There are 200 bricks-and-mortar Samaritans branches spread throughout the UK and Ireland, and an increasing number of them are using Three Rings.
We encourage our users to get in touch to suggest new features for future versions of the system, but sometimes branches just have great ideas of their own!
Each Samaritans branch in the UK gets a Branch Visit every few years, where two Samaritans from a different part of the country visit the branch. Partly this is to help ensure Samaritans offers a unified service (so if a caller rings Telford one night, and Preston the next, they’ll be listened to just as carefully as if they’d called London), but it’s also a chance for branches to demonstrate what they’re doing well, and what ideas they’ve had that other branches might be able to benefit from.
Normally that’s an internal process, but we were recently contacted by Jayne from Warrington, Halton & St. Helens branch, who found she was able to use Three Rings to make their branch visit a lot easier:
We find the filestore an incredibly useful feature of 3Rings. We upload Committee minutes, OGT material, branch bulletins, meeting powerpoints etc so that everyone can have access to them where ever they are. As a Caretaker Director, living an hour away from the branch, this is particularly helpful for me.
However, when preparing for our Branch Visit and gathering all the paperwork to be sent to the Visitors, 3Rings really came into its own!
We created temporary accounts for both of our Visitors, with permission to ‘view’, so they could then log in to look at all the documents in the filestore, see our rota, our directory of volunteers and all the news and updates from the overview page. They were able to get a really good feel for the work of the branch and I didn’t have to send out a single piece of paperwork, which saved a huge amount of work. It couldn’t have been easier for us or for our Visitors.
Not one of us here at Three Rings had thought of using the system that way, but we think it’s brilliant: Branch Visits can mean a Director has even more on their plate, and to use Three Rings to make the visit easier on both the visitors and the branch is such a great idea we couldn’t help but share!
Thanks to Jayne for letting us know – and if any one else has found a clever way of using Three Rings that other people might not have thought of, we’d love to hear from you!