iVolntr.org - Concept Video

As part of applying for Google's Project 10^100 competition we were allowed to include a link to a short 30second video about our ideas. So here's the video for iVolntr.org... please watch it, rate it, share it, leave your comments and spread the word!!



If it doesn't play in your browser, here's the link http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=7vR3O9_DbjU

I know the ideas spin past pretty quickly in the vid, so here it is in slide form in case you want to go through it more slowly!

Google Project 10^100 - iVolntr concept presentation

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: volunteering socialenteprise)

Enjoy! Hope you like it!!

iVolntr.org - An Illustrative Example

iVolntr.org is essentially a web2.0 concept for a social volunteering site that works by connecting existing networks, such as Facebook, with collaborative technologies that enable people to help others via the web. It will not only increase the exposure of physical volunteering opportunities through feeds in major social networks but will also allow people to volunteer from the comfort of home, using web-based document and media editing tools. Nothing this comprehensive has been done before (see the comparison grid in my previous post), and if we get it up and running, iVolntr will revolutionise the way volunteering is perceived and done, particularly amongst 16-35's or what I call the 'Facebook Generation'.

Here's an illustration:
A youth charity supporting excluded inner-city teenagers with career development, puts up a request for help with reviewing job applications and CV's. You've got the iVolntr application on Facebook and are interested in youth projects. Their request pops up in your 'Live Feed'. You have a little spare time so you click the link, which opens their profile and documents in your browser allowing you to edit them or leave helpful suggestions. When you have to go, you save and quit, and the document is free for others to keep working on it, until it can be marked complete. Their thank-you note shows on your Facebook profile, so your friends can see what you've been working on and your volunteering portfolio automatically updates for future reference.

Virtual volunteering thus covers anything that can be done for individuals or organisations using digital editing technologies. Other examples include:

• Career and educational help;
• Business plans;
• Ideation (idea generation and validation);
• Funding and housing applications;
• Marketing strategies, and plans;
• Graphics and video;
• Financial or other spreadsheets;
• Virtual meetings;
• Experience-sharing;
• Answering questions and providing advice;

These are just some examples out of a huge list of possibilities.

Connecting with existing social networks and using a crowdsourced volunteering model, addresses the major barriers to volunteering including findability, immediacy, physicality, localisation, commitment, and kudos; in combination helping more of us to make a collective difference on a global scale.

iVolntr.org

After about 3 months of working on the Urban Survival Project concept, I realised that to really improve opportunities for excluded young people, there needs to be a social and technical infrastructure in place. This involves

1. First, creating a flexible available and interconnected pool of literate urban volunteers
2. Second, enabling them to connect with and help young people and any one else who needs it, by making it easy to share time and knowledge immediately and online

When I started to design this concept, I realised that these two needs extend to all forms of volunteering and social projects, so I began to work on something bigger than the original USP concept. “A social network that mobilises the Facebook generation." I called it iVolntr.org.

The main issue is that in today's culture the volunteer has to do much work even before they start doing something helpful. So I figured if we could create something that works with all the major social networks, and allows people to volunteer from home with lots of people being able to do little bits of bigger tasks, we'd remove the pressures of commitment and also the hurdle of traveling to places that are difficult to get to.

No one seems to be doing anything like this right now. There are lots of sites that enable people to form helpful communities, but none of them address the core issues that stop us from volunteering. Here's a quick snapshot of where the iVolntr concept therefore uniquely fits in the current landscape.

Addressing The Real Issues With Volunteering

I've just read that the volunteering charity V is going to start referring to volunteering as 'favours', because apparently their research shows that two-thirds of young people find the word 'volunteering' a turn-off. Haven't they ever heard the phrase 'calling a rose by any another name...'. In this case if young people think its a pig, calling it a tiger isn't going to change anything.

Let's look at the two issues they point to... the reasons why young people don't volunteer.

1. They see it as signing up to the unknown - If you look carefully, there are two issues here. The signing up - in other words a commitment issue, and the unknown - in other words lack of clarity around what they are going to be doing
2. A third said volunteering was geeky - I'm guessing 'V' haven't taken into account the effect of the Orange Rockcorps campaign on shifting the perception of volunteering amongst young people.

Asking young people if they have volunteered, most said no, but 80% said they'd done someone a favour. So V have decided that renaming volunteering as favours would get more young people excited. Personally I think that's a poor approach. 'Favours' inherently suggest obligation. Does V realise that it might effectively be building a culture of young people who associate donating time and effort with actual return and reward?

In any event, renaming something does not in any way address the underlying issues, and therefore quite frankly should not be expected to do anything to improve the numbers of young people getting involved.

I've said this before, and I'll say it again. I believe there are 4 reasons why young people (16 - 35) don't volunteer. The barriers come down to perception, but usually underpinned by reality.

1. Effort required to find opportunities to help - I challenge you to find somewhere to volunteer for an hour this evening
2. Physicality and localisation - having to be there in person and doing something physical
3. Commitment - having to sign up to something regular and ongoing. The issue here is backing out rather than signing up. We have busy and social lives. A lot of people would rather not get involved at all, than face the embarrassment of telling someone after who needs help that they can't continue any more because they've got some other social activity that overlaps.
4. Kudos - personal kudos is a huge factor in young people's lives and right now there are no avenues to highlight anyone's volunteering efforts to their friends and networks. Even giving someone a ticket to a concert in return for volunteering as Orange Rockcorps are doing, is reward without kudos. Encouragement for one-off volunteering rather than a culture of a volunteering.

This project, through iVolntr.org, is explicitly aimed at removing these barriers by tapping into existing social networks and enabling real-time crowdsourced virtual-volunteering. By addressing the issues rather than playing with semantics, we can start to build a real culture of volunteering, enabling people to help each other and make a difference to millions.

