Opportunities of the Month

 

Opportunities are listed on this page because we've recently talked with the charity and we know that they are ready to work with a volunteer. Are you that volunteer?

Click on the link on the opportunity name below to go directly to the opportunity you're interested in on our website. Alternatively search the full database of available opportunities by signing-in to your account and selecting "Search for Opportunities".

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Opportunity Name: Technical Support for small Brighton Charity [This is a short task]
Skill Type: Technical Support
Region: South East
Locality:
Postcode: BN1
Virtual: No

Description: This Brighton based Charity provides information and support to the lesbian, gay, transgender, bisexual and transexual community of Brighton and Hove via a range of services. They're looking for someone to provide ongoing occasional technical support for their 5 PCs running XP.

Opportunity Name: An IT audit and outline plan for small Brighton Charity [This is a short task]
Skill Type: Audit/strategy
Region: South East
Locality:
Postcode: BN1
Virtual: No

Description: This Brighton based Charity provides information and support to the lesbian, gay, transgender, bisexual and transsexual community of Brighton and Hove via a range of services. Their IT trustee left recently, and they discovered there is no documentation. They have an office of 5 computers and they need you to help them get IT organised . They need to know about housekeeping, backup, and security, and an assessment of their current/future IT needs. An audit, simple documentation about the configuration and housekeeping tasks, and a recommendations document would be the first step. If you would like to be a Trustee of this organisation you would need to personally identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual or tans-gender however all enquiries welcome for a one off audit/short term support thank you.

Opportunity Name: Modifications to reporting database
Skill Type: Database
Region: South East
Locality: Hedgerley
Postcode: SL2
Virtual: No

Description: This charity recycles unwanted materials from British schools and sends them to African schools. They would like support with their MS Access Database. The database they have at the moment is functional; however they feel they cannot get the information they need from it. They would like a volunteer with MS Access experience, who can modify the database so that the charity can then pull various reports from the database. Database

Opportunity Name: please help make Access more accessible! [This is a short task]
Skill Type: Training
Region: London
Locality: London
Postcode: EC1V
Virtual: No

Description: This London-based charity works with homeless people - providing long and short-term accommodation; a mentoring service and a drug and alcohol recovery programme. A database volunteer has built them an Access database that stores vital client records, volunteer records and contact details. This database needs some final touches and a user friendly interface. This would be just a few days work for a volunteer who enjoys building Access interfaces and would be invaluable to the staff/volunteers trying to use it. Some handover training would also be much appreciated. Please help if you can, this is a vital tool and is currently causing much frustration. Please help this organization help homeless people and not fight with their database!

Opportunity Name: On-going support needed for Wordpress site
Skill Type: Website
Region: London
Locality: Islington
Postcode: N1
Virtual: Yes

Description: This charity campaigns for human rights and social justice across Africa. With a high profile and influential team they work strategically in peace negotiations in Sudan particularly (including the Darfur crisis) and other African states. Their website is a vital communications & information tool and has sensibly been created by a volunteer in Word Press to help with ease and speed of updates for important news from both the UK and Africa. Their current volunteer has recently taken up full time studies and no longer has spare time to support them and they are looking for a volunteer to spend a few ours every month or so to maintain the site. Do you have a good design eye, an interest in websites and CSS skills (the entire design is CSS-based)? If so this organisation needs your help! They are happy to work flexibly to fit in with your availability and everything could be done remotely if you'd prefer.

Opportunity Name: Facebook Application Development
Skill Type: Website
Region: London
Locality: Southwark
Postcode: SE16
Virtual: No

Description: An unusual and challenging opportunity. This UK charity based in Bermondsey, London provides support to other voluntary organisations which provide services to the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community. Their offices are accessible. They're looking for someone to create a new Facebook Application that will support their under 25 project working. You need to have a sound knowledge of the Facebook API, who can create an innovative and engaging application used for gaining the support of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender young people who may already be using the site and promoting work and activities that are there to support them. It would be useful if you could pass on your knowledge so that they can support it after you've gone.

