 So I'd like to, this was just a bit about meaningful work and the platform and I'd like to just transition over to digital transformation and what it is to some extent and from there on we'll talk about what that process of skilled volunteering looks like and how to get from that A to Z and then start the next stage of more skilled volunteering. So digital transformation is really affecting all of us today. These are some of the areas which we found that are most in need for nonprofits to start looking at, analyzing and finding out where they can really benefit from digital transformation in these areas. So in marketing that might look like digital advertising, segmentation, really optimizing their websites and landing pages, building funnels for donors to go through and for human resources that might be hybrid or virtual offices, engaging with employees, especially in creating equity, diversity and inclusion across these online spaces, just quite difficult. For operations, there's new business models that are available now to try out, being able to measure that client experience and be able to deliver your programs online. With technical infrastructure, some examples are being able to access employee and client and donor data and generate insights, making sure that your systems are cyber secure as well as effective with finance and fundraising, new channels every day, gamification of finance and fundraising, cryptocurrency or some really interesting new trends. And with impact measurement and communication, being able to tell your story on these digital platforms, being able to measure the progress and also set KPIs. And talking to nonprofits, these are some of the challenges that we've been able to help them work through, but also recognize the immense amount of expertise that is available in these areas, within nonprofits and also within volunteers and companies. So I will now kind of talk about some of the benefits of transformation and some of the challenges. So really being able to transition over to some of these digital technologies can lead to resilience and flexibility. You can really increase value to your audiences and even scale your impact at different levels. However, it is expensive. Building websites can cost a lot of money, for example. There's a steep learning curve in terms of all the available technologies. There's so many technologies every day, like what's the right one for me right now and what's the right platform to use, for example. And then it always requires building and updating and optimizing your system. So there's a continuous work that needs to happen every year or every month. So one way to address this challenge is by really looking at skill-based volunteering. And so I'd like to talk about what skill-based volunteering is. And it's really aligning a volunteer skills and experience with the task at hand and increasing the value, thereby increasing the value of the volunteer's time and impact. So you might know this as pro bono. It's definitely a type of skill-based volunteering. And it can really be centered around knowledge. So just knowing what's the next step and sort of what a traditional consultant might help you with and or also an implementation where you have a project that's defined and it just needs to be completed or a mix of both. And today I'm gonna walk you through a resource called capacitycommons.org, which I will make sure to link at some point and send in the resources. But this is a really great website which just really walks you through the A to Z of skill-based volunteering and how to get started and how to engage effectively. The other thing I'd like to add is skill-based volunteering is one solution to addressing this challenge. It's definitely possible to hire freelancers, agencies, and even interns. There's many grants available for these activities. And some of the advantages of skill-based volunteering is they tend to have many years of experience in what you need. But the limitation might be a lower weekly time commitment and turnover as well. So for the rest of the presentation, I'm gonna go through the six-step process that is adapted from the seven steps of capacitycommons that will kind of explain to you how to kind of approach skill-based volunteering at your organization. And I'd love to see sort of, feel free to ask any questions at any point and would love to hear your experiences through these steps or any other frameworks that you've been using. So the six steps are first to prepare your organization, scope out the opportunity, source the volunteer or the team, implement that project, and then evaluate the results. And then six and seven is really celebrating and repeating. Seven is, there's like the seventh step in the capacitycommons, but we've just kept it down to six for this presentation. So step one, it's preparing your organization. So really identifying readiness and high priority areas. So some questions to ask yourself is, is there a need for more capacity in my work and where is that need? Do I have the bandwidth or does my already have the bandwidth to engage with volunteers because it does take time to recruit, to manage and to again, do all the steps in the six-step process. And is there buy-in for my colleagues? Will they be able to support the volunteers if I'm not able to work with them? And is this something that my organization is ready for right now? How we can help as meaningful work is you can definitely call our team. We have a worksheet and checklist you can go through and also complete our quick needs assessment to identify some areas where skilled-based volunteering might be a good fit for you. Some ways to identify these areas, just some brainstorming. You can go from the operational perspective where you're looking at all the different key functions of your organizations and figure out where there is growth needed