Welcome to the new Reach platform - here’s what’s new

Welcome to the new Reach platform!

We are so glad to have you with us, and to get to show you what we’ve been working on since late 2023. We hope that the revamp will make life easier for the volunteers and organisations who use us, as well as encourage more people to discover the power of skills-based volunteering.

Designed by volunteers

First, an exciting note - our new site was designed and illustrated entirely by volunteers! As ever, we continue to be blown away by what skills-based volunteers can achieve, and hope our success will compel other charities and groups to consider volunteers when they’re rebuilding their own sites. See our interview with Merve, our wonderful illustrator, to learn more about her and her experience on the project.

Evolution not revolution

The new version of the Reach platform has all the same functionality as our old platform - just updated to make it a little more user friendly. 

Ahead of developing the new platform, we interviewed our users about how they found the site to use and - happily - most of them gave us quite positive feedback. However, we did discover a few issues with navigation: people struggling to find their way back to key pages, or having difficulty editing specific bits of their profile. 

For this reason, the new platform has much of the same content and functionality, but is organised quite differently. Most importantly, we’ve separated out everything for volunteers and organisations - so what you see when you login will only be relevant to the tasks you want to achieve. 

What’s new for organisations

Whilst most areas of the site will look relatively familiar, there are now multiple ways to review applications and other correspondence you’re part of. 

For organisations, we have two new pages - ‘Applicants’ and ‘Placements’ - which list volunteers who have applied for your roles or been placed. The ‘Applicants’ page is designed to make it easier for you to shortlist candidates without going through your inbox. Here you can search for all candidates for a specific role, review them side-by-side and place - or say no thanks to them - from one location. 

In addition, ‘Placements’ gives you an easy way to review the candidates you’ve onboarded, and find your conversations with them. 

In other locations, we’ve just made it a bit easier to do things you could already do on the old site, like editing your profile - which is now broken into handy steps for making quick changes - or setting up email alerts - which can be switched on and off with a few clicks. 

Check out our video guides:

What’s new for volunteers

For volunteers, we’ve made it easier for you to find what you’re looking for.

You’ll notice we’ve added a new ‘Applications’ tab, so you can keep track of what applications you have at what stage. From here, you can take quick actions such as accessing the relevant message thread, or withdrawing your application. The ‘Placements’ tab offers a similar summary page of all the places you’ve volunteered, giving you the option to make these placements visible on your profile. 

As with organisations, editing your profile is also much easier - so you can tailor sections of it without having to review the whole thing. 

Check out our video guide:

More great guidance

If you have any questions about the new site - or how to get the best out of Reach - our help and advice section has had a real revamp! Now you can search our dedicated knowledge base by keyword to find exactly the content you need, as well as browse our more general guidance. 

Alongside this, we also revised and updated the fantastic Trustee Recruitment Cycle - our flagship resource aimed at empowering organisations to build brilliant boards. The cycle features multiple tools and resources, including templates for skills and diversity audits, and case studies from organisations who’ve found great ways to excel at each stage of trustee recruitment.

Any issues?

As with any new website, we know there will be bugs and hiccups that we just didn’t spot when testing. If you are using our platform and come across something that’s not working, or looks strange, please report it by emailing us: [email protected]. 

We hope you enjoy taking a look around the new platform. And if you like it, please give us a shout on Instagram or LinkedIn - we’d love to hear your feedback!