Humanitas
Humanitas volunteers help people change their situation on their own. The Humanitas Registration System (HRS) supports Humanitas volunteers on a daily basis.
The system for volunteers 👩🏻💻
At Humanitas, volunteers are ready to help people give their lives a new direction. They not only offer support, but provide tools to help people regain control of their own situation. Whether it is a listening ear or practical guidance, the goal always remains the same: to empower people. Behind the scenes, the Humanitas Registration System (HRS) ensures that these volunteers can do their best work every day. Thanks to this system, they can easily keep in touch, track progress and fully focus on what really counts: supporting people on their way to a better future.
In HRS, all data on all Humanitas activities are maintained and consulted, including data on participants and volunteers, such as notes, documents, trainings and appointments. HRS supports the departmental administrators, paid and volunteer coordinators and other volunteers and professionals of the districts and the National Office in their daily work and their mutual cooperation. HRS contains the contact details of volunteers and participants (clients) and allows volunteers to keep records of the clients they work with.
Themes, activities, roles & permissions 🕵🏽
Humanitas is one of the main social services and community building organisations of the Netherlands, spread throughout the country with numerous districts and departments. Each department contributes to Humanitas' mission by organising various activities and projects. These projects focus on the themes central to Humanitas' work: from combating loneliness and coping with loss, to parenting, growing up, detention and help with home administration. To enable this broad engagement, a reliable system is indispensable. The Humanitas Registration System (HRS) provides that support throughout the organisation. The system has a layered and complex structure that safeguards privacy and security, while ensuring appropriate roles and rights. But despite that complexity, the system remains flexible and supports volunteers and departments exactly where needed.
Accountability 🤝
We have ultimate responsibility for the initial development, hosting, ongoing development and maintenance of HRS. Through proactive advice, we decide together what are the best features to support volunteers. We always look at new API links, improvements, wishes or features together with Humanitas. Data security and privacy are essential in every choice. We have been proudly working on HRS and all its integrations, APIs and links for years. As far as we are concerned, a textbook example of customisation, seamless cooperation and partnership.
HRS 2.0 🤖
In 2019, we started HRS 2.0. HRS 2.0 is a complete redevelopment of HRS, with new techniques and a greatly improved user experience and visual style. Together with Humanitas, we drafted all the epics and user stories that are important for the new system. It was very important that the system was easy to use for a large and diverse group of users. HRS also had to be more modern, highly visible and usable on mobile devices.
100% migrated 🚀
All data has been fully migrated from the old to the new system. Humanitas has given us the confidence to put down the new mission-critical application for the primary process of all volunteers. With the knowledge of the past years, we will make the processes even simpler and faster.
Security, connectivity & compliance 👩💼
HRS is not just another tool, it is the beating heart of the association. With over 20,000 volunteers logging in daily, the system provides insight into the data of over 59,000 participants. The system supports throughout the association process. Thanks to links with various business applications, such as authentication systems, CRMs, ERP systems and dashboards, HRS ensures a seamless workflow. Volunteers can easily submit their incurred expenses digitally in HRS and new activities are effortlessly notified and linked to the administration, while training results, documents and compliance statements are neatly recorded.
Uniformity, regulation & reporting 📊
Uniformity and efficiency are key. Periodically, data is checked to see if it is still necessary, with the system automatically anonymising data entirely in line with AVG legislation. To monitor performance, Humanitas uses a powerful BI solution. The data delivered via APIs from HRS provides this system with insight into the target groups and results, providing valuable overviews for the various stakeholders within and outside the association.
Scalability ☀️
Annually, there are more than 2.7 million page views spread over 262,871 sessions. The volunteers have collectively created more than 368,602 notes spread across 50,678 files.
Results 👍🏻
The biggest achievement is definitely the development that HRS has gone through. What started as a small tool to manage projects has grown into a full-fledged mission-critical application volunteers, coordinators, administrators and other stakeholders. It has supported different phases of the association and continues to do so. Spread over more than 60 iterations, we have linked external systems, added features, responded to changes in the association and in legislation. We secure quality with automatic testing. This allows us to continue developing and improving the application with certainty.
Technique used 🦾
HRS must be secure. The structure of data is complex and the roles overarching. That is why the Django platform was chosen. Humanitas' professionals are automatically linked via Azure Active Directory. Making decisions based on data? Creating data analysis and content insights? The BI tool is fed by the HRS API and made insightful in the web application. Logging into different systems is no longer necessary. HRS provides Single Sign On (SSO) for various external applications used by Humanitas.
Collaboration 🤝
Each iteration starts with an extensive list of requirements and ideas, a long backlog that has grown over time. Together with Humanitas, we dive into this list and see which items are prioritised. We listen to the various stakeholders, look at the possibilities within the budget, and thus determine which features are needed to realise the further development. Humanitas is at the heart of this process. They are closely involved in the team, with short lines of communication and a cooperation that is always smooth and pleasant.
About Humanitas
Humanitas is an organization that promotes self-reliance. It consists of a national body with 110 regional branches, divided into 7 districts. The departments are responsible for the projects that are carried out. The national organization facilitates the provision of services and is the owner of HRS.
