Volunteering made easy

Two stu­dents have embarked on a vol­un­teer­ing online plat­form to help non-​profits man­age their vol­un­teers better.

By ELEANOR YAP

Ivan Chang and Keith Tan, both 23, have known each other since sec­ondary school. Not only have they stayed good friends, they have also tried their hand in var­i­ous businesses/​projects together includ­ing an apparel print­ing busi­ness, an events man­age­ment busi­ness and a flower project. Though some of their busi­nesses have been less than “a dis­as­ter”, the fourth time may be the charm, which is what the two are bank­ing on.

They have embarked on a startup that hopes to sim­plify the volunteer-​NGO rela­tion­ship by pro­vid­ing vol­un­teers with an easy online plat­form to find ser­vice oppor­tu­ni­ties, and NGOs and other organ­i­sa­tions with a sim­ple way to find the vol­un­teers and man­age them.

Sim­ple platform

Called Start Now, the startup is being funded with a S$50,000-grant from SPRING Sin­ga­pore, as well as pro-​bono men­tor­ing sup­port and con­sult­ing ser­vices from the Grameen Cre­ative Lab @ NUS (National Uni­ver­sity of Sin­ga­pore). The startup has a num­ber of busi­ness pro­fes­sion­als on its advi­sory board, includ­ing “Toi­let Man” Jack Sim from the World Toi­let Organisation.

The idea of the busi­ness came when Chang was vol­un­teer­ing at Make-​A-​Wish Foun­da­tion Sin­ga­pore, which he had been with for six years. He found that there was a much needed gap to be filled in the area of vol­un­teer man­age­ment. “My main job at Make-​A-​Wish was admin­is­tra­tive, where I cer­ti­fied a flurry of dif­fer­ent forms for dif­fer­ent stu­dent vol­un­teers who had to call repeat­edly to get their forms sent back to them,” he said. “The school then had to key in all this data just to pro­duce a cer­tifi­cate for grad­u­a­tion. And I thought, there must def­i­nitely be a bet­ter way – for all of this to be dig­i­talised and con­tin­ued beyond school. Shouldn’t there be a cer­ti­fied pro­file of any volunteer’s work avail­able online that does not stop just because he has ended school – maybe, a LinkedIn for volunteers?”

He added: “There were also other gaps that I noticed. Firstly, there were vol­un­teers who were over-​taxed and vol­un­teers that were under-​utilised. This was because there was no real abil­ity to track the his­tory of each and every sin­gle vol­un­teer. This was what I wanted to change. All this stems from a sys­temic demand-​supply gap caused by an infor­ma­tion chasm.

“Organ­i­sa­tions didn’t know when the vol­un­teers were free and vol­un­teers were not noti­fied about vol­un­teer­ing events that took place dur­ing their free time. So we cre­ated a match­ing engine that would actively notify vol­un­teers of events match­ing their pref­er­ences. We wanted to help vol­un­teer man­agers know their vol­un­teers bet­ter and we think tech­nol­ogy can help with that.”

He shared these chal­lenges with his buddy Tan through Skype (while Chang was at the time in Aus­tralia) and Start Now was given birth. The plat­form helps not only vol­un­teers but also NGOs by giv­ing them the tools to man­age their vol­un­teers into groups, enabling the organ­i­sa­tions to sched­ule them quickly and with­out the need for spread­sheets. For the schools, the teach­ers will be able to man­age their CIP pro­grammes through the plat­form which will con­nect the stu­dents to suit­able vol­un­teer­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties and allow the teach­ers to track and report eas­ily. Tan men­tioned that for the lat­ter, they are look­ing at part­ner­ing the National Vol­un­teer & Phil­an­thropy Cen­tre (NVPC).

Com­pa­nies can also find ben­e­fit from the site as it offers tools so they can man­age and report on employee vol­un­teer­ing and allow them to build up their strate­gic part­ner­ship pro­grammes. Another high­light to the Start Now plat­form is it inte­grates with social media like Face­book, allow­ing the var­i­ous stake­hold­ers to notify vol­un­teers of an activ­ity and get them involved.

