Volunteer Impact

How do we motivate people to work on environmentally regenerative projects?

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We’re About To Get RHoK’d

It’s been a little while since we had the chance to update you, but we’ve got some exciting news!

We’re delighted to say we’re teaming up with RHoK - also known as Random Hacks of Kindness - to get the wheels turning on the next stage of our development.

RHoK is Australia’s largest socially-focused hacker community. We were delighted to be invited to become a Changemaker Project a month back, and we’ve been hard at work preparing for this weekend’s main event - The Winter Hack - for the last month.

We decided to join RHoK as we’re exploring how we can best build the technology to support environmental restoration projects to craft compelling impact stories.

We’ve been delighted by the experience we’ve had at the Ideation and Information Nights with RHoK, where our idea was warmly received and swarmed on by a number of techies, analysts and data wranglers. It bodes well for this weekend, which is set to be RHoK’s largest ever hack with nearly 100 hackers signed up to attend!

You may have noticed that RHoK is based in Australia - recently I (Sam, the founder) moved to Victoria, Australia. I feel this gives us a unique opportunity to bridge two really important countries for Volunteer Impact’s growth and impact - Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia. Volunteer Impact is still part of the Enspiral Ventures family which keeps us rooted to New Zealand as one of our key focus areas.

If you’d like to find out more about the hack, check out RHoK’s event page. You can also follow #rhok across social media throughout the weekend of 4 & 5 June 2016.

If you’d like to find out more about testing the Volunteer Impact service which results from the event, check out and sign up on our website.

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Conservation Innovation Awards Night

We were absolutely delighted to attend the 2015 Conservation Innovation Awards night in Wellington and cheer on some of our friends who took out the main prize!

As double finalists ourselves, it was excellent to see the pedigree of ideas in 2015, and thoroughly suggest everyone with an inkling of an idea to support Conservation outcomes in Aotearoa New Zealand get involved next year!

Here’s our round up from the Awards night:

[View the story "Conservation Innovation Awards New Zealand" on Storify]

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Happy Conservation Week!

Welcome to 2015′s Conservation Week in Aotearoa New Zealand!

There’s heaps of special activities happening around the country which you can get involved with, for families and friends! See more on the DOC website here.

We’re particularly excited to see DOC is running a National Geocaching Challenge this year to engage young and old in adventures in the bush, all leveraging some clever technology.

Geocaching is an international phenomenon. It is an outdoor adventure where players use a free mobile app to find cleverly hidden containers ('caches'). It has been described as a real-world outdoor treasure hunt using GPS coordinates.

Find out more about the Geocaching Challenge here.

We’ve also been busy since our last post about becoming a Conservation Innovation Awards double finalist, talking with some of the amazing people who have got in touch thanks to the challenge. It was a bit of a highlight to see our blog featured on WWF’s main site here too. 

We’ll be heading along to the Awards dinner this Thursday - so stay tuned to our Twitter feed if you’re keen to hear all about it live.

Follow @volunteer_app

We’re also in advanced discussions about an exciting Research project in partnership with Massey University, which we hope to be able to say a bit more about soon.

In the meantime - if you haven’t already, check out this post from Monica Peters on Community-led Conservation and her recommendations from the wrap up of her PhD!

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Check out this excellent article by Monica Peters who is wrapping up her 3 year PhD on Community-led Conservation. There's some strong themes coming through which highlight the direction we've been developing Volunteer Impact into, including capturing the contribution that community-led conservation is making to the overall sector, increasing cohesion between groups, and improving quality of data. We can't wait to see the full thesis, and see what Monica moves onto next!

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Double Finalist : WWF Conservation Innovation Awards

Today we’re feeling somewhat humbled and excited. 

Yesterday was the final day of voting in the WWF Conservation Innovation Awards and we’re stoked to announce our two entries have received enough votes and feedback to be put through to the small pool of ideas selected for judging.

We want to say thank you to all of you who voted, commented, shared the story on social media, and gave us your thoughts online and by email.

