jump to navigation

About this blog

What’s V-Base?

V-Base is a volunteering management software application. It was developed by the registered charity YouthNet – with funding from the Home Office – to support the work of a number of voluntary organisations throughout England.

Today V-Base is used by over 400 not-for-profit organisations across the UK, including the vast majority of England’s Volunteer Centres, several County Sports Partnerships, youth volunteering organisations, student volunteering programmes and other types of organisations involved in volunteering, making it the most widely used volunteering management software in the UK.

V-Base is also currently the main method of uploading volunteering opportunities to the National Volunteering Database (NVD) underpinning do-it.org.uk and other websites to which YouthNet supplies volunteering opportunity search services.

Why are we blogging about it?

V-Base was first released in 2000 and has gone through many changes since then. It’s currently undergoing a complete rewrite. The new version will be known as V-Base 3.

The blog is the newest baby of the V-Base 3 development team. We’re using it to keep the world up to date with our progress… and sometimes lack thereof. V-Base 3 is a project born of the voluntary sector, happening right in the thick of the voluntary sector. Our team faces all the challenges experienced by anyone involved in software development within a small/medium sized not-for-profit organisation. We’re great at producing gigantic, magical beanstalks from a handful of beans, but sometimes, often for reasons beyond our control, that takes longer than expected. And there’s very rarely a goose laying golden eggs to be found.

Anyway, enough of the dodgy fairytale analogies…

We actually enjoy talking about V-Base 3. It’s an exciting project for several reasons:

  • This is a rewrite – we’re not just bolting new functionality on top of an existing product. We get to design V-Base from scratch again. That’s a massive job, but it does mean that we’re laying the foundation for years of future development without being restricted by legacy technology or design.
  • We finally get to deliver some of the enhancements that current V-Base users are waiting for. We’re very much a customer-focused organisation and pride ourselves on listening to the people that use our products and accommodating their requests wherever possible. Our V-Base users have been very patient and we can’t wait to give them some of the gazillions of new features they’ve asked for.
  • We’re using some exciting technologies. Our developers will bend your ear about these for hours if you give them the chance.
  • We have an exciting (well, to us, anyway) way of working. We’ve chosen to run this project as an Agile development project – YouthNet’s first. In fact, we’ve yet to find evidence of any other UK charity using Agile for software development. If you know of, or are, such a charity, pleeease get in touch – it would be great to share our experiences and possibly even pick up some tips from some fellow Agile adventurers! Anyway, we love Agile. It really works as a way of delivering software, but that’s not to say that adopting it doesn’t come with its own challenges, including how to run an Agile project within an organisation that uses more traditional methods for the rest of its development.
  • We’re delivering a software product that has social value! The organisations using V-Base aren’t doing so for commercial reasons – they’re promoting and developing volunteering within their respective communities throughout the UK for the benefit of lots of different people and groups. Our product will hopefully give these organisations even better tools to help deliver their charitable aims.

So, that’s why we’re blogging. Hopefully by reading our posts you’ll get some insight into what we’re up to and maybe even contribute a few words yourself… feel free to comment on any of our posts or ask any burning questions you might have. We’re glad to have you along for the ride :)