As mentioned before, I'm going to be applying for Google's Project 10 to the 100th, so do help by spreading the word, subscribing to the blog at http://www.urbansurvivalproject.org/ and passing the link on to your friends and colleagues.

Innovation and iVolntr

iVolntr.org falls into the Type III innovation category as defined in NESTA's 'Total Innovation' report. It is about tying together a host of digital editing technologies (like google docs), existing social networks (like facebook), and open standards (like opensocial and the dataportability initiative) to remove the existing perceptual and real barriers to volunteering (particularly for the facebook generation) and thus change the way volunteering is perceived and done.

The project is about crowdsourcing time and skill on a many-to-one-basis to facilitate people helping people, and people helping organisations; by creating, commenting and editing individual and organisational information directly through the webpage in immediate response to need or request. It will be primarily designed to support social organisations and disadvanted groups in developed information economies like ours, where so much is facilitated by or done through desktop computing.

iVolntr then is essentially about innovation in social behaviour and the development of Personal Social Responsibility (PSR). By removing the commitment, physicality and localisation factors present in traditional volunteering models, as well as removing the effort in finding out about opportunities to help (for eg. through a facebook app) we should be able to leverage personal need for social kudos to create a sustainable culture of social enthusiasm and a sustainable supply of help for disadvantaged individuals and the third sector.

Elevator pitch for iVolntr

Still a bit of a struggle to get the Elevator Pitch right for USP, but I've had a go based on the guidelines from my previous post.

""The core idea is to create a collaborative virtual-volunteering website that is accessed through social networks like Facebook. The primary goal is to bolster the support system for social organisations. It essentially aims to solve the problems of commitment, localisation and physicality that act as barriers to volunteering.

There is no direct competition and there is a large market of people who want to do something socially beneficial but need it to be easier to do.

The business model is well proven around ad-serving, as this will function as a meta social network that ties in users from popular existing networks, with virtual-editing functionality that will make the site sticky for both new and existing users."

Yes, needs work I know but it's a start and it's under 150 words :) Comments and questions welcome!!

USP & iVolntr: Problem Statement

After much research and rework to define and simplify what I'm trying to achieve with the Urban Survival Project, the answer seems to come down to a two step process. To achieve our goal of improving opportunities for inner city kids, I think there needs to be a social and technical infrastructure in place.

First, create a flexible available pool of literate urban volunteers via a volunteering platform (iVolntr.org). Second, enable them to connect with and help young people and any one else who needs it, by making it easy to help people immediately and online. In light of that, here's a first draft of some questions and answers I've put together to help outline what I'm thinking. I'd love some feedback :)

What is the aim of the Urban Survival Project?

Revolutionise urban volunteering!

How will we achieve this?

By approaching it from a social-networking and cyber-volunteering perspective - i.e. iVolntr.org.

What is the opportunity?

There is an increasing sense of social responsibility amongst young professionals, particularly in the corporate space, combined with a need for kudos on a personal level and offset by limited available time. There is thus a keenness for volunteering and particularly helping disadvantaged young people that is not being realized because there are too many barriers to volunteering. This is especially so for a commitment-phobic web-savvy professional generation that takes ease of use, interactive engagement, fun and immediacy for granted.

What do we need to do?

1. We need to make volunteering easier.


2. We need to make volunteering immediate and temporary / non-committal.


3. We need to make some aspects of volunteering possible online and through the use of digital media, online document editors and wiki software. In other words, we need to enable true cyber-volunteering.

Why do we need another volunteering site?

There isn’t one out there specifically dedicated to engaging volunteers and catering for their needs. The volunteering sites out there focus primarily on organizations looking for time or donations, or alternatively provide for people and groups developing ideas or setting up social projects.

Why set this up as a social network?

As I see it, the largest untapped volunteering resource is the commitment-phobic, web- savvy, young professional group that has become accustomed to interpersonal interaction norms set by Facebook. Social networks are proven to be a highly successful way to connect and engage people in the 15 to 35 demographic. There is also a significant amount of social kudos for individuals and groups to be gained by showcasing their good deeds and developing their social ideas in a space where their friends and colleagues have visibility. The network would also contain organizations and projects as individual entities that members can interact with as they do with each other, as well as providing volunteering opportunities as Facebook style updates to members; thus making it easier to volunteer both in terms of usability and also in terms of findability. The combination of the two will create the ease and immediacy that most of us are looking for.

Why do we need another social network?

There isn’t one out there that is designed to achieve anything useful. There are plenty of Web 2.0 sites trying to do this, but they don't recreate our social graph and aren't really social networks. Attempts to achieve this through existing social networks have also not proved successful. Neither Facebook nor MySpace for example, are designed for useful collaboration between individuals, and are primarily fun sites rather than useful platforms. Creating a useful social network creates the opportunity to reuse and scale for a number of other collaborative needs.

Why do we need another website for young people?

There aren’t very many sites specifically for young people, and there isn’t one that covers the breadth of issues they face, at a literacy level that makes sense particularly to young people in the NEET (Not in Education, Employment or Training) category.

Why would non-profits and other volunteering websites support this?

This network would drive traffic to their sites by feeding their volunteering opportunities into the pool of users based on localization information and user preference, and thus increase their possibilities of engaging with and leveraging an audience that they currently struggle to pull in. Being able to create their own organization profiles that could be synchronized with their data feeds will also help create a referral channel at no cost. We could enable donations directly through member profiles like Facebook causes. Finally, and crucially, this project would help them build dedicated and long reaching networks of people that support their cause.