Charities often need a method of communicating with their members, volunteers, and those they help. Unlike a business where employees are easily contactable, dealing with volunteers who vary in the time they can give means that a central resource is very useful. The ability to use Flarebox to segregate the website into areas available only to staff / volunteers / the public can allow the charity to provide the information needed by each group without worrying about confidentiality and privacy.
Having built their website on an early version of Flarebox in 2007 the Haberdashers' Livery Company was back in 2009 to upgrade to the latest version of Flarebox: www.haberdashers.co.uk. The Haberdashers Company is one of The Great Twelve livery companies with origins in medieval times. Over the last 600+ years it has moved away from its historical involvement in the trade of haberdashery into a Company with a keen interest in Education and a significant supporter of schools in England and Wales.
Using a full version of Flarebox, the Haberdashers run their website in two main sections, a public facing, open section provides information to the many people interested in what they are doing, and those who come to the website to find links to their schools, parishes or alms houses. The other side of the website is a locked section with over 800 different users each with their own access and associated privileges. The extensive Flarebox security and user system allows them to maintain their own users and to grant them access to discrete sections of the website. This allows committee members to see their committee papers, sports clubs to view their own pages and all members to see the common pages.
Harrow Photos: www.harrowphotos.com is a historic collection of glass plate photos from the 1860s to the 1970s from the Harrow area of London and covering the world famous Harrow School and its surrounding area. The collection is now in private hands and the website provides a portal for the collection to be shown off to the world. Of the 80,000 photos, 32, 000 are indexed and the index is integrated in searchable form into the Flarebox system. 13,500 images are available as thumbnails through the site and these are delivered from the search index. The latest search terms are shown up as a tag cloud within the side bar and the collection twitter feed appears on the website.
