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: New Website built in Dreamweaver but including CMS
Skill Type: Website
Region: London
Locality: London
Postcode: EC1V
Virtual: No

Description: An interesting, unusual, and challenging opportunity. This educational charity based near Barbican tube station exists to encourage and enable individuals to play an effective role in democratic society, and they also train and support young people throughout London to develop campaigns on a range of issues including gun crime, housing estate improvement and community cohesion. They have an award winning project that supports groups of young people (working with adults) who want to achieve political or social change in their local community, and they would like a new project-specific website to help them promote the project. The charity's website manager currently uses Dreamweaver to maintain the charity's existing website, so if the new website can be maintained in Dreamweaver this would help. They want the website to provide groups to build their own page to promote their campaigns to the outside world using their own password and a CMS. The website will need a contact form, provide download resources and promote the project to media, donors and the prospective groups. They want a forum for trainers and adults. They've got a good idea of the design and content.

Opportunity Name: Help make Access more accessible!
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: Review Website and Make Improvements
Skill Type: Website
Region: London
Locality: tower hamlets
Postcode: e3
Virtual: No

Description: This charity based near Mile End tube station promotes IT and citizenship between a school in London's East End and a school in Nairobi. They have a website but they feel it needs improvement. They would like you to review the website and provide advice on what could be done better. They do want the design changed, and they have ideas. They also want new pages to promote the charity and get publicity, and they would like a discussion forum. They have a CMS.

Opportunity Name: Help Small Charity Update Website
Skill Type: Website
Region: London
Locality: London
Postcode: N7
Virtual: No

Description: This charity and social enterprise based near Holloway Road tube station provides counselling and complementary therapies to people experiencing acute stress and mental health difficulties. They get referrals from GP's, Community Mental Health Teams, and Social Services. They have a website but they would like changes to the style and design. They also need to be able to keep it up to date, so they're looking to you to implement a CMS and show them how to use it to change text and images, and possibly add new pages.

Opportunity Name: Simple website with CMS
Skill Type: Website
Region: London
Locality: London
Postcode: se6
Virtual: No

Description: This charity based near Ladywell station aims to relieve the poverty of refugees, improve their education, and help them integrate by providing support and advice, and providing classes in English, Maths, drama, music and citizenship to children, and English and computer skills to their parents. They're looking for someone to build them a brochure-type website to show people what they do and what they are about, links, a contact form. They need to be able to update the website and add new pages after you've gone, so they'll need an appropriate CMS. They have a rough idea of what they want, however they'll need guidance on the layout and structure. You'll need to: define the website content and structure in detail, assist them in choosing and registering a domain name, investigate whether their ISP can offer them free web space or guide them in signing up for suitable hosting, build the website, implement a CMS, and train them in its use, possibly implement domain email. Although meeting them will be vital for the initial groundwork and building up their confidence, much of the work can be done remotely.

Opportunity Name: Help Small Charity Create Online Newsletter
Skill Type: Website
Region: London
Locality: London
Postcode: N7
Virtual: No

Description: This charity and social enterprise based near Holloway Road tube station provides counselling and complementary therapies to people experiencing acute stress and mental health difficulties. They get referrals from GPs, Community Mental Health Teams, and Social Services. They have hundreds of people on their database who have signed up for a newsletter but the charity has never sent any. They want your advice on whether to create a text newsletter or an HTML newsletter. They need you to advise how to send these out, and help them choose a suitable email management system to do it. They'll need your help to implement the email management system.

Opportunity Name: Extend Website MySQL Database and Intranet Functionality
Skill Type: Website
Region: London
Locality: Hoxton
Postcode: N1
Virtual: No

Description: This charity based near Old Street tube station is an independent research, analysis, and advocacy organisation focusing on global nuclear disarmament, pressing political leaders to endorse the nuclear weapon-free world vision, facilitating the exchange of information and analysis on nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation issues, and promoting public awareness. They have a small network of PCs running XP and Vista and MS Office 2007. Their website newsletter subscription page stores contact details in a MySQL database. They would like you to review their needs, extend the database to include fundraising information, and create intranet webpages for staff to be able to maintain the data and report on the data in a few different ways. There is an associated opportunity to redesign their website.

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: Open Source CRM for refurbished Community Centre
Skill Type: Database
Region: London
Locality: Lewisham
Postcode: SE23
Virtual: Yes

Description: This community centre delivers Children's Centre Services for Lewisham, hosting a nursery, toy library, family support services and after school club. The centre also runs a successful Elder people's Support Project and provides a valuable community resource for groups running arts projects, health and sport classes and support groups such as AA. They are just in the process of opening a much refurbished centre and with it would like to refurbish their IT. The centre manager is IT savvy but would like support introducing an open source contact relationship management (CRM) database to record all of their service users and referral agencies. This a great project for an experienced database person who wishes to use open source to help this vibrant community resource centre.

