Help from Home

Introduction

We’re looking to expand our Team with people who’ve got some great ideas to enhance and compliment the work we do within the microvolunteering arena. If we like your idea, we’ll provide you with whatever support we can muster up (sorry, but not financial) and probably a bit of web space chucked in for good measure.

Microvolunteering is creating a ‘buzz’ in the voluntary world because it is quite literally stripping away all the barriers that people use as an excuse not to volunteer. This is a unique opportunity to get in at the ground level and create impact within an arena that is still evolving.

You

To get the kudos of appearing on our Team page, you need to have:
- a great idea!
- the passion and commitment to follow your idea through
- be self motivated
- ability to work under your own initiative
- have more than a surface interest in microvolunteering

Us

- we’re very small, but have been instrumental in putting microvolunteering on the map and we fully intend to continue our pioneering efforts
- we’re all volunteers with full time jobs outside of Help From Home
- we derive no income from what we do
- we’re passionate about creating impact

Possible Great Ideas

- we promote a service called ‘Do Good’ cards, which enables people to virally encourage others to do good. A participants impact can be tracked and monitored around the world. Could a cereal manufacturer be approached to include a cut out card on their cereal boxes, where their name would then become associated with doing good, whilst at the same time their product would be promoted for free as the card travels from person to person

- develop a mobile app to enable people to record, share and geo-locate their own microvolunteering ideas. Perhaps this could be developed in collaboration with the Orange ‘Do Some Good’ mobile app

- develop a mobile app to enable holidaymakers to microvolunteer whilst on holiday. This could be just a screen of information that relates to the country a person is visiting. Perhaps the free iBuildApp or appmakr could be used to design the app. Refer to our ‘Help From Holiday’ project for inspiration

- adapt the open-source +U mobile volunteering app to create an info portal for the microvolunteering actions featured on our database for smartphone users

- we’ve come across a free piece of software that converts blogs into a free iphone app, called bloapp.com. We’d like to see a blog created which takes the form of a weekly or fortnightly post on a different microvolunteering action. You’d be responsible for creating the app (which is pretty easy), populating it with actions and promoting it

- we’ve developed a creative way to promote microvolunteering actions for our Lunchbreak Volunteering project via a Microvolunteering Menu. We’d like to see it promoted into other areas, eg. restaurants who want to promote an ethical side to them, perhaps promoting hunger causes or maybe it could be handed out at mealtimes during Conferences that are addressing worthy causes. Or maybe whatever you dream up!

- could ways be developed to encourage people to microvolunteer on airline flights? There’s an awful lot of people sitting around doing nothing on planes! We’d like to see this promoted as a leaflet insert tucked into back seats or perhaps as an article in one of those airline onboard magazines or perhaps whatever you dream up! There is an increasing use of laptops on planes and some of this ‘spare’ time could surely be put to good use via microvolunteering actions

- could microvolunteering actions be inserted into companies newsletters? Actions would be aligned to a companies ethos and would demonstrate a companies ethical stance to it’s employees and customers

- could an internet click-to-donate button be developed which measures and accumulates time rather than the more common click-to-donate button that accumulates cash donations. We envisage this might be suitable for employee volunteering schemes where customers of a firm are invited to determine how much time an organisation allows its employees to volunteer. We’ve seen an internet button scheme here and maybe this could be adapted to the click-to-donate time button

- we’re on the edge of our seats waiting to see yours or to progress one of the ideas above!

Other Stuff

- unfortunately, no expenses will be paid
- volunteer whenever you want to
- volunteer from your own home or wherever is convenient for you

I Want To Help

You do! Glad to hear it.  Let us know what your big idea is and how you intend to follow it through. We’re after people who can bring their idea to realisation without much involvement from us, although of course you’ll receive whatever support we can give to promote it (but not financial). Get in touch using the form on the Contact Us page.

Look forward to hearing from you.