Join develops an organizational platform for volunteers

With over one million members and supporters, Malteser Hilfsdienst is one of the largest charitable service providers in Germany. The Catholic relief organisation is represented in more than 700 locations nationwide, and christian service to those in need is at the heart of its work. In order to comply with this, a holistic IT solution is needed to support the administration of volunteers.

ARNO not only covers personnel management, but also material management, an event module and service and deployment planning.

What do volunteers need?

Aid organisations have a very high need for coordination. It is a challenge to manage volunteer resources in a consistent and binding manner and to avoid redundancies. Organisational processes are carried out and tracked differently depending on the location.

SoCura offers organisations from charity, church and health care reliable and precise services from a single source. With ARNO, the app for resource planning in non-profit organisations, a solution has been created to support the daily work of volunteers. Efficiency, performance and quality play a major role in this.

Join was commissioned with the development of the application.

ARNO – the organization platform

ARNO is a web application with which non-profit organisations can manage the resources in their branches, groups or units both locally and across organisations. ARNO consists of different modules and can thus be built up modularly for each organisation in such a way that exactly those functions are covered that are ultimately needed.

The personnel module is used for the administration of the volunteers with extensive functionalities. Here, all information about qualifications, further training, activities, experience and availability, but also the most diverse documents are managed across organisations. Volunteers can thus be active in several locations without causing additional work for the administration.

The greatest strength of the material module is that it can efficiently aggregate large and heterogeneous amounts of data. This makes it possible to generate and store more complex personal views beyond the simple search and filter functionalities.

The event module is used for deployment planning or duty scheduling and can access data records from both the personnel module and the material module. This allows the person responsible for deployment planning to efficiently plan and organise necessary resources. In addition, if necessary, several locations can easily collaborate across many areas, as the underlying data can be viewed across organisations, depending on authorisation. All of this is made possible thanks to the fine-grained authorisation system. In fact, members who work at multiple sites can also take on different roles in them.

ARNO event module

The finance module offers functionalities for efficient creation and management of offers and invoices. Quotations and invoices can be created completely freely and individually, but can also be generated from existing quotations, invoices and services, whereby the work is enormously facilitated by automated data transfer. Furthermore, it is possible to use organisation- or division-wide managed quote and invoice items, which also increases consistency and efficiency. Captured offers and invoices can be exported as PDF files. For this purpose, ARNO offers the possibility to store Word templates, which are filled with the offer and invoice data during the PDF export, so that the printed offer or the printed invoice meets the individual needs of the organisations and their areas.

ARNO finance module

In the contact module, organisations can be managed with which the aid organisation cooperates in various areas, for example, clients of emergency services, suppliers of materials or responsible workshops for the maintenance of emergency vehicles. Furthermore, contact persons and contacts can be stored for these organisations.

The organisation platform ARNO can be used by several aid organisations. Each organisation can individually adapt the design of ARNO to its colors and logo.

ARNO design customization

To ensure that ARNO can also be used by volunteers whose native language is not German, the platform is also available in English. It can also be expanded to include additional languages without requiring any implementation effort.

ARNO language settings

What does this mean for organisations like Malteser?

With the introduction of ARNO, standardized organisational processes as well as a standardised volunteer administration are established and covered. Operations and events can be planned efficiently and quickly due to the availability of valid personnel data. In the event of a disaster, important information can be viewed quickly.

Statistics and evaluations ensure that work can always be further optimized. Beyond the pure efficiency of the organisational work, it is important to mention that thanks to ARNO, the legal risks associated with the work of the honorary office can also be successfully minimised.

In a first step, the platform was further developed together with Malteser Hilfsdienst (parent company of SoCura GmbH) and rolled out nationwide in Malteser Ehrenamt. This will considerably facilitate the daily work of volunteers from all areas throughout Germany.

Technologies used

js, MSSQL, Redis, Azure Cloud Services, Docker