In case you're wondering why it's taking so long for me to get this volunteering research sorted, here's a quick look at the comparison factors I'm looking at. I've essentially imagined a hypothetical generic social networking site for volunteers and then used the feature set it might contain to create a comparison grid. At the end of it we should be able to see how close existing services come to what we're thinking of. If I can find even one organisation or site that is a high match I'll accept that maybe there isn't really any gap to fill.
Apart from the generic user experience, complexity and content review I'm looking at 4 specific areas for comparison. These are social networking, cyber-volunteering (ability to do useful things online), impact and technology.
Social Networking:
- Social graph recreation
- Invite friends using email contacts or export from social networks
- Facebook application / synchronisation
- Synchronisation with Other Social Networks
- Synchronisation with twitter, tumblr etc
- Aggregate content from other external profiles - plaxo pulse
- Personal profiles
- Skills profiles
- Auto-Create profile from social networks
- Organisation profiles / pages
- Post messages on profile
- Status updates
- Network feeds
- Network friend updates feed / stream
- Opportunity updates feed / stream
- Customise/filter volunteering opportunities
- Track & Manage volunteering opportunities
- Interpersonal communication - email within site, IM within site, message boards
- Post photos, notes, video, presentations, papers, research
- User blogs
- Share with friends
- Wiki based information sharing
Usefulness:
- Cyber Volunteering capability
- Question & Answer capability
- Collaboration capability
- Edit documents/content directly through site
- User credit / reward system
- Create and manage multi-user project pages
- Raise funds for causes
Impact:
- Memorability
- User-centric design
- Organisational Blog
- Tone of copy
Technology
- Faceted and saved search
- Notifications by email and RSS
- Rich Media - Streaming, Videocast, Audiocast
- Customise/filter volunteering opportunities
- Open APIs
- Developer applications
- Compatibility with open standards
- Mobile compatibility
Can you think of anything else a social networking site for volunteers should offer users? I'd love to hear your thoughts.
