Help from Home

Now that our website is looking a little more zippier and zappier, we’re getting a lot more interest in our initiative – in fact the number of people visiting the site has more than doubled.  We’re up to an average of 8,000 visits per month and growing. We’ve been busy recruiting volunteers via our ‘VolunteerContinue Reading

An interesting report was published at the beginning of December by no less than the United Nations Volunteers initiative. It was their very first State of the World’s Volunteerism Report and was launched on 5 December 2011 in many countries around the world. Amongst other topics, it discussed Volunteerism in the 21st Century and statedContinue Reading

Woohoo, we actually got a new website design up and running with more microvolunteer actions, new video, improved actions tracker and more info on the microvolunteering arena. Anyway, have a browse around and see if it gets your juices flowing. As part of the roll out of the new website, we introduced a new projectContinue Reading

We were due to launch our new look website back in October, but we now envisage a launch sometime in November, maybe even December. No definite date is planned so, watch this space is all we can say! It was spotted during the month of October that Surrey County Council became the first (as farContinue Reading

Been a bit absent from blog posts of late. That’s because we’ve been working on the completely new look website that will have more functions, more actions, and more information about everything microvolunteering. We’re also going to be simultaneously launching a brand new project called ‘Help From Holiday’. Watch this space over the next 2Continue Reading

The UK government’s official website, Number 10, included Help From Home within its volunteering sections. There are only four other organisations featured on the web page and they are all the ‘main players’ of the UK volunteering world, so we’re quite chuffed to be included amongst them. The UK government in its Big Society visionContinue Reading

Had a bit of a volunteer recruitment drive last month, which resulted in one person offering to volunteer for Help From Home. Many roles were put up on offer and the one this volunteer went for was to form partnerships with like minded organisations, who have the vision to integrate microvolunteering opportunities within the portfolioContinue Reading

- Had a meeting with Cardiff County Council to discuss my idea of them becoming the first ;Microvolunteer Capital of the World’. This idea has been scaled down a bit, as a pilot project needs to be run first to see how it all goes. So, the scaled down project is now designed to provideContinue Reading

- We’re looking for partner collaborations for HFH’s ‘Volunteer Anywhere’ project to take microvolunteering into schools, employee volunteering schemes and civic engagement projects via a Facebook-esque social media interaction format where it is envisaged an income stream will be produced from quantifiable social impact reports – We also launched our ‘Change the world from justContinue Reading

- Published a ‘How To Develop A Microvolunteering Project’ handbook. It’s 40 pages big and getting alot of publicity. It explains what microvolunteering is and why you should set one up. It then moves on to developing the project, whilst also covering the all pervading smartphone app in terms of microvolunteering actions. Most usefully, 13Continue Reading

- UnLtd, who are my current funders, put me in touch with a social enterprise mentor. Let’s just say that my personal circumstances are changing with my day job and so I now need to look at income streams from HFH. For those that don’t know, I derive no income from HFH and do itContinue Reading

- HFH mentioned in the latest UK Government Green Paper, ‘Giving’ as an example of a platform that delivers non-traditional volunteering opportunities as part of their ‘Big Society’ vision- Got a few mentions in the media, most notably the UK ‘heavyweight’ The Sunday Times which included HFH in an article on mentoring people. Needless toContinue Reading

- HFH collaborated with Twixtmas to encourage people to use the time between Christmas Day and New Years Day to do something positive for themselves, others and the planet, as well as look ahead to the future. It was a succesful campaign with articles in the media as well as on radio.- Finally chatted toContinue Reading

- Was interviewed by a few newspapers with corresponding articles in each one. These being Alt:Cardiff (run by students in Magazine Journalism, Cardiff University) and Sunday MidDay (a leading newspaper in Mumbai, India no less than) – More UK high street volunteer centres are promoting the concept of micro-volunteering and HFH, either through articles orContinue Reading

- Director of Communications at VolunteerMatch (probably one of the largest volunteer database in the US) wants to chat with me about exploring the possibility of including micro-opps on to their database. If I can pull this one off – WOW! Watch this space! – HFH has inspired ‘vinspired.com’ to create a brand new categoryContinue Reading