Three Rings

Our aim here at Three Rings has always been to help streamline your organisation’s administration whilst enabling you to keep doing things in the way that works for you. We want organisations using Three Rings to find it makes their current practices simpler, rather than changes those practices to suit itself. But one of the practices where the system hasn’t always helped as much as it can is where helplines are using a ‘managed’ rota, and one or two volunteers assign shifts to everyone based on their availability.

If your organisation uses a ‘managed’ rota (as opposed to the ‘self-signup’ model Three Rings has traditionally worked better for), you probably find that it’s  the best way to ensure your volunteers get the shifts that suit them thanks to the Rota Secretaries in charge of matching the shifts to individual’s availability. Which is great for your volunteers, who don’t have to worry about unfair allocations, but can be a serious headache for your rota managers when they try to work out who fits where! That’s where Milestone: Iridium comes in.

This small purple button represents one of the biggest changes we've ever introduced.

Iridium’s flagship feature is Rota Autopopulation. A lot of the features we’ve already looked at, such as the New Rota Rules, the ability to Order Rotas, and, crucially, the Improved Availability Functions have all grown up around the changes we’ve made to enable automatic population of the rota based on the preferences of your organisation and the availability of your volunteers. This has been an incredibly complicated bit of software to implement, but as far as we can tell, Three Rings now provides the most sophisticated rota population tool of its kind anywhere in the world.

That’s because the Autopopulator doesn’t simply assign people at random, or even cycle through volunteers and sign people up to the first shift they can do. Instead – just like your real rota secretary – it tries to sign people up to the shift that’s best match for both them and the rest of your branch.

There are two key parts to this process: the setting of ‘preferences’ which enable you to tell the Autopopulator more about your organisation’s culture, and the way your rota secretaries work, and the Scorer/Allocator, which matches your volunteers to your open shifts based on those preferences. Strictly speaking, your preferences are a small part of an Autopopulation Ruleset, because you can have multiple Rulesets (so if you want to Autopopulate the Day Rota according to one set of preferences – such “It is very important that people do shifts at the same time” – you can keep that separate from your preferences in your Night Rota Ruleset – where one preference might be “It is very important that volunteers do not get lots of shifts close together”).

Setting up Rulesets, and specifying your preferences for that Ruleset is simple enough, but to actually understand what the Autopopulator does behind the scenes is a bit more tricky. That’s mainly because it does a lot of things all at once, which is excellent for big computer servers like the one behind Three Rings, but harder to explain to humans, who are used to thinking through problems one step at a time! So to take a closer look at how Autopopulator fills a rota, let’s image you’re Pat, a dedicated Rota Secretary at a fictional Samaritans branch in the small town of Nantway.

Autopopulation rulesets can be accessed via 'Your Rota' in the Admin panel

We’ll imagine you’re setting up Autopopulation for the very first time after the Iridium release on Saturday November 26th. Your first step is to create a Ruleset for the Day Rota. Nantway always plan shifts six weeks at a time, because that fits everyone’s commitment, so your first step will be to tell the Autopopulator to calculate six weeks at a time.

At Nantway, the Rota Secretaries have always tried to give people the shifts they’d most like to do, so you’ll want to set a preference for that, by checking the appropriate checkbox and moving the slider most of the way up. Equally, you doesn’t want anyone to have to do a lot of shifts all bunched together, so you’ll make some adjustments to the slider for ‘Shift Count Weighting’. Finally, your Branch policy in Nantway asks that volunteers try to vary which shifts they do, so you’ll also want to change the slider for ‘Favour Variable-Pattern’. (Of course, when your counterpart at the neighbouring branch in Gedstow comes to do this, she’ll make different choices – for a start, she’ll be populating up to 30 days at a time, rather than six weeks – but this setup is what works for your branch, and that’s the pattern Three Rings is going to work to.)

Once the Ruleset is in place, the Autopopulator can get to work. Just move to a date on the rota that you want to Autopopulate, and click on the purple Autopopulate button to get the magic going.