or within that, or are there any problems you're facing? The other way to look at it is maybe through a traditional role perspective. So you might look at the different departments of your organization and identify, talk to the members who are working on these aspects and say, what's missing right now? What would you need to achieve that next step in performance or maybe ways to identify what that next step could be as well? So from step one is just making sure you're ready, making sure you have a need for it and the capacity to engage. Step two is around scoping the opportunity. And so here's some questions to consider when you are trying to have a better idea of that area of say it's marketing and you wanna roll out the next marketing campaign, you might wanna think about these questions. What is your organization's core need? And this is different from the goal. So the core need might be something around, say your organization really wants to engage with the audience, with a specific audience that you haven't been able to engage with. That could be a core need. And the project goal would be how can you specifically engage with that audience? So the reason the core need is there is because there might be many ways to achieve the core need and perhaps the solution that you've proposed might change a bit depending on the input from the volunteers. But defining that project goal is really important and also going back and forth with the volunteers once they get started on that project goal is a really interesting exercise. Then you wanna talk about what are the phases? What are that interim milestones and deliverables and how do you define success halfway through the project or all the way at the end? And maybe it's a few months or it's a few weeks long or maybe it's just a one-time advising session. Either way, you can approach them quite differently but you still would want to think about what success looks like for you. And then what is a range of acceptable timelines? And you might have an ideal timeline which you should definitely communicate but also think about the time it takes to maybe find the right volunteer or any sort of contingencies along the way if something were to happen with communication or what's a volunteer, do you have a plan to kind of some wiggle room in that timeline? And what roles do you need? How many volunteers, what skill sets and how much capacity? So maybe if you're planning out a volunteer campaign or sorry, a marketing campaign, for example, you might want to have one session for advising with an expert in marketing and then have another project based on implementing those recommendations. This could be applied to any other area of the organization as well. So how can we help as meaningful work? You can definitely speak with a member of our team to value, assess and map out the project. And these are also really cool steps. So valuing means what would be the time, the value of that time that is provided to you as an organization. That's a nice way to measure sometimes the impact that could be created. Being able to assess and get some feedback on this project plan is super important as well as really mapping out the project so you know exactly how the deliverables and tasks flow from one end of the project to the other. And I love Eli's comment here about, yeah, it does look like putting together a job description for a contractor with maybe a bit more detail. We can also help with breaking out a big, a large project into smaller chunks suitable for skill-based volunteers. Something to think about due to capacity. And we also have posting templates on our website. So it actually comes with some pre-filled phases and milestones for the most common opportunities that you can then modify just so it takes some burden off you as well. So now that we've scoped out our opportunity and just to add to this in the capacity commons website you can have many detailed exercises for each of these steps. So I'd really encourage you to check that out once you do start skill-based volunteering. So talking about sourcing. So now that we have the opportunity sourced and scoped out, sorry, the opportunity scoped out we wanna figure out how to source the opportunity and get the right volunteers to do the job. So there's a few ways. You can definitely make a posting on your website and share it through your social media, a LinkedIn, or job postings is another good example of how you can get it well known. You can reach out to your contacts and a different volunteer networks that you're a part of. You can also reach out to companies. So some companies will have programs that are really specific and some might be more general. I know for example, Traction on Demand has a program where they'll help with your nonprofit with Salesforce implementation and that's a really focused program that you can apply for. Whereas other companies might be open to more of a free form arrangement if you do engage with them. You can also post on govolunteer.ca and local volunteer centers. They often have nice databases where you can post. There's also other similar companies to us which include Volunteer Match, do some good and purposely in Vancouver. They can definitely check out. In the States, there's Cashify, which is a really cool website which looks at engaging with skill-based volunteers. And finally, you can also do this your main for work and I'll just chat about our process and how it works on our end. So once you have your scope of opportunity, you can create that through our templates or on your own. We'll work hard to really match a volunteer or a team to you. So we have some automated matching based on our algorithm, but we also have people in our team that are able to talk to companies and find that a great volunteer for you. And just to be clear, we don't just work with companies, but we also accept