The ser­vice is cur­rently free to the vol­un­teers, non-​profits and schools, but com­pa­nies will need to pay a yearly fee for using the Start Now ser­vices that could range from S$3 to S$12 per user account. Start Now will be intro­duc­ing a fea­ture into its plat­form called Col­lages for com­pa­nies in March 2012 which will also require them to pay for it. It will auto­mat­i­cally cre­ate a photo and mem­ory col­lage of sto­ries and volunteer-​uploaded pho­tos of the activ­i­ties the com­pa­nies have par­tic­i­pated in all on the site, instead of them need­ing to cre­ate a new site or hav­ing to man­u­ally do up a newslet­ter to show­case their vol­un­teer­ing activities.

Said Tan, who found his pas­sion for social entre­pre­neur­ship while devel­op­ing Sin­ga­pore Polytechnic’s (SP) award-​winning project Mis­sion Seva­pur in India (where the SP team would travel to India to ini­ti­ate schemes that would gen­er­ate fund­ing for Inba Seva San­gan (ISS), a non-​profit organ­i­sa­tion that runs a num­ber of pro­grammes in Seva­pur to ben­e­fit the pop­u­la­tion): “It will be inter­ac­tive with com­pa­nies being able to com­ment on the site, as well as the non-​profits that the com­pa­nies are work­ing with.”

Start Now has been up-​and-​running in Decem­ber of last year with an offi­cial launch slated for Social Busi­ness Week (organ­ised by Grameen Cre­ative Lab @ NUS) on Feb­ru­ary 20, and they have already begun using social media to rope vol­un­teers to join in their cause. That was how the third “core” team got roped in – Xinyi Cheng, cur­rently a final-​year Mass Com­mu­ni­ca­tions stu­dent from Nanyang Tech­nol­ogy Uni­ver­sity (NTU) and a for­mer class­mate of Tan’s, who has been tasked to han­dle the com­mu­ni­ca­tions side for the startup. “I took a course on CSR and stud­ied sus­tain­abil­ity reports of MNCs. Since then, I have wanted to have con­trol of my time and to do some­thing mean­ing­ful,” shared Cheng. (Two other vol­un­teers have joined their cause as of press time – Ang Kar Yong, its cre­ative direc­tor and Huey Lin, its head of new media.)

Beyond Sin­ga­pore

Many non-​profits have already come onboard Start Now. Tan shared that in just four days, the team have signed up 42 non-​profit organ­i­sa­tions in Sin­ga­pore and they are look­ing also beyond Singapore’s shores. He added that he would like to see the plat­form tar­geted more over­seas as “we don’t want to go head-​on with NVPC (and its por­tal SG Cares which does vol­un­teer match­ing) as they are work­ing on some­thing in the pipeline that is sim­i­lar to us and they already are doing a good job”.

Next month, Start Now will be work­ing on part­ner­ships with stu­dents in uni­ver­si­ties in Bei­jing (call­ing the chap­ter site kaishi​.com start­ing with the pres­ti­gious Peking Uni­ver­sity) and Manila (Uni­ver­sity of Philip­pines, Manila). “We found through our research, Bei­jing has a low vol­un­teer­ing rate of 4 per­cent, while Manila with a high vol­un­teer­ing rate of 33 per­cent to 36 per­cent. We also already have peo­ple on the ground to work out the part­ner­ships with the uni­ver­si­ties. It is a huge mar­ket in Asia – there were 229 mil­lion and that doesn’t include India,” said Tan.

By end of this year, Start Now hopes to include Viet­nam and Thai­land, how­ever, all this would depend on avail­able fund­ing. “Or else, we will have to stay in Sin­ga­pore and shore up the fund­ing,” said Tan, who has taken a year-​off from his archi­tec­ture stud­ies at NUS to con­cen­trate on Start Now.

And with the injec­tion of fund­ing, the founders’ wish-​list is to extend its brand­ing to start sev­eral new sites includ­ing “Buy Now” for prod­ucts made by non-​profits and “Work Now” show­cas­ing com­pa­nies with good CSR. Said Tan: “Fund­ing has been a chal­lenge, as well as find­ing peo­ple pas­sion­ate about social causes to help us.”

How­ever, the team con­tin­ues plough­ing along as they believe whole­heart­edly this is a good thing to do and spurred by the pos­i­tive responses on the ground about Start Now – “The non-​profits have been telling us that this is exactly what they need.” The two founders, along with their team, are com­mit­ted to focus­ing full-​time after all three have graduated.

Shared Cheng: “For us, it is really about doing good, but doing it well enough that it can be a sus­tain­able busi­ness that car­ries on and expands to do bet­ter things for more peo­ple. While finances are still a chal­lenge for now, we believe we will soon find our bal­ance as we learn along the way.”