We’re stoked to say that the ideas have morphed, changed and improved as a result of going through this open innovation challenge, and we’re getting some interesting connections starting to come through because of it.

More than ever, our determination to take Volunteer Impact to the next level is growing and now we’re building the relationships to make it possible. 

Our founder, Sam, was asked to write a blog post by the WWF team to share reflections on the process. You can read the full article here.

In the meantime, here’s an excerpt:

How might we best spur new ideas for nature?

It's been a pleasure to be part of this year's Conservation Innovation Awards since the day it launched. I've watched the momentum build, the ideas flow and the conversations spark. Most importantly, I've heard stories of people who wouldn't normally speak up and throw their hat in the ring, do just that.

I've spent the last two and a half years running Design & Innovation Challenges and supporting emerging projects & ventures to improve youth wellbeing in Aotearoa, and I've seen a variety of online platforms which try to do the same for different causes. My last 8 years has been spent on a mixture of volunteer management for environmental restoration with CVNZ & Raleigh International, social enterprise development with Enspiral, technology ventures such as Bucky Box, and community building for a social lab called Lifehack.

When I heard WWF were planning to use Crowdicity, I was excited to see what it would bring forth. In a previous year I'd applied for the Conservation Innovation Award, but the process just seemed very stale - fill in an application form, wait for a panel to pick their favourite, and then receive a notification whether or not you'd won. It felt like it was missing the interesting trends of crowd participation, collaboration and discourse.

This year has been a different feast all together.

Read the whole blog post here.

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How are you inviting wildness into your day? #wildness #rewild #rewildyourlife #wearewildness http://ift.tt/1Gfmu34

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Have a good weekend people!

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Conservation Innovation Awards & br'dg

https://wwf-nz.crowdicity.com/post/157408https://wwf-nz.crowdicity.com/post/157294

We’re coming out of hibernation, and we’re pretty excited!

In the last 2 weeks we made the first steps to pick up where we left off, and let Volunteer Impact emerge from the ground and sprout back to life.

It began with an opportunity. 

The work I've been doing with Lifehack has led me to spend a lot of time at Massey University in Wellington, NZ, where there's a lot of savvy young design students who are keen to work with social enterprises. About a month back, I was approached by the team at br'dg who wanted to connect more of these students with interesting young businesses in the city. I applied, and Volunteer Impact was accepted for the inaugural cohort! 

Good turnout for #Brdg tonight at @CreativeHQ! @MasseyUni Students meet Welly Startups! Nice work team! #coca3 pic.twitter.com/16VrwhY0TL

I was delighted to find that several students were eager to jump aboard, so I am delighted to now be working with Maia, Jacob & Dayna on a project to bring to life the research and early design work we’d put in, in the form of our next version of the app for Environmental Restoration projects.

Watch this space!

And then there was Innovation

I’m delighted to say that we’ve also entered two projects into the WWF Conservation Innovation Awards this year. We put forward the visual reporting system we’re building, as well as the feature which a lot of people told us they wanted, which was the potential to capture pictures and videos of a project site.

We’d love your support - the awards begin with a crowd voting platform to establish popularity and originality:

VOTE HERE: https://wwf-nz.crowdicity.com/post/157294 

AND VOTE HERE: https://wwf-nz.crowdicity.com/post/157408

The 2nd is pending approval at time of writing, and sadly you have to do a quick sign up process - use your social accounts to jump through this quickly.

We stand to be in to win a $25′000 grant to put the tools in the hands of community conservation champions, so we’d love your support. Here’s a snapshot of our ideas:

So there we are - coming out of Southern Hemisphere Winter, and launching into Spring with some good news.

We’ll keep you updated with how we fare over the coming weeks!

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Volunteer Impact On Hold

This is the post we’ve needed to write for a little while.

Whilst we’re still very committed to bringing Volunteer Impact into the world, sadly our lives have been a whirlwind in the last 18 months and we’ve not been able to progress as we wish.

We’re currently working on another project which is closely aligned in ethos, focused on human wellbeing, and we’ve been thinking a lot about the cross over of the two projects so wrote a Medium article about it. Our work is currently being funnelled into a social lab called Lifehack.