individuals, volunteers who are at any stage, maybe they have some career experience, they have some minimal experience, but they might be working right now, they might be switching jobs. They're also really keen to volunteer. They can also join the platform as well. We then review applications from volunteers. So that would be on your end. You can see everyone who applied to that opportunity. There's a quick 15 minute feasibility call that you can arrange just to make sure it's a good fit and then you can start the opportunity. And one thing to note is we're always improving this process. So if we notice that it's taking too long to match, we'll try something new to really accelerate that timeline, such as maybe the future being able to reach out to volunteers directly with your ask as well. So before starting, now that we have sourced the volunteer, before starting, there's a few questions you might wanna ask yourself. So what information does a volunteer need to start and who do they need to talk to? So making sure if you're the project manager, you have the capacity to work with this volunteer or team or you have the right person, the right people in that conversation. Does a volunteer have any obstacles and something you wanna check in with every week? What have you been doing and what are your obstacles? And then is a volunteer comfortable with the commitment and the work environment and do they have any access needs to consider? So this is super important just because it's really great to be clear about the commitment and what's available and have that supportive environment as much as you can. I just wanna answer the question, does meaningful work do any initial screening of volunteers? And yes, we do. So volunteers are all required to insert their LinkedIn. We will do a little screening of sort of their past experience and we will not verify them until we have sufficient sort of evidence to prove that they are really capable of doing great work and are trusted. We also do verify non-profits and companies as well and work really closely with them before accepting them to the platform just to make sure everyone's on the same page. And yeah, just to answer the question, can startups utilize a service? Yeah, definitely. So startups on the company side, you can definitely go in and volunteer for startup non-profits. Definitely, we have a lot of startup non-profits on our platform that really benefit from the service. And if you're like a startup company that is looking for help, if you're for-profit, we don't really facilitate that, but you can use other services like RIPE and where you can work with students through those platforms. We definitely work with startup non-profits to accept volunteers. Yeah, so the next step is really again, managing progress. So once you got the opportunity started, you want to start managing progress. So do you have a process to document those learnings? Every step of the way, every meeting, are you kind of coming out with these little nuggets of you're always coming up with these little nuggets of really good information? Do you have a way to really document that, those learnings through those meetings? Being able to track the volunteer's progress. So once you've set out those milestones and deliverables, are they being met? Are adjustments needed to those? And thinking about how you can hand off the project after the completion, who's gonna take on the next steps? Finally, just a feature, the volunteer hours and notes can also be tracked in meaningful work, so you don't have to worry about that on your end of things. All right, so the last bit of the presentation is around measuring and celebrating impact. Once the volunteer opportunity is done or even once it started and you've reached a big milestone, it's super important to start measuring and celebrating that impact that's created. So a few questions to consider. And I put these steps together because they're actually really closely related. Was the project goal and metrics of success reached? So those things that you said out in the beginning where they actually reached, did you come up with new metrics based on the progression of the project? And what was that impact? Could you measure in hours? Could you measure it in those metrics that you've came up with in the beginning? Were you able to serve more people? Were you able to save money? These are some ways to start measuring impact. And then how can you tell the story of this project? And how does it relate to your audience? So this is really a creative part of the process and definitely the more storytelling you can give, the more images, the more video, the more powerful it can be to your audience and more relatable. And we're kind of recognize the work of the volunteer or the team. So it's really important to always recognize folks that are able to contribute and some ways you can do that would be maybe giving them a recommendation on LinkedIn or sharing the project. And I'll talk about how we can help you facilitate that as well. So our process to measure and celebrate impact is once an opportunity is completed, you have the opportunity to give some feedback to the volunteer and create a shareable impact story. And recognizing that you'll have so much work to do, you probably don't wanna create so many of these stories, we have, we'll have sort of a lot of the work filled out for you from that initial posting and you just need to give a little bit of feedback for the volunteer. Volunteers can also give your organization feedback as well and create the shareable impact story that you can then put out on social media and it's just a public link to a website and it has all sort of the details, a bit of the story behind the project and or advising session or event. And you can put it out there. If you need some help with measuring impact, we also have a workshop for that where we