Now you’ve set it going, the Autopopulator starts to assign shifts, working in ’rounds’, giving all active volunteers one shift per round.  Firstly, it examines every shift, and works out all of the people who have said they are available to cover that shift. Then it scores volunteers by how available they are to do a shift, with higher scores meaning ‘more available’. At this point it also considers the preferences in the Ruleset, meaning a high availability might still result in a low score on a shift immediately after a shift that volunteer is already doing, or which they did the week before. Of course, volunteers prevented from doing a shift by Signup Rules – such as New Volunteers, or Probationers, or volunteers signed up to another rota with incompatible Exclusivity Rules – are also going to be scored deliberately poorly at this stage!

Once the Autopopulator has scored each person’s availability to work out which shift is best for them, it then works out if there are any other shifts for which they are a better match than anyone else. So if Bob is a 99% match for the Thursday afternoon shift, he’ll probably get it… But if Alice and Colin are 90 and 85% matches for that shift, and if Bob is also the best match for the Thursday overnight shift, then he’s still the best person to cover the Thursday overnight (even if he only matched at 70%, it’s better to give Alice the afternoon shift than to let Bob do it and make Colin cover the overnight with his very low score of 20% for night shifts).

This diagram clarifies the situation described above: Green represents the best match, Yellow a possible match, and Red a bad match. You can see Bob is the best match for the Thursday Overnight, and this makes him a worse match for Thursday afternoon (because otherwise he'd have two shifts in a row). Click for a bigger version.

Once every volunteer has got the shift that’s the best match for them (matched, like Bob, against everyone else’s scores), the scorer goes round again, and gives each volunteer the shift that is their next best match. This part of the process can be thought of as being similar to picking teams for games at school: if you imagine every volunteer is a ‘Team Captain’, and all the shifts are ‘players’, the system is automatically giving each Captain the shift they most want on their team. Once each Captain has a player, they go round again until their team is full, and there are no shifts/’players’ left to pick from! That’s not quite right, of course, because some volunteers aren’t allowed to pick certain shifts, and most shifts can be picked by more than one volunteer, but it’s a good way to think about what’s happening.

Once the Autopopulator has worked through each shift – and saved you some serious number-crunching – it will have created Nantway’s rota for the next six weeks, and given everyone shifts they can do. There might be a few quirks – it’s possible Bob will complain that he has to put off his trip to the cinema on Thursday! – but there shouldn’t be any major problems.

Of course, no system is perfect – not even a real live Rota Secretary! – but we’re confident that Three Rings’ autopopulator is as close to perfect as we can make it. Sometimes people’s availability will change, or they’ll have to pull out of a shift at short notice, and that’s fine: you and your organisation’s Rota management team can resolve that internally the same way you always have.

We’re not going to deny that it’s been a massive effort, but we hope this powerful new tool will make life substantially easier for your rota secretaries to keep your volunteers listening. And for us at Three Rings HQ, that’s what really matters.

The next upcoming release of Three Rings - Milestone: Iridium – is nearly upon us, and one of the things we’ve been working to improve is the “drag and drop” functionality in the Rota. We first talked about Drag and Drop back in March, and it’s proven so popular – especially among organisations that partly- or wholly-manage their rota centrally (e.g. by a Rota Secretary) – that we’ve decided to make it even better.

Drag-and-drop in the Rota.

One of the things that Three Rings users often tell us is that they’d like to be able to tell, at a glance, which volunteers haven’t yet been signed up to a shift this week, so they can concentrate their efforts on finding shifts for them.

The new "Drag and Drop" volunteer bin, with highlighted numbers of shifts alongside each volunteer.

Now, when you start using Drag and Drop to fill your rota, you’ll see that each volunteer has a small number to the left  of their name. This number is the number of shifts they’re signed up to in the rotas you’re looking at right now. If you uncheck some rotas, you’ll see the numbers change, right in front of your eyes, as the numbers update to reflect what shifts people are signed up to on the rotas you just selected.

A close-up of some volunteers, ready to drag-drop, showing their numbers and colours.

To make instant recognition even easier, the numbers appear in colour-coded boxes. Volunteers with no shifts are red, with one shift are yellow, with two shifts are dark green, and with three or more shifts are light green. Now it’s easy to see at a glance who’s the right person to add to any given shift.

