Volunteermatch.org, by far one of the best “matchmaking” websites online for helping nonprofit organizations find volunteers by matching up user preferences with organizational needs - is opening up its network for public access.
What does this mean? According to Allyson Kapin at FrogLoop, it means that VolunteerMatch will be able to have even greater positive impact by enabling third parties (social networks and widget-makers) to access their data and ultimately make volunteer opportunities accessible in a variety of ways.
This is a very good thing.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Susan - Thanks for the kudos. We’re excited about this new phase of VolunteerMatch, and the positive feedback we’ve heard from everyone in the nonprofit community has been an enormous boost. The Web’s changed a lot since 1998, when we first launched (!). But this has been a direction of increased discoverability that we’ve been moving into for the last two years by making our own RSS feeds and other search widgets available. Now we’re inviting the developer community to really join us in innovating for social change. Can’t wait to see what comes out of this. Cheers! - Robert Rosenthal, VolunteerMatch team
Robert - Keep up the great work. For many reasons, volunteermatch.org is one of my top-ten websites. Add-in your mission and ability to make a positive impact, then it rises quickly to number 1. I would love to find out more about other online activities. It would be great to see some regionally - focused meetups where volunteermatch has a presence. You can find regional volunteers to recruit folks to sign up at local events (in-person). You could even use meetup.com to organize it.
Just a thought. Thanks again for stopping by!