Knowing the amount of energy it takes to bring a project like Volunteer Impact to life, we’re finally admitting that we don’t have the capacity to do so authentically at the moment. To this end, we’re putting the venture on hold, awaiting some changes at the end of the year.

Whilst we’re still nested in the Enspiral Network, we’re also moving the project to an idea on Assembly (a community around the world building software online together) - if you’re keen to help move Volunteer Impact forward - please join us there.

We’re looking forward to picking up the baton to make the world more wild again in the near future - in the mean time, why note check out this article about 4 awesome Rewilding projects.

If you have any questions in the meantime, please drop us a note on twitter.

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Could holidaymakers be environmental restoration practitioners too?

Another month has almost passed and the end of another year is close. In a few days, motorways will be thick with traffic as holidaymakers exit cities and towns to properties perched where land mee...

Thanks to Monica Peters for this great little article on the potential for holidaymakers and tourists to become environmental practitioners.

Here at Volunteer Impact, it is definitely something we're interested in seeing increase, but what needs to happen for this to become a reality? Here's a couple of observations:

Volunteer activities need to become more accessible - currently it can be quite hard for holidaymakers to find activities they can get involved in for the short time scales they are able to offer.

Environmental Groups need to change the way they work with volunteers - many grassroots environmental groups can't afford the time and energy overhead of 'one off' volunteers, so prefer to have 'lifers' who will turn up week in, week out.

Opportunities for 3rd party volunteer management - when you take into account health & safety, activity instruction, ecological knowledge, there may be a role for organisations who manage volunteers professionally (such as Conservation Volunteers) to work with environmental restoration groups, and help with the recruitment and management of short-term volunteers from overseas and domestically.

Volunteers need the 500 year vision & 5 minute plan - short term volunteers need to change expectations about the kind of work they will be involved in. Too many expect to do the 'glamorous' work - the species monitoring, tree planting, and other high profile work. Changing how volunteers are introduced can help them see how things like weeding will play a role in a bigger picture, and understand that some long term volunteers might like to do species monitoring too.

Keeping in touch + seeing projects develop - under-staffed & under-resourced, many environmental volunteering groups don't ever follow up with once-off volunteers to help them stay connected to the project developments. This often means the memory fades and the potential of word-of-mouth referrals to friends, families & the internet are lost - which could have been a vital stream of recruitment for future volunteers.

Whilst some of these will take time, and a shift in culture, we see the importance of this last piece especially. It can help build an engaged community of local and domestic volunteers over time, and with modern technology and media, the cost is largely (just) people's time.

What opportunities do you see to engage overseas or domestic holiday makers in environmental restoration work?

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The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The next best time is now.

When was the last time you planted a tree?

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We'd like you to stop reading this article right now...

Take a moment to sit and think about some of the places and experiences you've had in your life which have been the most engaging and exhilarating. Think about where you used to play as a child, what the places looked & smelled like...

OK, so if you're like us, your mind started to drift to some tall tree forests, beaches or lakes. When was the last time you were in those places? Recently we hope...

There's mounting science to suggest "Forest Bathing" is good for boosting the immune system, lowering blood pressure, reducing stress, improving mood, increasing the ability to focus, accelerating recovery from surgery or illness, and improving sleep... amongst other things (source: NY State Department of Environmental Conservation). So.... shouldn't we be doing it more, rather than less?

The problem is particularly evident in our children too.

Well that's something we want to change over at Volunteer Impact HQ. Not only do we want to encourage more people into volunteering because it's good for our planet, but because it's good for you too. Whilst you're outdoors working and learning at restoration projects, you're also likely to be regenerating areas of land for our & future generations to enjoy - win win win win win....

So, go on - make a promise now to get away from the screen, unplug and get into the wild.

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Rise of the Social Entrepreneur - Volunteer Impact in the news

Last week, I was interviewed by Siobhan Leathley from Stuff Business (New Zealand's main online newspaper) about the rising tide of social entrepreneurship around New Zealand and the world.

