Humanitas Volunteer Management Software

Partner

Humanitas, Netherlands

Humanitas is one of the main social services and community building organizations of the Netherlands. It is a non-profit association that supports people who, for various reasons, temporarily cannot manage on their own. 

Challenge

The core of Humanitas’ services is provided by over 26,000 well-trained volunteers who are active in more than 1,000 projects. They are supported by a professional staff of just over 400 people. 

Humanitas needed a solution to provide their professional staff with tools to generate reports, perform analyses, and create an online documentation platform for their volunteers. Security was a top priority given the fact that information about clients is private and for specific volunteers only. 

Seven different user roles were defined, each associated with tasks and rights to view their content. Within the 1,000 projects spread over 100 departments and 7 districts, there are 300,000+ notes created by 26,000 volunteers. All information had to be searchable by coordinators who needed the ability to create anonymous reports that provided in-depth information excluding personal information. 

Solution

Plone's out-of-the-box functionality for users, groups, workflow, roles and sharing was integral to fulfilling Humanitas' requirements.

Given the need to support a complete matrix of the professional staff and their responsibilities within the management tool, Plone is perfectly suited for defining read/write permissions per-project based on groups and context-aware local roles. We don't worry about SQL injections, insecure direct object references by URL or cross-site scripting (XSS). Why not? Because Plone includes security features that protect against these vulnerabilities. 

We now have:

• Fully-searchable text, returning only results the user has been authorized to view
  
• Private content, based on the user's role or group; even managers can't see everything
• Excel exports that exclude any personal information
• Reports, filtered by department, district, or activity level
• A secured modular Plone environment that connects with third party systems

The site is used daily, seven days a week, and is fully set up to support the way volunteers and professional staff document their daily work and generate their reports. 

Don’t worry about security every day: let Plone handle that for you.