Three Rings is 10 years old in 2012! And, to celebrate our birthday and our Nightline roots, we’re giving every organisation using Three Rings a discount: every invoice issued in 2012 will be at our ‘unaffiliated Nightline’ rate of just £40!
Back in 2002, Three Rings was a tiny project intended to help the 10 or so volunteers that ran Aberystwyth Nightline. But word of mouth soon spread, and more and more Nightlines began to adopt Three Rings, and each new organisation wanted to tell other organisations about us…
…Now, ten years later, Three Rings supports over ten thousand users, at more than a hundred and twenty separate organisations, including Nightlines, Samaritans, and similar support networks around the UK and Ireland – and some even further afield.
Throughout that time, our aim has been the same: to streamline helpline administration so that volunteers can devote more time helping their callers, and less time to paperwork. We’ve aimed to provide the highest quality service, and the best, most flexible system we can make, at the lowest price we can afford so that every Three Rings client – from the largest Samaritans branch to the smallest Nightline – gets the best deal available, and can save more resources to devote to things like training and publicity.
We’ve always been open about our pricing structure: individual Samaritans branches pay £150 a year, with no extra set-up charges or support fees, and Samaritans regions get a discount rate of just £120 per branch and access to our powerful suite of Regional Tools to support collaboration between neighbouring branches. Meanwhile, we support the Nightline Association by providing Three Rings free to affiliated Nightlines, and for £40 a year to non-affiliated Nightlines.
We’ve been able to keep these charges low thanks to our own dedicated team of unpaid volunteers – including our grassroots champions and advocates amongst our users – and through the use of the same free, trusted technologies used by Internet giants such as Amazon and Google. Right from the start, we worked to ensure a scalable architecture and a strategic business model that meant Three Rings would become increasingly sustainable as its popularity grew, rather than risking the company overreaching itself with rapid expansion.
Thanks to that scalable structure, each new organisation we bring on board helps to sustain and improve Three Rings for all the others and, as we enter our 10th year, we think it’s time we gave something back. We’ve been planning to do this for a while, and it’s the best way we can thank you for helping us to help everyone:
To celebrate our 10th Birthday, and to reflect our support for the Nightlines that helped inspire and improve early versions of Three Rings, every invoice we issue during 2012 will be for the ‘unaffiliated Nightline’ rate of just £40 per organisation. That means our standard rate for Samaritans Branches, for non-affiliated Nightlines, and for any other comparable organisation, will be just £40 for the whole of 2012 (unless you’re a Nightline affiliated with the Nightline Association, in which case we still won’t charge you anything!).
If you already use Three Rings, you’ll be invoiced on your usual date. Every organisation will be issued an invoice for just £40, as if they were an unaffilitated Nightline, even if they’d normally pay £150. Samaritans Regions will be invoiced at £40 per branch, instead of the usual discount of £120 per branch. And, if you’re an organisation that decides to start using Three Rings in 2012, you’ll still get our standard full calendar month trial, and an invoice for £40 if you’d like to keep using the system after that.
A decade ago, we never dreamed this project could get so popular with Nightlines, let alone with organisations like Samaritans, but our aims haven’t changed: we still want to make it easier for you to get volunteers on shifts. It’s thanks to the support of our existing clients that we’re doing so well in achieving that goal, and it’s thanks to our future clients that we’ll be able to build on our successes in the future.
So this is our way of saying thanks, not just to the Nightlines that nurtured us in the past, but to the Samaritans that continue to suggest enhancements today, and to the organisations curious about what we can do for them over the coming months. It’s a thank-you not just for the support you’ve given to us, but for the assistance you’ve given your fellow Three Rings users, and the vital support you continue to give your callers. Enjoy this year’s celebratory discount, and have some cake on us!