Made Open

Welcome to Made OpenThe digital platform that helps communities to shape their future.

© Made Open Communications Ltd. 2015 2

Made Open is a digital platform for community action. A customisable social network, where people with shared interests can collaborate, crowdsource resources and take action for change.

Community benefits Organisation benefits

Shape your community Learn about your community

Share skills and resources Access resources from the community

Make connections Prioritise actions

Form groups and collaborate Share knowledge

Find volunteers Enable community action

Raise money Ease financial pressures

Create and promote events Earn revenue from crowdfunding commission

Make a difference Create social impact

The intuative web interface makes it easy for people to share ideas for community projects, organize events, create polls, and crowdsource time, money or materials – anytime, anywhere.

Our approach is based on the belief that people in our community are capable and want to make a difference, and we can help by creating a network that better connects individuals and groups to transform our place, community and economy.

Jan Bonde

Mayor of Hobart, Tasmania

What is Made Open?


Make connections

Members of the Made Open community can search for other members by name, location, skills or area of interest. Once connected they can directly message each other.

What can you do on a Made Open platform? 1/3

Create groups

Members can create groups, which can become private collaborative spaces to discuss ideas, set tasks and organise events. Groups might be used for places, sports clubs, social clubs or businesses.

Add a question or idea

Members can ask the community a question or add ideas to others. Active discussions and projects are displayed in the ‘activity stream’, which can be filtered by location, category, most popular or most recent.


Donate / fundraise

Members can donate items or money to a project or cause they believe in. The great thing about Made Open is that anyone can pledge as much or as little as they want. Project leaders are encouraged to add rewards in exchange for time, materials or money.

Volunteer / find volunteers

Members can find project opportunities and volunteer their time to specific tasks set by the project leader. All community activity is displayed in the activity stream, and project leaders will receive notification of all pledges.

Start a project

Members can start a project to find and access skills, money and resources from within the community. Simply describe the project aims, add relevant information and add your pledge targets.


Made Openpayment to community cafe project

Pay £10.00

•••• •••• •••• 1111

08/17 •••


Manage your profile

Inbox: Members manage their messages, receive connection requests and keep updated on the number of likes and ideas added to questions.

Activity: Manage your discussions, projects and see key performance statistics. Statistics include how many people have visited your page, liked it or made a pledge. Users can also send messages to all the people that have made pledges from here.

History: Members can see a date order plotted history of their activity on Made Open, including activities they have liked, ideas and comments they have added, questions and projects started.

Create a poll

Members can create polls to gain tangible, qualitative responses to questions and statements. The simplicity and flexibility of polls means they can be used for a range of purposes and achieve different goals. Polls allow users to set a question with up to ten custom responses, set a time frame, invite users to take part and view results.

Create an event

Members can create and share community events. Events can be public or private to groups. Made Open makes use of the powerful Eventbrite functionality to create ticketed events with attendee limits. The system enables paid for events as well as simpler, open to all, events with the ability to monitor those who can, can’t and may be able to attend.



Themes are means of allowing your users to find content that is relevant to them, they are used to tag Questions and projects and are used to search the activity stream. As a platform owner you will be able to set your own themes, using as many or as little as you like.

Your customisable Made Open Platform Custom themes

Behind the scenes, administrators can customise their platform settings – for example, introducing search themes, adding pages, changing platform colours and editing their homepage settings.

They can also:

Manage and moderate all content – managing users, groups, activities, projects, events, reported items plus editing the skills database and email templates.

Send notifications out to their user community too – sending alerts to the whole community or to individual groups – and set up reporting tools.

Connect the platform with their mainstream social media accounts – linking in Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn accounts.

Add their Eventbrite and Stripe accounts – allowing integration with ticketed events and crowdfunding APIs (to access these features via the Made Open platform).Set a percentage-based commissioning fee from revenues generated via crowdfunding (note: Made Open does not charge any commissioning, all profits go directly to you).

The Made Open platform has four ‘modules’ on which activities are added – asking the community for ideas, starting crowdsourcing projects, organising events and creating polls. Should platform administrators wish, these modules can be removed within the set up phase by the Made Open development team and reintroduced seamlessly later on.


Made Open has been designed to be easily customised and updated on the homepage there are five core areas which can be set and updated as much as you like:

Your Made Open platform can be set up to reflect your brand by slecting the colours you wish to see through out the site. All you need to do is choose six core colours. Think you may rebrand or want to be able to play around with your colour scheme? No problem the colours can be updated at anytime in a matter of clicks.

Custom homepage Custom colour palette

Background image

Your site logo

Introductory copy

Site tagline

Video (Youtube or Vimeo)


Case Study Monmouthshire Made Open

Made Open is helping local government organisations transform the nature of their relationship with citizens.

Our first pioneer – Monmouthshire County Council in Wales are already seeing the benefits of using the digital platform to engage people in conversations and empower grass roots organisations to make good ideas happen.

monmouthshire.madeopen.co.uk

We have always valued conversations and for the past few years we have been holding a series of forums where local people can share their ideas about solutions to the challenges we face. Made Open gives us a platform to take conversations to another level..

Paul Matthews

CEO Monmouthshire County Council



Case Study Made Open Tasmania

Central Coast Council have recently launched Made Open in Tasmania. Their aim is to help build a better connected and coordinated community and provide the tools and support people need to become active problem solvers.

tasmania.madeopen.com.au

Jan Bonde

Mayor of Holbart, Tasmania

Our approach is based on the belief that people in our community are capable and want to make a difference, and we can help by creating a network that better connects individuals and groups to transform our place, community and economy.



Activity Stream

Community befriending service

Damian25 Peterbourough

18 likes 12 ideas

How do we provide a safe space

Damian25 Peterbourough

All activity Filter

44% pledged - 13 days remaining

community.madeopen.co.uk

O2-UK 12:00

About Made Open

Trusted by local authorities around the world, Made Open Communications Ltd are a small team of service and digital designers who have been redesigning public services for many years.

Through our work, we have observed how local authorities and charitable organisations are trying to navigate their way through a tough and complex set of pressures – cuts in funding, rising demand for services and economic growth.

Our solution was to create a digital service that would give local governments, charities and large businesses the ability to transform how they engage with their customers and drive change in the capabilities of their service or culture.

So, in early 2014, company directors Kathryn and Robert Woolf took to a bold decision to invest into the development of an innovative platform for social change.

@made_open

[email protected]

01326 259986

community.madeopen.co.uk

Made Open

Technology