"We don't run our ventures to make money; we make money to run our ventures."

READ THE ARTICLE HERE

I've been involved in the social enterprise space for a relatively short time (since around 2010), but I've seen the space expand and grow significantly from my early days with Enspiral (a social enterprise collective in Wellington), with several of my friends founding their own social good startups, and taking my own seat at the table of one of the early Enspiral Ventures.

I'm personally hugely excited about how we can use business as a tool for environmental good, rather than harm - the driving force behind Volunteer Impact. From my perspective, the possibility of creating a business which solves some of the nagging challenges for volunteer organisations, creating tools for volunteers to better understand their impact, and growing the number of people worldwide who engage in environmental volunteering is an exciting prospect. 

READ MORE AT STUFF BUSINESS

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Volunteer Impact - Visual Reporting for Volunteer Organisations

Reporting is one of the toughest things for community restoration groups to do well. We regularly hear stories of people rapidly trying to piece together paper reports, putting together various spreadsheets, and scrambling to remember what happened on the last few weeks of volunteer activities so they can file a report for the committee.

The time will inevitably come when you need to pull together all the activities on your restoration project into a report for funders, the committee, or for a fresh run at volunteer recruitment.

Currently at Volunteer Impact, we're developing visual reports for restoration projects, as well as agencies & councils. We're aiming to change the way that environmental volunteer organisations report, making it much easier to create visual reports for your funders, committees and of course - your volunteers too.

If you think your organisation might be a good fit for this service, get in touch at [email protected] to discuss how we can help.

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Survey Results: Volunteer Motivation Infographic

At the end of 2014 we launched a survey of regular environmental volunteers and people who occasionally make time to volunteer when we announced our project. 

We decided to release this top level infographic featuring some of the insights we gained from those responses. Perhaps the most surprising insight was the interest in the collective impact of team far outweighed the interest in the individual volunteer impact. This data sharply contrasts with the study we highlighted a little while back.

So, the people have spoken! One of the first elements we will be focusing on with Volunteer Impact is the collective activity data. Stay tuned - we have some big plans for 2014!

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Volunteer Impact - Our Plans For 2014

Happy 2014!

We've started the year with renewed excitement and enthusiasm to see Volunteer Impact come to life in 2014, so it's time to let you in on the plans!

Becoming An Enspiral Venture

One of the first things we've done in 2014 is to apply to become an Enspiral Venture. This development, if we're accepted, will mean that we have much greater access to resources, talent, experience and knowledge to make Volunteer Impact successful. Our founder, Sam Rye, has been part of the Enspiral Network for 3 years, so we're excited to make this association.

Beta Trials Begin

We've spent a few months in 2013 in research mode, gathering information and doing interviews with volunteers & volunteer managers. It's time for our service to go into closed beta trials - meaning we wont be fully open to sign ups, but we will be working closely with a small group of engaged volunteers and volunteer managers to optimise the service and its design. If you're keen to be involved, please sign up here and send us an email. 

We're specifically looking for managers of environmental restoration projects who work with volunteers - please feel free to pass on this link to someone you know or tweet this link.

New Site Coming Soon

Our new website is currently in development, so our launch page will be disappearing and a more rounded, informational site will replace it. Keep an eye out!

Hiring Team Members

In 2014, we're looking to build our team to create a world leading tool for volunteers & volunteer managers. In the coming months we're looking especially for two specialists:

- Graphic Designer / User Interaction & Experience Designer

- Multi-platform Experience Engineer

These opportunities will be advertised on our new website.

We're hugely excited by the year ahead, and we'd love to work with you in 2014 to make the impact of volunteers around the world more transparent and engaging, so that together we can make the world a little more wild.

Get our bite-sized updates in your inbox!

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Looking to find any resources to get your volunteer group off the ground, or needing some help with restoration planning?

Check out the very excellent Resource Centre in Nature Space - New Zealand's portal for environmental restoration groups.

Resource Centre - Nature Space Aotearoa