Volunteer Base

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Team

Josh Birnbaum, Jacob Bishop, Hayden Emrah, Travis Hensley, Brandi Osthimer, and Will Pancake.

Problem

The US nonprofit sector is a vast and versatile market, accounting for 5.5% of total GDP, about $2.1T in revenue. Within this massive segment however, over 99% of firms have less than 500 employees, the median being 4. Because of this, many firms lack the capital & resources to fully manage volunteers, using slow and tedious methods. Therefore, a service is needed to minimize or alleviate this time consuming work, creating time to be spent developing other facets of their firms.

Solution

Our solution: Volunteer Base. Our platform cuts down the busy work of organizing the various events nonprofits hold. We make organizing events as easy as typing in a few boxes and letting the volunteers sign up themselves. No longer do these nonprofits have to sacrifice the better half of their day calling/emailing to confirm they’ll have the help they need, because with Volunteer Base, the volunteers sign up and confirm on their own behalf.

Market Size

Our service focuses exclusively on nonprofits operating volunteer-backed events, services and meetings. Within this volunteer segment, 14.9B hours were volunteered in 2010, the value equivalent of 8.8M full time employees being paid $283.3B for their time. That value is where we come in, seeking to further optimize this number through individual firms, cutting-down on the logistics required to organize, maintain and grow these volunteer lists.

Competition

Competitors include volunteer management software companies such as Rosterfy, Volunteer Hub, Volgistics, and EveryAction. Most volunteer management software today is costly, out of date, complicated, and impractical. Volunteer Base provides volunteer management software that is affordable, simple, modern, and above all, functional.

Business Model

Our service is subscription-based. Organizations would pay a flat-rate of $10 a month to access our service. At the time of writing, our team is debating the implementation of additional services behind tiered paywalls, but the established flat-rate model lets our service grow awareness in order to gain further development. Marketing and Sales Currently, our marketing concept has consisted of contacting various nonprofits across the US and asking them to consider our service. In the works, we’re developing a budget of $150 worth of advertisements to Facebook members aged 25-50 who have interests in volunteering and religion, as church volunteer groups fall under our market segment.

Progress to Date

We have a contact list with over 200 organizations’ emails & phone numbers. This list is used to validate problems and will be used to validate further features. We’ve achieved V1.0 of the Volunteer Base software. Both volunteers and organizations can sign up, log in, and complete tasks. Organizations can manage their volunteer database, contact their volunteers via text and email, and create events for volunteers to work at. In turn, volunteers can join these organizations and sign up for the events.

Future Milestones

We will add more features to our app to increase its value to our customers, including, but not limited to, donation feature for volunteers, calendar integration (iCloud and Google), import volunteer schedules for work matches, and automated reminders.