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?

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Opportunity Name: Basic photo editing skills
Skill Type: Training
Region: South East
Locality: Wallingford
Postcode: OX10
Virtual: No

Description: This charity works throughout south Oxfordshire to support people with learning difficulties. They provide supported living services to people living on their own or with friends and family. They also organise daytime opportunities - training, work opportunities, leisure and sporting activities - and provide support for individuals to help take part. Each of their clients has an individual person-centred plan describing their wishes, dreams, support requirements, etc. The plan is constructed in a format to suit the individual's personality - perhaps decorated with glitter, in a purely pictorial format or in large print for the visually impaired. Increasingly they are using photos in the plans and the support workers would like some training on manipulating digital images. They would like some basic advice - how to download images from the camera, resize and crop the images and import them into Word, etc. This opportunity may involve working with the charity's clients while photos are taken and, if so, a CRB check will be required.

Opportunity Name: Office 2003 training for small group
Skill Type: Training
Region: South East
Locality: Wallingford
Postcode: OX10
Virtual: No

Description: This charity works throughout south Oxfordshire to support people with learning difficulties. They provide supported living services to people living on their own or with friends and family. They also organise daytime opportunities - training, work opportunities, leisure and sporting activities - and provide support for individuals to help take part. The charity uses MS Office 2003 in their admin. office and would appreciate some basic training. Although they use the applications they're aware that they could probably use them in a more efficient way. They are particularly looking for help with Outlook, Excel - they use this for developing rotas, etc - and Access - used for a donors' database. Ideally they would like a volunteer who can be available for a few visits over a couple of months. The initial visit would involve some basic training and subsequent visits would address questions that have arisen in the interim. Training would be for a group of about six people.

Opportunity Name: creative CMS website advice and design
Skill Type: Website
Region: London
Locality: Palmers Green
Postcode: N13
Virtual: No

Description: This small charity was set-up following pioneering research into early diagnosis and treatment of cancer. They are mainly a research charity but also operate a care centre for people suffering from or affected by cancer. They have a website but it has a Turkish CMS with some Turkish alerts that they do not understand. They also work with a team of adventurous fund raisers who would like an easy to update website to reflect their activities. This sounds like a project for a Wordpress (or similar) website to allow for ease of update and lots of different forms of content. Ideally they would like someone with a good design eye and a creative outlook. A nice project for an interesting, small and active charity.

Opportunity Name: Attractive site needed for counselling charity
Skill Type: Website
Region: London
Locality: London
Postcode: N4
Virtual: No

Description: Based in Finsbury Park this charity provides psychotherapy and counselling services to immigrants throughout the UK. They have a network of therapists working with individuals and groups to promote mental health and well-being. They are desperate to replace their antiquated website with something engaging and easy to use. They need a pro-active volunteer with good design skills who can offer them potential designs and help them choose the right solution for their audience. The site needs to appeal to potential clients but also attract possible donors. They need to include their logo but have no preconceived notions about the rest of the design. They hope to recruit a volunteer from elsewhere to keep the site up to date once it is complete. They don't know what skills that volunteer will have so a CMS-based site is probably preferable. They hope that their existing hosting package can be used as they have no budget for the project.

Opportunity Name: Improvements to Website including e-commerce
Skill Type: Website
Region: London
Locality: London
Postcode: E6
Virtual: No

Description: This charity based in Beckton, London provides comprehensive holistic support services to adults and children experiencing domestic violence. They work within a client centred approach to ensure that adults and children are provided with safe choices to enable them to plan safer futures. They have a website built some years ago, which they feel now looks tired and uninteresting. They want someone to update it to have a modern look, change the donations page to accept online donations by PayPal, provide PDF newsletters, and have an online contact form so that their email addresses can't be harvested for spam. The link to their forums is currently broken and they want some guidance on resuscitating this, particularly with regard to preventing undesirable posts. They want to be able to keep it up to date, and while they use Dreamweaver, they don't know how to do the more difficult bits. They need your guidance on whether a CMS would suit them better, so you may need to implement a CMS and train them how to use it, or train them to do the bits they don't know in Dreamweaver.

Opportunity Name: Advice about Document Management
Skill Type: Consultancy
Region: North East
Locality: Newcastle upon Tyne
Postcode: NE1
Virtual: Yes

Description: This charity based in central Newcastle works across England towards an empowered, participative, fulfilled and healthy civil society by promoting practical participation in the arts and crafts. They have a network of 4 PCs running XP and MS Office, and wireless internet access. With only 2 staff, they operate a paperless office policy, scanning paper documents and requesting organisations to send most documents by email. Currently they store the files on a server and creating folders and sub-folders, as needed, to dump files in. After four years, they are finding it increasingly difficult to store and retrieve files with ease and are in need of a better file management solution. They are keen to find out about alternative solutions already out there or the possibility of having a bespoke solution created. They would particularly like someone to come in and explain potential solutions. Their office is not wheelchair accessible.

Opportunity Name: Point of Sale Audit Reports - Advice [This is a short task]
Skill Type: Advice
Region: Yorkshire & Humberside
Locality: Bridlington
Postcode: yo15
Virtual: Yes

Description: This organization of sub postmasters need a database expert who can help them make sense of the audit reports produced from their Post Office system 'Horizon' a point of sale system built on an Oracle platform. The log files are believed to be in Tivoli XML format. You will not need an understanding of finance/accounts nor necessarily the bespoke Horizon software. Due to technical problems these postmasters have become involved in legal proceedings, the volunteer would not be asked to be an expert witness but would help the postmasters form a case from which they can apply for further legal help. Would you be happy to a) sign a confidentiality agreement and b) have a detailed look at a series of database reports to give your professional opinion as to what evidence they may be able to provide? This is a very short but very important project for this campaign group.

Opportunity Name: Small accessible website
Skill Type: Website
Region: Remote
Locality: Colchester
Postcode: CO4
Virtual: No

Description: This charity is a Colchester-based social club for adults with learning difficulties. Part of a UK-wide network they are one of the largest clubs in the country. Catering for people from 18-80 they organise a wide range of social events including theatre visits, residential holidays, etc. Open two evenings a week they have more than 150 people taking part in drama groups, arts and crafts activities and a regular disco. With more and more people turning to the Internet rather than the Yellow Pages the charity would like a website to showcase their services. They would like the site to appeal to users of their club and include details of events and activities with photos. They imagine that the site will be quite small and one of their trustees will be happy to keep the site up-to-date if the volunteer can give training. The trustees have some ideas for the site but would be guided by the volunteer. The site should be attractive to their target audience and the volunteer will need to advise on accessibility guidelines as well as domain name registration and hosting. The charity feels it would be useful for the volunteer to attend one of their social evenings to get a feel for the sort of things they do.