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Reason Digital

One Central Place is a free and easy to use directory of the voluntary, community and charity groups in the Manchester area organised by what they do, and where they operate. Around 1000 groups and counting are registered so far. Did you know so many people were working for change in just one city alone?

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. This helps get people talking, prevents duplication of effort and helps people join their work together to maximise their impact at a local level.

The directory helps to provide an environment for a thriving third sector (NI 7) by offering an online home for voluntary & community groups of all sizes and facilitating partnership working within the sector. It is a public sector database project with a similar budget to the one outlined above.

It's a much more engaging, useful and more popular version of a formerly paper-based VCS directory, improving search capabilities by allowing very customisable combinations of search criteria and providing visual map-based results so that people in need of support can easily view the relevant groups in their neighbourhood.

Organisations are now in control of their free directory entry and can log in at any time to update their details – another advantage over the print version.

Almost 1,000 groups and organisations are currently listed, with several new organisations adding themselves every week.

One Central Place also facilitates collaboration between listed members, by allowing groups to put out calls for partnership to a potentially interested audience. Previous calls have included strategy consultations, Local Involvement Network surveys and requests for collaborate working.

One Central Place equalises the playing field, giving an online presence to smaller charities with little or no budget and a way to enter into partnerships with other, larger organisations.

We’re currently working with the Probation Service to extend the functionality of the site to allow case workers to work closely with organisations at a very local level to help fulfil the needs of ex-offenders being integrated back into society, such as re-housing or peer support.

We also developed an API so that web developers can make use of the information about groups listed to develop new, innovative web apps to help further strengthen the sector.