Jerri Chou from All Day Buffet asked the following in the comments section:

In the comment section, Would love to know more about what you learned from Jamie Hartman, Greg Baldwin, Ben Rattray, and Vince Stehle. I’m super curious about what they found worked and didn’t, outcomes, lessons learned, how to organize etc. as far as matching the right volunteers to organizations. Any elaboration would be amazing.

Thanks so much for the question.

We discussed breaking sometimes-traditional paradigms of volunteerism and engagement. Rather than nonprofits and campaigns relying solely on recruiting volunteers who can work on specific dates at specific times, how is it possible to make folks’ cataloged abilities and skills work for further recruitment? For example, rather than relying on a volunteer who is willing to work at a Food Not Bombs table on Wednesdays and Thursdays at noon, a volunteer who can file papers for an immigration law nonprofit every Friday, or an activist who can canvass every other Wednesday evening, how can we better streamline this process to work better for the volunteer and for the organization/campaign?

A suggestion was put on the table that potential volunteers outline their availability and skills to organizations/campaigns, which would then aggregate potential opportunities and send them to potential volunteers accordingly. This is not dissimilar from what I was doing when I was an Americorps volunteer, working to recruit volunteers at the University of Southern Maine. The school, heavily populated by commuter and non-traditional students, did not have a large bank of students/staff who could regularly and consistently volunteer their time. This was remedied by putting their names on a listserv, which was indicative of their willingness, and they were then connected via newsletter of one-shot opportunities. This is also not dissimilar from the way that the American Red Cross operates. The volunteer (blood-donor) makes their willingness and skill (ability to give blood) available to a database and they are then contacted accordingly.

For this to work more effectively, organizations will need to create a comprehensive inventory of skills that they need to utilize so that they can ask for them. Can the organization use monthly legal help? Do they need a day or two of physical labor to maintain quarters? Do they need to provide child-care for employees? Do they need a digital projector once in a while? Etc. When this comprehensive list is compiled, it can then be the basis of a questionnaire made available to potential volunteers. The questionnaire, in addition to tracking potential availability (versus asking for commitment to a certain date or time), might ask for skill-sets (so that lawyers don’t spend all of their time lugging stuff around rather than helping with legal work or so that labor-interested folks don’t end up filing) and what possessions they are willing to lend. The organization/campaign could then reach out weekly to willing volunteers and make potential opportunities/needs available that the volunteer could effectively respond to and offer.

This conversation came out of the suggestion that social networking sites might be tailored to filter this information for volunteers/campaigns. Perhaps when filling out a profile on a social platform concerned with volunteerism or activism, these questions would be built into a public or private profile and then users could opt in to sharing their information with organizations, so that the organization could see the user’s willingness (anonymously, so as to not take their other information) and use the platform as a middle person to facilitate potential volunteer opportunities. From what I understand, Squarepeg, who we will be talking with for an interview later, is already addressing some of these connections. I look forward to featuring what they have to add.

-Filed in Ideas