Problem Volunteering: accountability, measuring impact, and rewarding participants

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Potential VolunteersWant to trust that their efforts are well-spent.

Metricising impact 1. Choose the manner in which they contribute

2. Maximise impact to their personal causes

3. Get a sense & record of achievement; feel like they “moved the bar”

Accountability 4. Find the best organisations that match their cause and work style

Increasing learnability 5. Makes entry level experience clear and accessible

6. Provide background information, event on-boarding and feedback

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Volunteering OrganisationsWant an easy, low-cost way to manage volunteers.

Metricising impact

• Prove the organisation’s efficacy to their cause

• Have a user-originated measure of effectiveness

Accountability

• Want appropriately skilled and motivated volunteers

• Want a way to reward volunteers

Increasing learnability

• Leverage an existing community of volunteers

• Automate management of events and people

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SolutionCause Corps. !A website for volunteers to find volunteering initiatives that match the causes they care about and the way that they want to work. A way to crowd-review volunteering organisations.

!A place for organisations to post events and find reputable volunteers. A service to reduce the cost/augment ability to of provide a rewarding volunteering experience.

!A system for mutually tracking the impact of both parties toward their shared causes.

Initially caters for Explorers and Achievers.

• Design focus at launch is on the“single player experience”, highlighting types of activities volunteers can do from home before moving to bigger commitments

• Helps to solve “empty bar problem”

!Subsequently then builds on Socialisers, leveraging data gathered to match them.

Player Types Involved

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Game mechanics!!Increasing learnability The “sign up wizard” has a simple XP system represented as a progress bar.

• Volunteers: encourages new-to-site to explore available events; through to volunteering for their first event

• Organisations: encourages new-to-site to post an event; through to creating a profile page about their organisation

Game mechanicsMetricising impact & accountability - Explorers & Achievers (first) Upon completing an event, both the user and the organisation rate each other via an online feedback form.

A reputation point is then added to both the below categories

• Causes, such as “environmental”, “animals”, “health”, et al.

• Work Type, such as “work @ home”, “manual work”, “face-to-face”, et al.

!Both users and organisations can see their overall reputation as made up by these two categories.

ExamplesThe website lists the user’s top three causes and work types.

!Later functionality would provide drill-down charting.

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Do"@"Home"

Office"Work"

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Animals"

Human"Rights"

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Game mechanicsMetricising impact & accountability - Achievers (later)

• Award badges for progress within each cause and each work type

• Badge awarded at increasing scale, (e.g. 1, 3, 5, 8, 15, 25 reputation points in category)

• Miscellaneous badges e.g. based on overall frequency, overall number, “streaks”

Game mechanics!!!Social aspects

• News/event feeds

• Personalised pages

• Follow organisations

• Suggest volunteers to each other based on: similar badges, causes, work types, locations

• Create specialised leaderboards for: • each cause • each work type • each cause/work type combination • and further refine/filter the leaderboard by geographical area as the user base scales

Cause Corps: SummaryMetricising impact

• Reputation-based point system on two vectors - cause and work type

Increasing Learnability • Progress bar/XP system for new-to-site users to direct behaviour and reward progress

Accountability • Creating a two-way system of ratings allows volunteers to hold organisations accountable; and vice

versa. • Organisations can see how many people rated them positively/negatively for a given event, but not

who exactly.

Socialising those with the same causes and work styles • Social mid-game, comparing oneself to others in similar categories

End game • Volunteers above a certain level are invited to start creating their own causes and running them

Appendix

User ActionsPhase 1: Learn: Sign up/Learning to Use Explore the possibilities; commit to signing up for the first event

Phase 2: Build reputation

Build experience, status, reputation; against your causes and work types.

Phase 3: Participate Compare, share, get involved in the community

Phase 4: Create Create own volunteering causes and events.