Plateforme Francophone du Volontariat

Volunteering means offering your services out of pure dedication. It also means offering your time: the volume of volunteer activity in Belgium is estimated at 220 million hours. Given these figures, it is only natural that organizations such as the Plateforme Francophone du Volontariat (PFV) should inform, support, and provide tools to volunteers, while defending their rights in French-speaking Belgium.

The PFV is a pluralistic organization that works in partnership with its members and volunteers who give their time at one of four centers in Brussels, Namur, Mons, and Nivelles. Its online classified ads system allows anyone in Belgium to find an association where they can volunteer.

PFV : « We are looking for Drupal specialists who can help us migrate our site from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 and upgrade it from a visual and functional perspective »
Nous : “We will focus on improving the interface and user experience”
PFV : « We would like to take this opportunity to integrate new features: how to manage organizations on our site? How to manage members, what they can and cannot do? We would also like to add geolocated classified ads, as well as a library of tools for volunteers »

We had the opportunity to fulfill all of these requests, which were easily integrated thanks to Drupal, during the workshops we held with the platform teams. During these workshops, we worked together on the user experience (UX), mock-ups (UI), and search engine optimization (SEO).

Many challenges

We were very happy to work on the volunteer platform website. Because it is an exciting and philanthropic organization, because it connects thousands of people for the well-being of thousands of others... Who wouldn't dream of working on such a project?

There were quite a few challenges in terms of the solutions we implemented:

A member directory, with a search field and an alphabetical index: each member has their own dedicated page and must complete a specific form designed by us when registering, which is then sent by email to the applicant and to the PFV administrators. Once their registration has been validated, they acquire member status and are given a private account.
Association management, particularly on the back-office side: when registering, each member must be attached to an organization (either joining an existing one or creating a new one).
Role management: some members can post classified ads; others can add locations and link them to those ads. We took into account a hierarchy defined by the association and made sure that it could be easily managed by integrating the Drupal Group module.

We took advantage of the site migration to implement particularly complex solutions, such as the member directory, association and role management, geolocation of classified ads, and tools such as videos and documents.

Classified Ads

in list form, with geolocation

Tool box

sorted, with different types of media

Roles

multiple access levels for different stakeholders

SEO

installation and configuration of several modules related to search engine optimization

User Account

to enable organizations to manage their information

Thanks to Drupal, we have integrated two essential features for future volunteers:

Geolocation of volunteer classified ads, which are listed by default based on the location from which the site is accessed. Users can also search by keyword or according to their interests.
Tools: the site offers links (web pages) or media (videos, documents) classified by category, which can be sorted using a series of checkboxes implemented using the Facet module. In addition to categories, users can also filter their search results by media type or year of publication.

Visit the website levolontariat.be

Plateforme Francophone du Volontariat

Your mission,
if you accept it…