This is Part 1 of a 3-Part series of posts. Part 2 is here, and Part 3 is here.At the penultimate session of the Three Rings 10th Birthday Conference, JTA presented a session entitled Where do we go from here?, taking a look at the lessons we’ve learned over the past decade, and some of our plans for the future.
This post offers a re-cap of the first part of that session, in which we explain our desire to more friendly, and more in touch with our users.
Without ever engaging in direct marketing – working solely on word-of-mouth recommendations from our own delighted customers – Three Rings has become a major player in the rota and volunteer management sector. From our humble roots providing a basic rota system to just a couple of Nightlines in 2002 we now support the majority of UK Nightlines, more than half of the Samaritans branches in the country and other voluntary organisations from Community Stores to Libraries to major restoration projects.
As we’ve grown we’ve naturally had ever more to do – it’s been a long time since we had the time to visit an individual organisation to offer training, although we’re always happy to see our users at larger gatherings where we can make contact with multiple groups at once. We’ve come to feel that we’re more distant from our users than we’d like – as JTA said, we don’t want to be the sort of company that only gets in touch once a year to present the bill (especially since we officially confirmed that it’s not about the money!)
So as we enter the next ten years, we want to start doing more for our users, and for our volunteers.
For our users:
Starting in 2013, we’d like to offer each of our users a small gift, once every three years. We wanted it to be something practical, which would help to remind anyone using it that they’re not alone in doing what they do. As volunteers ourselves, we recognise that there are times when you need a bit of a boost, and so we’re aiming to present each organisation using Three Rings with a mug to thank them for their support.
We’re going to start that process in the first few months of the New Year, and we hope it will help us to re-connect with our users, even if it’s only in a small way.
We also want to do something to recognise that our users are make a difference to the wider world, not just because they do what they do, but because they do what they do through an ethical, volunteer-driven project like Three Rings.
To that end, for every five years that an organisation uses Three Rings, we’ll plant one tree in recognition of all the paper they’ve saved by keeping their rota online instead of printing it out, and we’ll plant another tree for them every five years from then on.
For our volunteers:
We’re also keen to do more to reward our volunteers, especially the testers, the many users of the system beyond the ‘core’ team of developers and support volunteers who give up their time to check that new features work as they should and report any problems in time for them to be fixed before they cause anybody any trouble.
Of course we use automated unit tests here at Three Rings HQ, but however good a unit test is, it doesn’t compare to a real human using a feature in the wild (even an artificial and controlled wild like the beta server!).
As of Milestone Jethrik we’ve launched a ‘Best Tester’ award, to be given to the member of the test team who provided the most detailed, most accurate bug reports during the test period. We’re pretty pleased with the prize for this: the Best Tester recieves a certificate in recognition of their achivement, but they also get something money can’t buy – the chance to pick a feature off our long-list, to be developed on their behalf ready for the next release of Three Rings.
In short, as a reward for their work to make the system better, a Best Tester gets to pick a light or medium-weight feature suggestion for immediate development, bypassing the usual feature planning ‘balancing act’ that can often keep lower-popularity features from making much progress. It’s a wonderful opportunity to shape Three Rings, and given the contribution our testers make to the overall quality of the system, it’s very well-deserved, too!
We also want to host an informal gathering for our testers: from Summer 2013, we’ll host an annual Tester’s Barbecue, which all testers and their families will be welcome to attend. We’d like to be able to get to know our test team socially, to thank them for their work in person, and to conduct a nice conversation without needing to apologise for things not working properly.
There’s a lot more to what JTA said on Saturday – covering both our plans for future versions of Three Rings, and our ideas for some major feature developments, so stay tuned for more updates. We’re also processing some of the films we shot of the day, and we’ll let you know when they start becoming available, too.