New GoVolunteer Partnership with SEEK

As part of a major initiative of IYV+10, Volunteering Australia in collaboration with SEEK is to launch a new GoVolunteer service.

Originally launched as a collaboration between Boston Consulting Group BCG, SEEK and VA as an initiative of the International Year of Volunteers in 2001, GoVolunteer remains a national volunteer matching service that provides a simple single point of reference for volunteers wishing to find suitable opportunities.

CEO of Volunteering Australia, Cary Pedicini says that in ten years much has changed and GoVolunteer will now have even greater capacity to take advantage of new technologies and adapt to the changing ways people want to volunteer.

Enhanced functionality will include features such as interaction with social media, small screen friendly interface, geo-tagging of opportunities near you and interest based searches. Volunteers can set up job mail style opportunity alerts and revamped organisation profiles will allow more information to reflect an organisation's cause and branding.

Pedicini says a key feature of the new GoVolunteer system is its capacity to share information with the myriad of local and state based systems that have evolved since GoVolunteer was first introduced.

He says the great advantage of this feature is that organisations will only have to load their volunteer opportunities on the one GoVolunteer site to achieve maximum exposure for their organisation.

He says the proliferation of volunteer matching websites since the launch of GoVolunteer has had both positive and negative implications for volunteers and volunteer involving organisations.

In a major study undertaken in early 2011, BCG found that:

• Proliferation of online volunteer recruitment sites has led to time-consuming and frustrating experiences for volunteers. To view all available opportunities at once, volunteer seekers must trawl many websites and even then cannot be confident they have viewed all opportunities. From a systemic viewpoint this is undesirable and inefficient resulting in volunteers being placed in positions which may not best match their interests and skills. Apart from being time-consuming, volunteer seekers also expressed frustration as they encounter the same opportunity on different websites.
• Not for Profit organisations expressed that interacting with the myriad websites was difficult and created duplication of work. The existence of many volunteer matching websites requires NFP organisations to understand the different registration, account log-ins and upload processes that each site requires. Some NFPs cannot manage multiple uploads to each website due to staff time constraints. NFPs reported receiving expressions of interest from multiple websites in different formats and time consuming work of physically re-entering volunteer data into their own system from different forms as even more resource intensive.
• Growing market fragmentation detracts from market efficiency. Rather than negating or reducing the need for a national aggregator, the proliferation of many websites emphasises the need for easy navigation and search ability.

VA says that over the past ten years, GoVolunteer has grown rapidly and become the largest national volunteer recruitment service in Australia. In 2010, on average there were 13,000 volunteer opportunities in the national database at any one time. This represents approximately 80% market share in terms of posted opportunities. GoVolunteer opportunities are distributed to over 60,000 unique website visitors each month via the dual branded GoVolunteer and SEEK Volunteer websites.

In 2003 SEEK and BCG were recognised in the Prime Ministers Community Business Partnership Awards for demonstrating a commitment to their community through excellence in a community business partnership.