Assistant Volunteer Main
Assistant Volunteer Pillars
Enabling Better Societies
During COVID-19

Inspiration

"Assistant Volunteer" is a SaaS platform aiming for the management and coordination of volunteers by organizations during the COVID-19 crisis, to effectively respond to the assistance requests of citizens in need.

Volunteering is an extremely effective and beneficial way to empower society, especially in difficult times like this. Also, it supports the increased operational needs of organizations at times such as this pandemic.

The Problem

Millions of vulnerable people, such as people with chronic diseases, disabled, senior, all over the world have been isolated in their homes in order to protect themselves from coronavirus. People that before were capable to perform their daily tasks and even never required help suddenly needed assistance in buying groceries, running errands, go to medical exams and many other types of support, in order to avoid risking an infection. Besides, they do not always know whom to ask for help or where to search for care services.

At the same time, voluntary organizations and local government programs are experiencing an unexpected increase in the need for assisting people. Also, thousands of volunteers responded to Government calls, wanting to help during this crisis. Nevertheless, voluntary organizations lack a quick and systematic matchmaking mechanism between volunteers and available missions. Typically voluntary organizations use either excel spreadsheets or a complicated CRM, but in order to make the whole system of volunteering better, they need everyone to have access to the same tools.

Voluntary organizations face several problems in harnessing the power of volunteers missing:

A central registry of volunteers: It is critical to have an overview of the available volunteers, their abilities and their skills. A central registry system would provide such functionality.
An efficient management system: It is both challenging and necessary to manage volunteers and actions in a secure and efficient way. Especially, in a case like COVID-19 crisis where there are vulnerable citizens, a system requires to be able to protect the citizens’ privacy by delegating the tasks to the proper Volunteer while at the same time hiding the sensitive information.
The communication with citizens in need: Citizens, especially the ones in need, often do not know where to contact volunteers and have difficulty in trusting an unknown source. It is crucial to set up a strong communication channel with the citizens and build trust while providing them with the valuable assistance they request.

The Solution

To address the above problems, voluntary organizations need a reliable and efficient way to screen, match and certify volunteers for actions, and a trustworthy and secure channel for vulnerable citizens to ask for help.

That’s why we designed the “Assistant Volunteer”, an innovative platform aiming to assist organizations and government programs manage volunteering. Thus, we will maximize the positive impact of voluntary work in society by empowering voluntary organizations and local government programs while helping vulnerable social groups.

“Assistant Volunteer” will be a digital assistant, a communication channel that will connect vulnerable citizens with voluntary organizations and local government programs so that citizens can request assistance via a user-friendly and trustworthy solution. The centralized coordination (organization, government etc.) will ensure the integrity of the service.

Our solution can be configured to support organizations of all types and sizes to achieve modernization and upgrade of the operations, seamlessly with their workflow. The “Assistant Volunteer” will help voluntary organizations become more flexible by providing them with the tools to recruit, train, organize, coordinate and supervise volunteers. This will allow organizations to optimize services and streamline communications, reducing workload and increasing efficiency. With the “Assistant Volunteer” we make it easy to not just manage the volunteers, but effectively engage them and dedicate more time to making a difference.

“Assistant Volunteer” a solution that helps voluntary organizations and governments to harness the power of volunteers to deal with the COVID-19 crisis and afterwards.

The solution's impact to the crisis

Volunteering is a significant contribution to our society that up to 30% of the adult population participates and generates a value of 180b$ in the US only. In Europe alone there are more than 3.2 million voluntary organizations.

The COVID-19 crisis triggered a sudden peak in need for assistance and volunteering offers. As one can see at Google Trends, the interest of people for volunteering quadrupled in March 2020 and is clearly correlated with the COVID-19 crisis.

Furthermore, the specifics of the COVID-19 crisis impose some extra challenges for the volunteers and the volunteering organizations. In many cases the tasks need to be performed by appropriately trained and equipped people.

It is fantastic that thousands of people want to help those in need of support during COVID-19 crisis. But it is important though to make sure they are well enough and well-trained to volunteer in a safe way. Otherwise, they will transform from part of the solution to part of the problem.

The value of Assistant Volunteer after the crisis

Volunteering is an important part of our society, so our service “Assistant Volunteer” can be used not only during the pandemic but after that as well, contributing to the work of:

Municipalities,
Voluntary organizations,
General Secretariat For Civil Protection,
Local government programs, like home care etc.

“Assistant Volunteer” has a great future potential as there are over 1 billion disabled people in the world while people with reduced mobility (mostly seniors) and people with chronic diseases represent more than 40% of the population and the volunteers will keep helping them.

Also “Assistant Volunteer” can be a platform that will promote volunteerism after periods of crisis and can contribute to establishing volunteerism as part of the education and people’s culture.

Furthermore, “Assistant Volunteer” could be used by companies to promote their corporate social responsibility by:

creating volunteering teams from their personal to perform an action to help their local community
training and certifying volunteers for free with company related skills
initiating and organizing their own volunteering actions