Volunteer Africa
- Web address: www.volunteerafrica.org.uk
- Company profile: Volunteer Africa is a registered charity who charge volunteers to go and help local communities in Africa. The money charged is used to fund the projects that the charity runs. The charity has a volunteer staff located throughout the world and had problems with organisation
- Purpose of website: To allow the staff to have a central repository of all the information relating to the volunteers, mainly to get them through the complex application stage, but also to be a source of information in case of an emergency during a trip.
- Period worked on the website: Approximately one year
The Volunteer Africa website is about advertising the Volunteer Africa service to potential volunteers, then helping those volunteers know what they are letting themselves in for, and helping the administration staff (who are also volunteers) more efficiently communicate when it comes to assessing applications, and dealing with emergencies.
Volunteer Africa required a workflow system so that the different individuals with different responsibilites in the application proceedure could keep track of what they had to do. Because the staff are spread across the world, then there was no room for training, so the system had to be self-explanatory.
The site also had a Forum system built in, where volunteers would get more (or less) access to forums depending upon the status as determined by their application status.
The site is built with PHP, PostgreSQL on top of the Apache server. The site is hosted on Linux.
