Connecting People

Owned by Andrew Watkins
Last updated: 23-10-2019
3 min read

Relates to:

 

The goal of voluntarily is to bring people together to help people learn. Although we are a technology platform its really all about the people. We help teachers find great activities for their students by providing an easily searchable, well-curated marketplace of things to do - from experienced and tested Activity providers like OMGTech and Inspiring the Future.

We then connect people organising activities with volunteers that can provide everything needed - from a helping hand to specialised skills.

In connecting people the platform has some key capabilities

People Profiles.

Strong profiles help you know more about the person organising an event, volunteering, providing an activity. So we give space for people to talk about their interests, post some photos of them working, even an introduction video. Profiles include information about whether the person has food preferences or special accessibility requirements so that you can provide for them when they volunteer.

Matching Algorithm

We aim to ensure every opportunity has volunteers and every volunteer has opportunities.

Our matching algorithm tries to find the best person to volunteer for your activity and also tries to find the best thing to do for the volunteer.

Emails and Notifications

We don’t expect people to be visiting Voluntarily every day - it's not intended to be a social media platform - although there will always be something interesting and new to see here.

So when new opportunities appear, or when you are invited to participate in an event we will send out notifications to your preferred channel.

By default that will be by email. You’ll need a valid email address to be able to sign into Voluntarily and we will send messages as follows:

  • Getting Started

    • When you first sign in you’ll get a confirmation email along with links and information that lets you know how things work and what you will need to do to be ‘School Ready’, how to get badges and awards for volunteering.

  • New Membership and changed membership messages

    • When you follow or become a member of an organisation you will receive a notification from that organisation telling you about themselves and how you can help. if you’ve asked to join an org and get accepted you’ll also get a notification.

  • Opportunity messages & shoulder taps.

    • When a new opportunity is posted that closely matches your preferences - locality, skills, source org etc. We will send you a message linking to that opportunity where you can ask questions and show interest, get invited etc. You can choose to receive these as soon as they are posted or as a daily or weekly digest. You can also mute these messages for a period if you’ve used up your volunteering time or will be unavailable for a while.

    • We give opportunity organisers the ability to search and select key people they think can help with their project. They can ‘shoulder tap' a limited number of people and you’ll get a personal email from the system on behalf of the organiser asking if you are interested in helping.

  • Newsletters

    • If you follow or are a member of an organisation - the admin of that org can include you in a newsletter or digest that will cover both upcoming opportunities and stories about what has been recently happening. This keeps you in touch with the community that you are a growing part of.

    • The Voluntarily organisation will also issue a more general newsletter that tells you more about what is happening on the platform, blog posts and featured opportunities.

    • You can subscribe/unsubscribe to these newsletters in your settings.

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Comments/discussion section

https://voluntarily.atlassian.net/browse/VP-515

  • Under an opportunity, you can post a comment or question and get replies from the organiser.

These creates a chain of extra information associated with the op. This can include general announcements.

Threaded - post, reply.

you need to be interested in order to be able to post?

e.g trademe, Jira comments

Comments remain with the op for its lifetime.

Group and Direct messaging.

https://voluntarily.atlassian.net/browse/VP-55

Instant messaging service - when you are invited or committed to an opportunity you can access the Direct messaging function that lets you discuss things with the organiser.

At the same time, we create a group chat room for the op that allows all the people involved in the opportunity to talk together.

  • This is implemented as a real-time chat window and requires a messaging/event/pub/sub system.

  • Chat messages are more transient - they are held in the overall chat system with a room created for each op. Once the Op is completed the chat can be discarded/archived.

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