Opportunity Name: Create Online MySQL Databases for Existing Website
Skill Type: Website
Region: London
Locality: Ilford
Postcode: IG1
Virtual: Yes

Description: This charity based in Ilford provides advice, information, fundraising, training and representation to local community and voluntary organisations. They developed their website in Dreamweaver, and they have one online database. They would like you to create additional online databases for community organisations, community spaces, and their library catalogue. You'll need to build data maintenance pages as well as display and reporting pages. They also need a CMS implemented, which is the focus of another opportunity.

Opportunity Name: New community website with CMS
Skill Type: Website
Region: London
Locality: Southwark
Postcode: SE16
Virtual: No

Description: This UK charity based in Bermondsey, London provides support to other voluntary organisations which provide services to the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community. Their offices are accessible. They're looking for someone to build a community website aimed at young people, with members' profiles (updateable by members via registration), a message board, a chat room, event listing and registration, as well as a contact form, and brochure-type pages. They have clear ideas about the style and design they want. They already have Linux hosting and a domain name. They would like it to be based on Joomla, PHPNuke so that they can keep the website up to date, but they would consider a different CMS. They would prefer somebody with Dreamweaver experience too.You'll need to train them to use the CMS.

Opportunity Name: Scoping Online Membership Database Options
Skill Type: Database
Region: London
Locality: Southwark
Postcode: SE16
Virtual: No

Description: This UK charity based in Bermondsey, London provides support to other voluntary organisations which provide services to the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community. Their offices are accessible. They currently have membership data held on Excel 2007 spreadsheets, a fledgling MySQL database, but are considering whether or not to implement an online CRM system, and wonder what packages are available. They would like to end up with an online database that member organisations can update by themselves over the web, interface with their mailing program, and support their organisational needs. They see this as scoping project, reviewing the options, and determining the associated costs, features, and resource impacts of each option.

Opportunity Name: Advocacy charity seeks technical support advice [This is a short task]
Skill Type: Technical Support
Region: London
Locality: Lewisham
Postcode: SE8
Virtual: No

Description: This small but vital charity offers advocacy support to people with learning disabilities in the Borough of Lewisham. With just 3 part time members of staff they enable at least 50+ people with learning disabilities every year to speak up for themselves and to positively influence the quality of their own lives. They have a small office set up of 3 desktop computers and 2 laptops. These vary in age and reliability. They are used to run the accounts, a database of records and to share information. The charity is looking for a geographically close volunteer who will come in to help with an initial audit and review of the machines security, backup and network. They do not want anything glamorous or complicated, just an idea that they have appropriate systems and that they can plan for the next 3 years. From time to time they would like to be able to ask you as their volunteer if they have a problem. At current rate of problems this will be less than an hour a month. This is a low overhead way of making a very positive impact on your local community and supporting this important local charity.

Opportunity Name: Database advice for canal boat charity
Skill Type: Consultancy
Region: London
Locality: Islington
Postcode: N1
Virtual: No

Description: This charity operates a skippered canal boat based on the Regent's Canal in Islington. The boat is available to community groups at low hire rates for long or short trips. The charity works with many educational and voluntary groups in a socially deprived area. The boat trips provide new experiences, team-building opportunities and educational fun. The charity is the Mayor of Islington's chosen charity for 2008/9. They would like to investigate a database system to help them keep detailed records of their hirers and potential hirers and to produce reports for funding purposes. They need to share the booking of the boat between two members of staff and some of their volunteers and they'd like to consider whether the database could be accessed via a secure area of their website. The charity would like a volunteer to help them define their requirements and look at the options open to them - do they require one database or two? what technology should they use? can their website host a database? Once you've helped them decide what they need you may wish to develop the system for them. Alternatively iT4C can advertise for another volunteer for them.

Opportunity Name: New Design for Website and CMS Implementation
Skill Type: Website
Region: South West
Locality: Barnstaple
Postcode: Ex31
Virtual: Yes

Description: This Barnstaple Industrial and Provident Society has a range of projects in areas such as homelessness, learning disability, substance abuse recovery, work preparation and experience, they also have a social enterprise arm to recycle and sell furniture. They have a website that they can't keep up to date, and in particular, while they don't want to do internet sales they do want to update frequently the list of furniture items with descriptions and photos. They would like you to discuss their design ideas with them, and change it, implement a CMS and train them how to use it, and advise them on optimisation of images, why it's necessary, and how to do it.