We’ve also improved the compatibility of the Drag and Drop feature: it makes use of some very modern web technologies, so we were cautious about making it available to certain less-standards-compliant browsers. From Milestone: Iridium, Drag and Drop will work on even more computers than ever before and behaves more-predictably. We hope that these changes will make it even even simpler for you to manage the rota at your organisation.

To give you even more control over the rota than ever before, the new upcoming release of Three Rings - Milestone: Iridium – will provide you with two new kinds of rota rules: Rota Exclusivity Rules, and Minimum Distance Rules.

Configuration of the Rota Exclusivity Rules.

Rota Exclusivity Rules are pretty simple: they prevent volunteers from being signed up to shifts if they’re already on duty in different rotas at the same time. So for example, you might not permit a volunteer to be the Shift Leader for a shift where they’re On Duty, and vice-versa. But it’s flexible, so if you do allow them to be the Deputy Director On Call for the day while they’re On Duty, you can still allow that. It’s entirely up to you.

The rules can also be configured one-way,  so if you can think of a scenario where a volunteer could sign up to both rotas if they do it in a particular order (but not if they do it in reverse order), then you can. We had at least one organisation contact us to suggest that feature, so hopefully it’ll come in handy: it’s always good to be told what people would like to see in future versions, so if you’ve got a feature suggestion, why not get in touch to let us know?

The interface panel for the new minimum distance rules, among others.

Meanwhile, a Minimum Distance rule can be used to prevent volunteers from doing too many shifts in too-close proximity. If your rules require that volunteers leave 6 hours between their shifts, for example, then you can now mandate that. You can customise this on a rota-by-rota and experience level-by-experience level basis, so you can even set rules up that express more-complex conditions, such as, “New volunteers must leave at least a week between their Night Shifts”.

And of course, like all rules, these new ones can be overridden by Rota Managers just by clicking a checkbox. When you’re a Rota Manager, rules are meant to be broken (okay, they’re not actually, but we know that there are times that it’s necessary!).

Three Rings is always improving, and one of the things we were keen to enhance in the latest upcoming release, Milestone – Iridium, was the aging Stats system. This release, we’ve completely revamped three of the most popular reports: the Number of Shifts report, the Number of Points report, and the Inactivity report.

Number of Shifts/Points/Hours

Some of the new filter options in the new combined Number of Shifts/Points/Hours report.

We’ve combined the Number of Shifts and Number of Points reports into a single report, and also given it a new facet, Number of Hours: so if you want to track the number of hours of volunteering time your team have committed, you can do that too. You’re also now able to generate reports on all rotas, any given rota, or any combination of rotas, filter by any role, and produce output in table, summary, list, or starchart formats.

Better yet – and at long last – you’re now able to export directly to PDF files, CSVs, or Excel spreadsheets, as well as being able to view the output directly on the web, so it’s even easier to drill down into your data and analyse to your heart’s content.

On top of that, we’ve made it possible to send Comms emails directly from the Stats reports. So once you’ve got a list of volunteers who haven’t met their commitment, for example, you can quickly put together an email to remind them to sign up for some more shifts. Easy.

Inactivity

The Inactivity Report’s been given an overhaul, too, bringing it in line with the new Inactivity Types feature. We’ve also made it possible to flick backwards and forwards backwards through the Inactivity calendar, just as you can with the Rota, to see exactly when people are going to be away. Expecting to be short-staffed during the summer holidays or around Christmas? Now you can know for sure, by comparing your volunteers’ commitments all at once.

And just like the Number of Shifts/Points/Hours report, you can export as PDF, CSV, or to Excel, so you’ve got even more opportunities to format, analyse, and manage your data than ever before.

One of the most-common complaints that new users give when they first start using Three Rings is that the “Activation Codes” system is unnecessarily complicated. So in the upcoming Milestone – Iridium, we’ve completely overhauled it and replaced it with something far more user-friendly.

Now, when new volunteers join your organisation, you’ll give them (by email, on paper, or however you’re already used to doing so) their username, and a Temporary Password. They’ll log in as normal using this username and password: but when they do, they’ll be asked to pick a new password: something known only by them.

