One Central Place – an online directory of voluntary and community groups in Manchester

One Central Place is an online directory listing the profiles of voluntary and community (VCS) groups active throughout Manchester, together with the details of organisations that support work in the VCS sector.

One Central Place enables VCS groups in Manchester to promote their work and make contact with other groups to network and share information. It also provides an opportunity for groups to be contacted and consulted on specific areas of interest.

It’s such a simple thing, yet it’s already helping local groups find out who else is working for social good in their neighbourhood.

The site encourages communication and networking in a range of ways. From facilities to browse the directory by location, or area of interest to interactive maps and dynamic visual cues so you can see similar organisations by the colouring of their icon on the site.

Once you’ve found the groups you’re interested in, it’s a snip to e-mail or call them, get directions to their office on a map or even export a PDF file, or a CSV spreadsheet for mail merging a letter to them all.

More than just a directory, the site also encourages partnership working by providing clear contact details for every organisation, along with a specifically developed calls for partnership section. Anyone interested in working with VCS groups in Manchester can create a call for partnership. Running a survey? Got a tender out? What to help build capacity in the sector? Need to partner up to secure funding or magnify your impact? It’s easy. Just describe what you’re looking for, select the areas of interest and locations the call matches and the site notifies all the groups it’s relevant to, and shows you a list of organisations that might be able to help.

Working with other organisations

One Central Place is also working with the Manchester Probation Service to put the site to work making our communities safer by reducing re-offending rates. Groups can register an interest in working with ex-offenders – an extremely hard to reach group. This puts them in touch with the Probation Service via the site, who ensures they have everything they need in place, advises them on best practice and helps them build capacity. Offender Managers – of which there are nearly 100 in Manchester alone – then match the ex-offenders they’re supporting with suitable groups and activities in their areas with the search facilities on the site. This is just one way the site is encouraging the third and public sectors to work in partnership to make Manchester a better place to be.

All of the data in the directory will be open to anyone who wants to use it via an API – just how people have created new experiences on the web by mashing up content from Flickr, Google or YouTube – now Manchester’s VCS groups can be added to the mix.

Find out more

Visit the One Central Place website to:

• Promote the work of your group to a wider audience.
• Find the details of other voluntary and community groups in specific localities and areas of interest.
• Make contact with similar groups to network/share good practice.
• Access the details of specific service providers and support agencies.
• Register your group’s details for FREE on the directory.

Contact the One Central Place Team by phone on 0161 234 2909 or by email at hello@onecentralplace.org.

About the work MDDA did with One Central Place

Through our Working Neighbourhoods Fund / Deprived Area Fund project work, MDDA worked with One Central Place to develop a specification for the site and help them find a web developer to do the work.

To develop the specification, we first ran a workshop with One Central Place staff to find out what they wanted to the site to do, what information should go on the site, and so on.

We did this by getting people to write down ideas on to Post-it notes – one ‘idea’ per note – and then clarify what had been written down. No technology was involved, all people had to do was bring along ideas and share them at the workshop.

We then worked to clarify the ideas from the workshop. Some ideas were fairly clear, such as wanting the site to have easy to read web page addresses. Others were not so clear, such as ’sophisticated search functions’ – it was our job to try and get more information about those ideas by asking questions a web developer might ask. What do you want people to search for? How should the search actually work? How do you want the search results to be shown on the page? Are there any other websites that have a search feature you want to emulate on the One Central Place website, and so on.

Doing this ‘clarification’ work also helped One Central Place staff to begin to get a sense of the work they would have to do to not just get the site up and running, but to support it and develop it in the long term. Who’s going to administer the site? What training will staff need? And so on.

We also worked with One Central Place to prioritise the ideas for the website. The project had a fixed budget, and not all the ideas proposed at the workshop could be turned into reality given the budget available. So we help One Central Place identify what features the site should have when it launched and what should be developed later.

After the workshop was over, we wrote up a report that started the process of ‘locking down’ the requirements for the website. This would also form the basis of the specification document that would be published for web developers to respond to.

We then worked with One Central Place staff to develop the specification document. A PDF of the specification document is still available to download if you want to read it. The specification took a couple of weeks to finalise as we wanted to give web developers as much information as we could to help them understand what was needed for the One Central Place website, and it also further helped One Central Place staff understand more about the ‘offline’ work that would need to be done.

The specification was then advertised on the MDDA website, the Manchester Digital website, the GeekUp Job Board and some other sites, and after shortlising and interviews, a supplier was appointed.

If you would like more information about this process, please contact MDDA.

From the developers

Read what Virtual Construction are saying about One Central Place.