Vivanista has teamed up with VolunteerMatch to share best practices and provide access to thousands of volunteer opportunities for our members. We are proud to be contributing to VolunteerMatch’s Blog Engaging Volunteers for Social Change Organizations. Check out the first post ‘What have your sustainers done for you lately?

A Nonprofit itself, VolunteerMatch pairs volunteers, other nonprofits and companies together. They are an online facilitator that brings “good people and good causes” together by harnessing “the power of community, relationships and partnerships.” As we all know, finding the right person for the right volunteer project is not an easy task! You can now easily search for Volunteer opportunities directly from Vivanista. We have added a VolunteerMatch search box to the right hand Column for your quick and easy access to new opportunities.

Founded in 1995 as Impact Online, they merged soon thereafter with founders from Volunteer America. The VolunteerMatch.org site launched in 1998.

Since then, VolunteerMatch has referred almost 5 Million volunteers to over 70,000 participating organizations. That’s a lot of volunteer hours! At any given time, they have tens of thousands of volunteer opportunities available to help worthy charities achieve their missions, and it may not be surprising that most of the members of VolunteerMatch’s community – like Vivanista’s – are women.

One of the most interesting things about VolunteerMatch is that their big website powered by a massive database is really just about what problems speak to people on a personal level. Want to help with oil spill clean-up?

They have an opportunity for you. Looking to teach art in a children’s classroom? They’ve got that too.

Robert Rosenthal, Director of Communications at VolunteerMatch gives us a behind the scenes look at the organization.

In your experience, what qualities must volunteers have to remain committed to a cause?

Honestly, I think the best volunteers are ones that recognize all the benefits that they themselves are receiving from their service. Volunteers gain in so many ways — socially, professionally, and emotionally. Long term volunteers truly value the volunteering they do, in part because they know how it’s helping them. Ironic, of course, because nonprofits are also benefiting in truly important ways.

You mentioned your audience is mostly women. Why do you think that is?

I think our technology, which empowers choice most of all, is attractive for many women who are looking to get involved in solving the problems they see in their own local communities. The ability to quickly find and select from a broad network of opportunities is a huge change from past paradigms, when volunteers were often exposed to opportunities through existing social networks, schools, churches and clubs. I think women have really taken advantage of the new technology in ways that men — who often still rely on social networks for recommendations — have not.

Finding the right fit for volunteering is a personal experience for many people. You mentioned it often takes private research to make these matches. How do you describe the connection people need to make in order to engage with a new organization and/or cause?

You’ll know a good fit when you feel it. Ultimately, it’s not about mission or skills, it’s about people. Unfortunately, you won’t know if there’s a good fit until you get involved. But you can set the stage for a strong foundation by understanding your own capacity in terms of interests, time, and location. And you can use your powers of observation to look for signs of possible success or flags of warning in opportunity listings and how an organizations talks about itself.

Vivanista’s readers would love to hear about how VolunteerMatch got started and how you help volunteers and organizations find each other.

Jay Backstrand left a full-time position at Sun Microsystems to turn his dream of an Internet-based nonprofit into a reality. Backstrand’s first taste of Web/community synergy came in 1996 when he was a key organizer of NetDay, a community service initiative sponsored by Sun, which mobilized 25,000 volunteers to connect nearly 3,000 California schools to the Internet in a single day.

Backstrand’s co-founder was grad school friend Craig Jacoby, who also gave up his job with San Francisco law firm Cooley Godward to join the project. Both were passionate about the idea and had been working from home mornings, nights and weekends—until 1998 when they decided to change careers and become full-time entrepreneurs.

In 1999, Greg Baldwin, a friend from Backstrand’s undergrad days at Brown University, who had worked for the Leo Burnett advertising agency before founding his own technology startup, joined the team to hotwire the site. So did fellow Brown alum Andrew Smiles, who had directed Community Impact!, a college access program for Washington, D.C. high school students, and who came on board to head the fundraising efforts.

At its core, VolunteerMatch is a national database of nonprofit organizations and their current volunteer openings. To recruit volunteers, organizations first register with VolunteerMatch by providing basic information about their organization’s mission, management and tax-exempt status. Once approved, they have 24-hour, password-protected access to their account to publish volunteer opportunities on the network, providing details about purpose, time commitment, skills requirements and logistics. A built-in email system allows interested volunteers to respond to opportunities by notifying the non-profit organization’s contact person. This basic package of free services is available to all nonprofit members, and can be upgraded to various levels of fee-based subscriptions, which include enhanced listings and more extensive administrative tools.

People who want to volunteer can simply log on to the site and enter their zip code plus a keyword for their preferences, such as causes they care about, kinds of work they want to do and time availability. In seconds they receive a personalized list of volunteer opportunities that match their search criteria. They’re put directly in touch by email with the nonprofit they choose, enabling them to make the initial connection leading to a volunteer relationship. All of these services are free for volunteers. Besides its recruitment service, the site provides additional content such as advice for first-time referrals and space for experienced volunteers and nonprofit representatives to share their inspiring stories. Recently added enhancements to the site include user-generated reviews and recommendations for specific volunteer programs, search maps to help volunteers find where nonprofits are located and RSS subscriptions to track volunteer opportunities by cause or by organization.

How do you see VolunteerMatch growing over the next 10 years?

We’re going to continue to innovate and take advantage of new technologies to make it even easier for people to connect with organizations. Obvious future directions include social media as filtering through networks begins to replace search as the dominant paradigm. And we are already preparing to move away from a purely Web site-based system to one where most of our services are distributed over a wide number of platforms.

If you have a few minutes watch this inspiring video called Change the World: Volunteer