Flowchart comparing the old and the new "New User" process, from the new volunteer's perspective.

It’s just as secure as the old system, which was carefully-designed to be “tamper evident” (that’s why activation codes can only be used once). But the fact that there are only two terms used - username and password – and not a third - activation code – makes it far less-intimidating to new volunteers, and as a result far easier to explain.

The new Email Templates button, found in the Admin tab.

But that’s not all. To make getting your new volunteers up-and-running as quickly and smoothly as possible, we’ve also introduced the new Email Templates feature. Using this, you have a great deal of control with which you can customise the emails that are sent to your volunteers when they first come on board, or when you reset their forgotten passwords for them.

The list of template emails that you can customise.

This new feature puts you in close control of the information that’s delivered to your new volunteers. If you’d like to provide their usernames as well as their temporary passwords in their “welcome” email, you can. In fact: you can go further still, and customise the email to provide them with a proper welcome message, some tips on being a volunteer with your organisation, or even some basic Three Rings instructions, tailored to your individual needs.

The New Volunteer email being customised to include some basic getting started instructions and the new volunteer's username.

The interface to customise the emails is exactly the same as the one you’re used to in the Comms and News tools, so you can even use basic text formatting, links, and so on. When Milestone – Iridium goes live, give it a go, and take one more step towards making your Three Rings installation really your own.

The new version of Three Rings, Milestone: Iridium, goes into Beta Testing today, and our team of volunteers will be spending the next few weeks exploring the new features to help us ensure they all work the way we expect.

Since we’re making such big changes this time round – our biggest Milestone ever – we’re running  a three-week beta test period, and the new version of Three Rings will be going live late on November the 26th.

We’re going to keep posting about the new features you’ll be seeing at the end of the month, but if you’d like the chance to actually play around with them ahead of everyone else, then you’re always welcome to get in touch and join the testing team!

Over the years that we’ve been working on Three Rings, we’ve seen some imaginative ways to use it. But one of the most interesting yet was when we discovered a helpline that had opted to call its overnight rota “0vernight”, spelt not with a letter O, but with a number 0 (zero). We asked them about this, and they explained:

“Three Rings orders rotas alphabetically, and we wanted our Overnight shift to appear before the Leader shifts that occur at the same time… just like our Day Shifts appear before their corresponding Leader shifts. By changing the name from Overnight-with-an-Oh to Overnight-with-a-Zero, this works.”

And they were right: it works. But it makes us feel icky that they have to do this. So in Milestone: Iridium, we’ve fixed it.

The new "Order" buttons in the Admin->Rotas panel, which allow you to re-arrange your rotas.

Using the new “Order” buttons on the Admin→Rotas panel, you’re now able to arrange your rotas in any order you wish. This order will be respected on the Rota both in the “checkbox list”, and in the order in which shifts that coincide are placed, so there’s no longer a need to use “imaginative” names for your rotas just to get them to display in the way that you want!

Milestone: Iridium will also enable you to have shifts with more-unusual durations.

Also by popular request, Milestone: Iridium will introduce the ability to create shifts with durations that don’t necessarily fall on quarter-hour intervals. So if your organisation runs shifts that run for a multiple of five or ten minutes, or has “scheduled overlap” times, this can now be accurately reflected on your rota. Better yet, if you go back and change your existing shifts, the Number of Hours report in Stats will automatically update to accurately reflect the exact amount of time that your volunteers have worked. Sometimes, little things like this can make all the difference.

One of the new features coming to Three Rings in the upcoming Milestone – Iridium release is Inactivity Types. This new feature spans a variety of different requests by a number of different organisations, and we hope that it’ll give everybody a better way to manage their volunteers.

The new "Inactivity" button, on the Admin tab.

With this new feature, you’re no longer limited to volunteers merely being “active” – when they can do shifts, receive emails sent to “all active volunteers”, and so on – or “inactive”. Instead, you can define your own types of inactivity, and apply your own rules and conditions to them.

Creating a new Inactivity Type and choosing an icon for it.