really look at some multi-step kind of process. You look at sort of your theory of change, identify some of those core metrics that really matter to you and how they align with some of the global metrics that you might be working towards as well. Again, I just wanted to share one story that I think maybe is a little unconventional but I thought it was a cool story to share. So we worked with Habitat for Humanity Greater Vancouver and actually they came to us with an ask of, we need some drone footage recorded for some of our builds that we're doing and being able to tell the story of the land that is there. So they were able to recruit a skilled volunteer, Ben, who is actually able to, he has his own drone company and he joined our platform and he recorded some drone footage and they were able to use that into a video where they were able to start launching a campaign to build housing in Coquitlam. So this is what an impact story looked like, just a summary of that impact story here and some really cool video that Habitat for Humanity is able to produce and tell that story. So definitely check out there in their pages. It's really cool storytelling that they do. So after the opportunity, it's really important to reflect how did the process go, what needs to change for next time and then can you start including skill-based volunteering into your strategic planning? So recognizing that as a resource that your teams can use moving forward. Maintaining a relationship with past volunteers, definitely being able to re-engage with them if they're open to it. It's always great to bring people on again because they have that in-depth knowledge of your organization and maybe they'll start with skill-based volunteering and move on to a board role or a committee member role. I know personally I worked a lot with the Starfish Canada and they work with environmental chain makers across Canada and helping them build their platform and give them a voice. And I started off just as kind of a skill-based volunteer as a judge for one of their programs and I moved on to becoming a board member and really getting into their equity, diversity and inclusion work. So that was a cool pathway for me. And after my board term, I'm back to being a skill-based volunteer for them. And then one cool idea would be just to really send an update on that project you worked on, maybe six months or one year down the road just to see how their work has impacted the organization because I think that feeling of impact really just keeps on giving. And finally, working with companies. So we have companies on the platform and they have volunteers and this could lead to you working more closely with corporate social responsibility departments and actually building partnerships. So most of the company entities are headed by an HR manager or a CSR manager, a corporate social responsibility manager and they can see all the postings and the nonprofits and it's an opportunity to connect with them and build partnerships. And again, when you're building partnerships, it's about understanding the key decision makers and what their needs are, what your wins are and what their wins could be through a potential partnership. So just some questions to kind of reflect on post this presentation is where are your biggest gaps in capacity? Where do you see potential projects or advising sessions? And how might you work with companies in the future and what might that look like? So just some pieces to sort of thinking about moving forwards. And Jason has a question about, do you get requests from orgs for ongoing tech support type of help? Yeah, we definitely do. And we can definitely try to break that down more into sizable projects or it could might be an ongoing role, a long-term role. Cool. And a question from Joe. How do you recruit volunteers to the platform? Do you have partnerships with corporations or are you more focused on recruiting individuals? And what does that typical time commitment look like? Yes, so we are definitely doing both. We believe it's important to engage with companies, but it does take some time in terms of getting them to adopt a program. So that's why it's sort of, we do a bit of both. And the typical available time commitment, it looks like around five hours per week for some of the five to 10 hours per week for a project, face volunteer, and for an advising session, it would be just sort of a couple hours a month as in a mentorship capability. Yeah, and many volunteers have sort of paid volunteer hours from their organization. So this could be maybe 20 to 40 hours over the year as paid volunteer time that they can take off. And so that depends on the organization or the employee, but that's something that they are able to use. What are some of the things volunteers have had working with a nonprofit that you can recommend we work on? Yeah, so I think some issues that we've had as well as I think issues or recommendations. Yeah, so some issues around that. Some issues could be around communication. So when you are doing the initial feasibility call, just being clear about what you need and what that commitment would look like and just making sure the volunteer is comfortable there. I think that's key and just being able to communicate with them about timelines and when you're going to get back to them and sticking to those has been some issues that we've encountered in the past that we were still working on. Some recommendations. Again, I think some of the things, okay, got you, that was an issue. And some things that volunteers have done successfully in the past. So we've definitely had a lot of marketing advisors. So for example, Orbus Canada wanted to really market their flight for the blind charity event where I think they get companies to kind of pull the plane as a team building activity or fundraiser, but they wanted to do it online this