Opportunity Name: Technical Support for Community Charity [This is a short task]
Skill Type: Technical Support
Region: South West
Locality: Barnstaple
Postcode: Ex31
Virtual: No

Description: This Barnstaple Industrial and Provident Society has a range of projects in areas such as homelessness, learning disability, substance abuse recovery, work preparation and experience, they also have a social enterprise arm to recycle and sell furniture. They have a peer-to-peer network of 7 PCs with broadband access, running Win XP and Win 98. They have unexplained email, internet, and PC crashes which they would like you to resolve. However, they would also like your advice on the most appropriate architecture, and how to make it robust, and recommendations for identifying and contracting for on-going support.

Opportunity Name: Redesign Website, and include CMS and online Payments
Skill Type: Website
Region: East of England
Locality: Harlow
Postcode: cm20
Virtual: Yes

Description: This community interest company based in Harlow provides family mediation to separating and separated couples and their children where appropriate. They also help alleviate the immediate and long term distress experienced by children and adults when families separate. They have an existing very small and plain website. They would like it redesigned to make it more visually interesting, to include a contact form instead of showing their email address, and an online payment capability. The current website was built by someone who often isn't available so they would like you to implement a CMS so that they can add and change text and images, and add new pages, you will need to train their staff to do this. Most of the work can be done remotely.

Opportunity Name: Advice on improving small IT system
Skill Type: Consultancy
Region: West Midlands
Locality: Birmingham
Postcode: B5
Virtual: No

Description: This charity provides a helpline service to the lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans community within the West Midlands. Operated every evening by a team of volunteers the helpline provides advice, support and signposting on all aspects of sexuality and relationships. The charity is currently having a new website and intranet built for them but most of their IT system is old and ad hoc. They have three PCs in the office and some sort of network. None of the volunteers have strong IT skills but they realise that their system needs improving. Their new intranet may mean that they can start working from home and they will also be logging calls online rather than on paper. This may have implications on their IT system. They would like a volunteer to look at the system, talk to them about their requirements and help them put together some plans for the short and medium-term. They do have some budget for equipment but don't want to waste it by buying the first thing they see in PC World!

Opportunity Name: Urgent help needed to keep IT Centre open
Skill Type: Training
Region: West Midlands
Locality: Earlsdon
Postcode: CV5
Virtual: No

Description: This IT centre provides basic computer training to blind and visually impaired people in Coventry. This well used and valuable service is under threat of closure as they have lost a member of staff. They are looking for willing volunteers to help keep the centre open by providing centre users with support during the drop in times. If you, or anyone you know with patience and good computer use skills, can spare a few hours a week to work with people who may otherwise be excluded from computers and the Internet please request details.

Opportunity Name: Review Website and Implement CMS
Skill Type: Website
Region: North West
Locality: Stockport
Postcode: SK1
Virtual: No

Description: This charity based in Stockport provides advice, information, fundraising, training and representation to local community and voluntary organisations. They have a website, however they can't update it, and it's not user friendly. They would like you to review it, tell them what's good and what's bad, and implement a content management system so that different people can change text and images, and add new pages; and they would like you to train them. The implementation work could be done remotely, however you'll need to be in their office to train them. They're particularly keen to hear from people who would like to improve their experience at the same time.

Opportunity Name: Website design changes and implementation of CMS
Skill Type: Website
Region: North West
Locality: Manchester
Postcode: M15
Virtual: No

Description: This Manchester mental health charity offers a range of self help initiatives including self help groups, computerised cognitive behavioural therapy services and complementary therapy services. They have a small website, however, they want design changes, including changes to the colours and logo, and they want to be able to update the website themselves and add new pages. You'll need to define the changes in more detail, implement a CMS, and train them in its use.

Opportunity Name: Training on how to use CMS [This is a short task]
Skill Type: Website
Region: Yorkshire & Humberside
Locality: Rotherham
Postcode: S60
Virtual: No

Description: This independent Rotherham charity provides support to local residents in ensuring they access their rights. They also provide advice on debt, housing and immigration and areas of social (civil) law. They have a website created by a (non-iT4C) volunteer who is now employed and doesn't have time to update it. There is a CMS but they don't know how to use it, so they want you to review the CMS and train them how to use it.