VolunteerMatch
An Online Service Helps Everyone Find A Great Place to Volunteer

At the height of the dot-com boom, Jay Backstrand, a young Silicon Valley insider with a social conscience, first witnessed the power of the Internet to get big groups of people involved in vital community causes. He dreamt of starting a Website to expand that human capacity long-term and nationwide, recruiting three of his best friends to help make it happen. It was the right idea at the right time, and in 1998 they launched VolunteerMatch—now the country’s biggest, most popular Web-based volunteer recruiting service—which has since racked up more than 3.67 million referrals of “good people to good causes.”

Citizen involvement is the lifeblood of democracy, most Americans would agree. Millions of us do our bit for causes ranging from literacy to homelessness, health care to the environment, the arts, immigration and hunger to animal rescue and domestic violence. Yet even with volunteering reportedly at a 30-year high, 70 percent of Americans are still watching from the sidelines, while two-thirds of the country’s 900,000-plus nonprofits struggle to find the volunteers they need. The online recruiting service VolunteerMatch (www.Volunteermatch.org) aims to fill this need with best-in-class technology and resources that make it easy to connect people with opportunities that suit their passion, motivating them to get out and make a difference. Carnegie Corporation, (along with Atlantic Philanthropies and the David and Lucile Packard, Surdna and John S. and James L. Knight foundations) was an early supporter of the cutting edge nonprofit, providing $800,000 to help get the enterprise off the ground and adding another $150,000 several years on to fund its efforts to become self-sustaining.

This issue of Carnegie Results traces the development of VolunteerMatch from home-based startup to nationwide network, with opportunities in every zip code in the U.S.A.. Now located in downtown San Francisco, the two-time Webby Award winner, named one of Time magazine’s top-ten Websites in 2007, has 1.8 million registered members and averages over 54,000 active volunteer opportunities on any given day. Its single, scalable network enables communication and collaboration among volunteers, community service organizations and socially responsible businesses. With just a few clicks, volunteers can find local opportunities to match their strengths; organizations can vastly reduce the cost and challenge of volunteer recruitment and businesses can help employees get involved in their communities. Many of the country’s most recognized charities are among the service’s 59,800-plus nonprofit members: American Red Cross, National MS Society, Peace Corps, Easter Seals, Girl Scouts of the USA, Senior Corps, America’s Second Harvest and Habitat for Humanity, to name a few. Today the network also includes more than 60 corporate partnerships—businesses using the service to link their employees with local charities.

Closing the Gap
The VolunteerMatch story starts with a question: What prevents millions of would-be volunteers from getting involved in causes they care about? Conventional wisdom suggests apathy is the answer: people don’t volunteer because they don’t care passionately enough. But research in the field points to a lack of information about volunteer opportunities as the most significant drawback for individuals. Connecting with the right organization or volunteer opportunity can be a time consuming and frustrating experience. People have to find out which organizations address causes they are interested in, learn when specific events are happening and where to report to help out. Faced with this bureaucratic challenge, many individuals simply opt out.

At the same time, most nonprofit organizations are focused solely on their missions and cannot afford the time or resources it takes to get more people involved. Advertising and recruiting are costly and hard to justify when there are more urgent needs to be met. As a result, no matter how hard they work, nonprofits often miss out on the support of willing and able individuals in their own communities. In addition, many nonprofits have been slow to adopt technology-based solutions that could help them to access volunteer resources right in their communities. In short, there is a longstanding knowledge gap between worthy organizations that need help and individuals who want to provide that help.

The founders of VolunteerMatch were aware of that gap and were determined to close it. They began with the assumption that every person has talents, skills and assets to offer. At the same time they recognized that even though people want to commit to a cause, significant communications barriers discourage them from getting involved. They decided to take a fresh approach to solving the problem and, instead of trying to convince people of the virtue of volunteering, they drew on their Internet expertise to make it easier for would-be volunteers to leap the usual barriers and find the right opportunity. All they needed to make their high-tech approach possible was funding—which brought them to Carnegie Corporation.

“Supporting VolunteerMatch was a no-brainer,” says Cynthia Gibson, who at the time headed a Carnegie Corporation program dedicated to strengthening nonprofits. Helping to build a volunteer work force, in this case using the power of the Internet to bring together would-be workers and understaffed nonprofits, was clearly aligned with programmatic goals. When the VolunteerMatch team presented their idea, “They blew me away!” Gibson recalls. “It was one of the first times I’d been presented with a real business plan: the whys, the hows, projections for the next five years, benchmarks—they had it all. Even a PowerPoint. For every question that was fired at them, they had an answer that was really thoughtful. I’d been in the nonprofit sector long enough to develop an intuition about these things. It was clear to me this idea was meeting a need that was out there. Here was a service that was cost efficient and user friendly. It was especially good for small nonprofits, which are always under resourced, because they could use the site to market themselves.”

Jay Backstrand headed up the team that wowed Gibson, having 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. “Coming from Palo Alto I was already well aware of the Internet’s potential,” he says, “and I was also interested in giving back to the community. I was lucky to be working in the Internet when it was taking off as a consumer application. It just clicked that it could help people like me who wanted to volunteer but found it difficult to determine where to go.”

Written by: Karen Theroux. Theroux is an editor/writer in the Corporation’s Public Affairs department with many years’ experience in educational publishing and communications.