year. And so we had a marketing manager at Maximizer, which is a Vancouver company, come in and give them some really cool ideas as an advisor. So that was really successful. And this person, Nicholas, he's been able to help many other nonprofits as well with advising. We've also had some team-based opportunities around marketing and building up content and campaigns as well with Harmony Movement in Toronto. Another example of a cool project, again, with the drone work, as well as some HR advising. So helping with online volunteer recruitment and setting up volunteer recruitment policies. So that was from Sage Vancouver. They were able to provide some support there to the UBC environment nonprofit. Yeah, those are just some examples. There's definitely more that can be explored and we'll definitely reach out to make sure we can help meet those needs. What are some suggestions for attracting younger volunteers? Yeah, so that's a great question. I will think about that. I think attracting younger volunteers is possibly about understanding what their interests might be and being able to, I think, tell the story when you're creating and posting. So something I forgot to cover was when you are creating that posting, are you able to tell the story of the impact that will be created? So I think when folks are able to see that, if I do do this work, this is the impact that will be created. There's a story behind it, something I really care about, making the sort of job posting more interesting and engaging can definitely help with that. Yeah, and then second question, what percentage of volunteers between 18 and 30? I think most of our volunteers are sort of between, I would say, 25 and 50 in terms of our volunteers. I don't have an exact breakdown by age, but I can definitely look into that. And right now, we are sort of being able to onboard roughly 30 to 40 volunteers per month and that's sort of right now, but we are aiming to grow a lot in the fall once things start to get back to normal. Cool, there are a bunch of more questions, but I just wanna talk about some next steps and then I'll get to the rest of the questions. This is a question in a group. Thank you so much, everyone, for diving right into the chat and we'll definitely come back to your question. Yeah, thank you. So I just wanna talk about some next steps, which could be getting started with meaningful work. You can definitely go to our website, app.me4.xyz or app.meanfultech.ca. They both work. We just have two, one for the .ca domain. Be able to then go and then review sort of this talk, go to capacitycommons.org. There's tons of awesome activities on there. You can stay tuned for a recording of this presentation, a worksheet and a checklist. And there'll also be an invitation to book some custom workshops, which we offer on a sliding scale in equity diversity inclusion, impact mapping and navigating grants and online tools. Yeah, so thank you. This is some of our team here and you can definitely contact us at these email addresses and we'll get back to you. But yeah, I will kind of continue to answer the questions. Whoop, oh, we just lost him. I'm sure he'll jump back in a moment. But yeah, it looks like my next question is coming in actually from Alex. Alex, I'm gonna give you the possibility of coming in on Mike if you want to actually ask your question because I think it's a bit longer here. So I'm just gonna go and give you those powers. And yeah, and from here, we can certainly try and add others to have the presenter mode on. So if they want, they can come on camera and ask the question directly. I got lost for a second, but I think I'm back. Excellent, you're back. So I think we've still got two questions coming up here. I know we've got one here from Alex right here, which is sort of, I recall from a former. If you wanna read that out again, that'd be helpful. Cool. So Alex says, asking, I recall from a former slide, you work with Do Some Good for access to organizations full of potential volunteers. It's in value add and working to do some good as opposed to directly with meaningful work. As an organization, I think we would be more interested in being actively matched with potential scale line and value aligned opportunities for staff and volunteers as opposed to a broad volunteer posting, both important. Yeah, so Do Some Good, I mentioned, we don't have an active partnership with them, but I just kind of mentioned them as another option to check out as another option to post opportunities. I would say the sort of value add in working, Derek, I think it might be, if you're looking for skill-based volunteers, volunteering specifically, I think meaningful work might be a good place to start out with. And then if you need additional help, you can definitely check out Do Some Good. Yeah, just wanted to mention that as another option. As an organization, you'd be interested in, yeah, I think meaningful work would be really cool to try out, especially as a company. And we can definitely chat about that for your unique organization. And the other thing is that nonprofits might be accepting help, but I think nonprofit organizations are so diverse and many of them have staff that wanna give back and give back to other areas and other nonprofits. So we can definitely keep, you know, add you in as a company or as an organization. And we're kind of working on that wording just to make it more inclusive and make it accessible for all organizations to engage with however way they want to engage. And do I charge fees? Yes, so with nonprofits, for folks or organizations that are looking to accept help, we do not charge fees for companies, for-profit companies, we do charge per employee fee. And that's to help them set up that employee volunteer program with these opportunities that are often quite hard to find and quite hard to scope out as well. So we do charge