If you’re a nonprofit thinking about signing up to Social Good Connect, and you’re wondering ‘what’s the catch?’, we’ve got some good news for you!
We give nonprofits free access to skilled employee volunteers from businesses across the UK. Our platform (SAM – as we lovingly call him) is designed to make volunteer recruitment easy for charities to upload opportunities and find volunteers. Whether it’s a long-term opportunity you’re looking to fill – or even just someone to help brainstorm with you for an hour or two – SAM is keen to brew up your perfect match.
Let’s explain how easy it is to find volunteers through our platform by answering some of your most common questions:
There are three fundamental differences that separate us from other recruitment platforms:
We aren’t here to replace recruitment processes, but our platform is designed to be easy so you can add another tool to your belt. Our Charity Relationship Manager can set your membership up for you, and help you to upload your initial opportunities to get you started.
SAM gives you access to our pool of skilled volunteers that may be tricky to access otherwise. Plus, we occasionally run charity thinktanks and workshops on how you can work closer with volunteers, write great opportunities and problem solving. It’s too good an opportunity to miss!
No! Businesses pay to join us as a member, whilst charities can use the platform for free. We’ll soon provide the option for paid value-add services to better serve our charity members, but access to SAM will always be free for nonprofits. And you can hold us to that!
Hey, we don’t want to sound like a broken record buuuuut… we want to keep our platform as easy and simple to use as possible. There’s just a few requirements that we ask of our charity members.
To keep our volunteers engaged, we ask that charities to respond to all volunteer applications within 48 hours. The quicker the better – but really we just want everyone to have the best experience possible, including our volunteer applicants to keep them coming back for more.
During sign-up, whether it’s through our Charity Relationship Manager (CRM) or online self-sign up – we’ll ask for your nonprofit details. If you’re a registered charity, we’ll double check that against the OSCR register but social enterprises and other nonprofits can still join us as a member. If you have any queries about this, get in touch with one of our team who can explain why we ask for these details.
Maintaining your opportunities by closing unavailable roles, updating opportunities and posting when you have an opening will help to make sure the opportunities on our platform are relevant and help potential volunteers find your opportunities more easily. If you ever feel like you need extra support with managing your opportunities our Charity Relationship Manager is more than happy to help.
Our only caveat is that whilst we work with all sorts of charities with different missions, we do not allow any volunteering opportunities that directly promote religious or political causes. We do work with religious charities, but we just ask that the opportunities you upload do not directly promote an ideology. (i.e. a Christian charity can sign up and advertise for someone to help their website, but no roles that advocate for beliefs).
Our platform has an inbuilt messaging tool where you can communicate with applicants. If there’s a particular business you’d like to approach with a specific opportunity your Charity Relationship Manager will be on hand to help.
Many of our business members are looking for team volunteering opportunities. If there’s a big task that you could use a team of people to help with, your CRM will help to coordinate this.
Currently, the functionality of our platform only allows you to respond to volunteers who have already applied for a role.
If you have a specific need for volunteers, let your CRM know and they’ll help put you in touch with the business where appropriate.
You’ve come to the right place, baby! Yes, we absolutely can.
We have plenty of resources for nonprofits with useful content and advice on how to make the most out of your membership. We can also give you some advice on how to write the best opportunity adverts for attracting volunteers.
We’re always encouraging charities to think outside of the box when it comes to posting opportunities. It doesn’t just have to be formalised roles, or roles that benefit your service users. You can post one-off or task specific roles that help your company internally. For example, if your social media is needing a little love – why not post an opp asking for help to create a social strategy? Or, if you have a filing-room that’s needing a bit of a facelift – that could be a great team opportunity for people to help sort out your office. As long as it’s not taking a paid job away from someone else, the world is your oyster.
Examples of opportunities we’ve supported include: befriending, food deliveries, trustee recruitment, organisation flag flyers, video editing and IT support to name but a few!
Yes of course, but we do recommend posting an opportunity as soon as you join, as your organisation won’t be visible to our volunteers until you post an opportunity. Saying that, you’re totally welcome to wait until you are ready to upload.
You can join up yourself in just a few easy clicks, or if you’d like to understand more about how Social Good Connect can help you achieve your nonprofit goals, then book in for a call with our Charity Relationship Manager.
Caroline has made it her life’s work to help people make more meaningful decisions to support their communities and she’s learned some golden nuggets along the way!
So, join Caroline each week for her ‘Thursday Thoughts’ on all things people, planet, philanthropy or purpose all served with sprinkle of fun (but unfortunately no prosecco) to inspire you.