Opportunity Name: New Website Including CMS
Skill Type: Website
Region: London
Locality: Vauxhall
Postcode: SE11
Virtual: No

Description: This youth-led social enterprise based near Vauxhall tube station offers young people meaningful opportunities to get involved in the creative arts and media. They're looking for someone to build them a website to attract young people, and provide them with the opportunity to interact with the website. They want a fairly simple website to begin with, including a blog, information pages, links, FAQ, and a rotating image on the front page. They want to be able to update the site themselves, so you'll need to implement a content management system (CMS) that will cater for their current simple needs and their long term ambitions, and train them how to use it. A blog CMS might be ideal, however it's important to them that they have the functionality of a blog, but that the website doesn't look like a blog, so the capability to change the CSS is essential. Their longer-term plans are to have a capability for members to be able to add their profile with a couple of photos, and have a forum. They've got ideas about the design, and the content is available. They would like guidance on hosting, too. Their office is not wheelchair-accessible.

Opportunity Name: Medium term plans for innovative arts organisation
Skill Type: Strategy
Region: London
Locality: London
Postcode: SE1
Virtual: No

Description: This arts organisation brings together professionals, volunteers and students from a range of disciplines to create innovative projects. They encourage inter-generational projects and provide opportunities for work experience and volunteering. Projects must result in public performances and participants are encouraged to take the show on tour. They worked with a consultant from Lasa who has identified a need for them to approach their ICT in a more strategic manner. They are looking for a volunteer to help them put together strategic plans for the next five years which will ultimately enable them to use IT more efficiently. The plans should identify priority areas to work on, define manageable projects and enable them to seek funding for particular areas. They have already identified a number of areas of interest - communication within projects, security, managing their equipment (much of which is loaned by other organisations) and making a vast archive of materials available via the internet. An initial document written by the Lasa consultant will be available. Volunteers must be familiar with Apple Operating Systems.

Opportunity Name: Visually exciting site for play association
Skill Type: Website
Region: South West
Locality: Plymouth
Postcode: PL1
Virtual: No

Description: This charity based in Plymouth provides resources and support to anyone working with children in the region. They operate a toy library and scrapstore and have a small arts shop where members can purchase materials at reasonable prices. They would like a small website to publicise their work and to put their catalogue of resources online. They want a site which is easy to use and visually attractive - visitors to their premises are often impressed by how visually exciting their projects are and they'd like that to be reflected in the website. The board of trustees would like to be involved in decisions about the site and are already thinking about ideas for design and layout. One of the trustees has good IT knowledge and would like to learn how to keep the site updated in future. The resources catalogue is currently available in a printed form and they'd like to discuss the best way to make this available online so that people can easily view what is available. They will also need advice on the choice of hosting, domain name registration, etc. The Charity feels that this opportunity is not something that can be done remotely. So a local volunteer to Plymouth would be great.

Opportunity Name: Community website project needs technical advisors/support
Skill Type: Website
Region: East of England
Locality: Luton
Postcode: LU1
Virtual: Yes

Description: This Social Enterprise has won the full support of Margaret Moran, MP for South Luton, who specializes in the policy issues generated by ICT. eQuality Networks wish to facilitate the building of a community website designed by and for young people living in the mainly Bangladeshi and Kashmiri community of Luton's Bury Park, one of the most deprived areas of the country. eQuality Networks are looking for a volunteer who can take the technical lead on this project and help them develop the community website for young people. The clickBuryPark project has two phases. Phase 1: building a web based model for a community web portal that is simple and easy to use and can be added to by users. Phase 2: training instructors that can show users how to navigate the site and add to it in their own time. In doing so young people will learn transferable IT and web skills whilst contributing to their community. clickBuryPark will use technology to tackle anti social behaviour by creating an online community for young people. It is a daring and exciting project striving for improved citizenship through e-participation. eQuality Networks would be very interested in talking to volunteers who would like to help design the site, or contribute to the training in Phase 2.

Opportunity Name: Brochure-Type Website including CMS for Small Charity
Skill Type: Website
Region: East of England
Locality: Kings Lynn
Postcode: PE30
Virtual: No

Description: This charity based in Kings Lynn provides housing advice and support and life-skills training to people who are homeless or at risk of becoming homeless in Kings Lynn and West Norfolk. They have 5 stand-alone PCs running XP and MS Office 2003 and wireless internet broadband access. They're looking for someone to build them a brochure-type website to show people what they do and the services they provide, links, a contact form, and provide downloadable referral forms. They have a current problem with 2 inaccessible ISP mail accounts previously held by 2 dismissed staff, so they need you to implement domain email for current staff. They need to be able to update the website and add new pages after you've gone, so they'll need an appropriate CMS. They have a rough idea of what they want, however they'll need guidance on the layout and structure. You'll need to: implement domain email, define the website content and structure in detail, guide them in signing up for suitable hosting, build the website, implement a CMS, and train them in its use. They already have a domain name. Much of the work can be done remotely.