Earlier this year we told you we’re introducing a new Volunteer Management System called Assemble. You can read more about the system, why we’re introducing it and how it’ll benefit you, here.
Assemble will draw together all the information you need to undertake your volunteering role(s) in one, easy-to-navigate place. A key feature of Assemble is its Document Hub. This will replace our volunteer website, which will retire at the end of the year.
Opportunities and challenges
The volunteer website contains over 3,000 pages and documents. Some are accessed regularly, but others are no longer needed. We know that much of the content needs updating to reflect how we work now. And you’ve told us the language can be complicated, and that content isn’t named in a way that makes it easy to find what you need.
The transition from the volunteer website to Assemble gives us the opportunity to review and update the content volunteers need. And to build a structure for the new Document Hub which makes things easier to find, and simpler for us to keep up to date.
Involving you in our plans
We’ve been working with ‘we are mc2’, a digital consultancy, to help us develop a new structure and identify the content that visitors to the site are most likely to be looking for.
They began by interviewing volunteers and staff to find out what does and doesn’t work on the volunteer website. And by testing how easy, or difficult, it is for users to find what they’re looking for in the current structure. They also looked at the analytics that show us how people are navigating around the site.
Next steps
The next step is to look at how the content could be arranged differently on the new Assemble Document Hub to improve navigation. This has involved a workshop with staff and volunteers, who were asked to sort the information currently housed on the volunteer website in a way that would make sense for them. It was a very challenging exercise, but the output has really helped us start shaping the new structure!
Help us organise your Document Hub
Now we have a proposed new basic structure, we’d like you to test it to see if it makes sense!
The Document Hub will be where you go to find information and resources to support your volunteering. So, we’d like you to complete a series of short and simple tasks to help us understand if it’s organised in the right way. And whether you can find the things that are useful to you as a volunteer. It'll only take 10 to 15 minutes to complete and is completely anonymous. There are no right or wrong answers so there's no pressure at all.
TAKE THE TEST BY CLICKING HERE
The test will be open until the end of Sunday 18 August. Whatever your volunteering role, and however much you currently use the volunteer website, we’d be grateful if you could complete it.
If you have any questions, please just drop us a line at [email protected] .
Many thanks in advance for your help.