For example, you might have an “On Holiday” inactivity type, separate from a “Leave of Absence” inactivity type or a “Support volunteer” inactivity type, each representing different reasons why a volunteer might be unable to do shifts. Each different inactivity type can have its own icon, so you can quickly distinguish between them when you see them in the Directory, and of course the full title of each appears at the top of the Directory page of any affected volunteer.

Two Inactivity Types defined, with different rules for each.

You can also customise each inactivity type further by specifying:

• Which rotas are affected. For example, a “Support volunteer” might not be able to do calltaking shifts on your helpline, but they might be eligible to help on fundraising shifts.
• Whether or not this kind of inactive person still receives Comms emails addressed to “All active” volunteers. For example, you might prefer that volunteers who are “On holiday” still receive email bulletins of organisational news, but that volunteers who are “on Sabbatical” are left in peace.
• If volunteers can set this inactivity level for themselves, or whether they need a Directory Manager to do it for them. For example, you might allow volunteers to put their own “Vacation” days in, but not allow them to set a period of “Taking a break” without first speaking to your administrators.

We think that this wide-ranging solutions covers just about everything that anybody’s ever requested that the Inactivity system should be able to do, and more besides! So even if you only use some parts of it, you’re sure to get value out of the new features we’ve just added.

It’s funny how people will sometimes come up with ways of using Three Rings that we never even considered. Take Simple Mode, for example. We designed it to help people who weren’t so confident using computers to have a gentle way of “getting into” Three Rings. But while it does a really good job of this, one of the unanticipated uses we’ve seen for it has been from “power users”: exactly the kind of people we never thought we’d see.

Why? Because by switching to Simple Mode, just temporarily, these users can get a list of all of their upcoming shifts, rather than just the ones in the next 30, 60, or however many days are shown in the Upcoming Events column! If only we’d known that this was what they really wanted to see, we’d have added it sooner!

The new Upcoming Shifts link, at the bottom of Upcoming Events, provides a list of all of your next shifts.

Well: now we know, so now we’re adding it. In the upcoming Milestone – Iridium, you’ll now be able to click on the “upcoming shifts” link, at the bottom of the Upcoming Events panel on the Overview page, and get a list of all of the shifts that you’re signed up for. Print it, put it in your wallet, update your calendar from it: whatever you like. But you don’t have to switch to Simple Mode to get it any more; that’s the important thing. You can do what you were already doing, but faster and easier. And that’s the Three Rings way.

The next major release of Three Rings, Milestone – Iridium, contains a lot of big, important features, based on the most-popular requests by our users. But sometimes the little things are important, too, like the enhancements we’re making to the News system.

A "Sticky" News Item, highlighted in yellow and 'stuck' to the top of the news list.

For example, you’ll soon be able to make your news items “Sticky“, if they’re particularly important and you want to make sure that everybody sees them. Sticky news items stay at the top of the news page, above all other news items (even newer ones!). Of course, if you made all news items sticky, they’d lose their impact, so you’ll want to save it for the really important pieces of news. It’s as simple as ticking a checkbox.

The 'Sticky' checkbox and 'Auto Archive' feature.

When you’re done with a news item, you no longer have to delete it to get it off the front page. It’s now possible to Archive old news items. They no longer appear on the front page, but they can be accessed via an “archived news” link at the bottom of the Overview page. This is great for new volunteers and those who’ve been away for an extended period, who can “catch up” on everything that it’s missed, and it’s also good for your organisational memory, because you can keep old news indefinitely and revisit to it in years to come.

An archived news item, seen here in the news archive.

You can also use the new “Auto-Archive” tool, to automatically archive old news items when they expire. So whether you’re writing a news item about an upcoming training session or a “tin rattle” down at the local supermarket, you can instruct Three Rings to automatically archive the news item the moment that it becomes out-of-date, effortlessly making room on your news page for new and exciting stories.

Having a good rotation of news (and getting rid of old news) makes your volunteers more-likely to read the news items you post, which keeps them more-involved with organisational affairs and improves the community feel of your group. And now more than ever, Three Rings can help with that.