on the company side, but it is free for nonprofits as well as individual volunteers. Amazing, great. That's really helpful to know and makes a pretty low barrier. So I've got another question that's come to me and for the rest of you, throw your questions into the chat in the meantime, will I basically take up this last two minutes? So when you're bringing someone through a project, what is the most common obstacle that leads to a stalled project? Like what are the things we should really watch out for? So I think that setup is really important making sure that you have that plan of how you want the project to proceed. Often you might start with a project and it doesn't have that complete plan or deliverables and the volunteer might get a little confused on how to proceed and they might not actually meet what you were expecting. So keeping that communication crisp and clear is super important as one of the, I would say probably one of the primary things is just communication and being able to communicate which is hard in this online world. So hopefully we are also building a bit more features in the future like chat just to make, to keep that flow more active. But for now we try and kind of nudge both the volunteer and the organization every week or so just to check in. And I've got a follow-up question here around fees. So regarding fees as Alexa, do you charge on the company side for when the company is seeking volunteers or when the company is looking to offer volunteers or both? Like how does that work? Yeah, so just to like clarify on the fees, we charge companies when they are looking to build a volunteer program and find opportunities for their staff. So for a company that's a subscription program where employees can enter in and they can volunteer and they can track their impact and they can find these meaningful opportunities and the company can kind of share that impact to their channel. So it's more for being able to create an employee volunteer program is what we charge for and everything else around that is free for the nonprofits. So what's your ability to scale right now? What if like all, you know, all 21 people right now come to you and say like, yes, I want a placement. Like where are you at right now in your ability to like actually do that matching? Is it sort of restricted in these early days how does that work? Yeah, so definitely we have been able to create matches for many of the opportunities. It is a little restricted. It might take maybe, you know, two weeks one to two weeks to find that right volunteer. But as we kind of grow on both sides it'll be much faster and easier to create that match just because we'll have that available database. So it's sort of a, in a way it's a marketplace the more it grows, the more faster and more variety of folks will be that are ready to help at any moment. So basically everyone here should go get that account created make start that process because of that will sort of help turbo charge the marketplace and, you know and you get to take advantage of the fact that there is this process you can follow as opposed to having to like sort of manage a whole new pro bono volunteer process yourself without having like all destruction best practices built around it. Exactly. Thank you. So we have four minutes left, which means I want to just do a final closing statement but Raj, thank you so much. Really excited to hear about this new platform especially that is coming out of here in Vancouver in the lower mainland. So it's nice to see like, you know a cool new platform emerging here. And if anything ever goes awry we know we can always like show up at your doorstep and like knock on the door and get your attention. Oh sorry Raj, we've got perfect back. Always available for any emails or any questions and yeah, I'm just going to pop some links into the chat and then also keep an eye out because I will send Eli some resources to send out to everyone here. Thanks so much, I really appreciate it. So keep your eyes on your email inbox. So here's what the future looks like. September is going to have two events because we're just busting with good ideas that people have been coming to us with awesome proposals. So in September 9th, we're going to be looking at a number of different no code tools that you can use to start doing automation within your work. So that'll include some platforms like AirTable it's going to include Zapier and it's going to include a couple other basically free or low cost tools you can use to start automating your workflows to make yourself feel a bit more productive because we'll have lots of busy work to be done in our lives. And on September 14th, we're going to bring back a repeat presenter who's going to talk about Google Analytics. And it's a big terrifying beast of a product but here's the secret, you don't need to know all of it. We're just going to show you the 25% of it that's actually useful for you to start measuring your impact and answering the core questions about what are people doing on your website? How are they interacting with you? And we'll just ignore the stuff that doesn't apply to you as a nonprofit and is the kind of thing that's only thing that like people who have a giant full-time team doing this kind of work need to focus on. So that is going to be the future. And before I let you go, of course, I want to ask once again for your contributions. So if you've got a great event idea that should be happening in the future, let us know or if you want to get involved in any way, reach out to me and I would love to put you to work. But with that, let's let it go. Like, you know, you can move on with the rest of your day, really grateful for your time and we'll have the recording and all the other materials coming back at you within the next couple of days by Monday for sure. And let me hit that stop recording button. Boom.