Volunteer Management Game-Changer
At LEAD we love meeting inspiring change-leaders, particularly those who have a passion for sharing their innovations with others.
Recently LEAD director, Sandy Thompson, had the pleasure of chatting with Daniel Young from Orange Sky. Orange Sky is having a huge impact with its vans offering mobile showering and laundry facilities for the homeless in Auckland and Wellington. You may have seen the Orange Sky story when it featured on TVNZ’s Seven Sharp earlier this year.
But the conversation that got Sandy really excited was about the Orange Sky team’s new initiative, Campfire (soon to be rebranded Volaby), so we invited Daniel and his team to write us a blog post about how it’s set to be a game-changer for Volunteer Management. Here’s what they told us:
2020 marks an eventful year for not only our industry but for the world at large. In the midst of what seems like perpetual disorder, an Australian and NZ based not-for-profit organisation has decided to take a proactive stance and create a world-first #tech4good software solution to help their fellow not-for-profit organisations to not just survive 2020, but to come out stronger and more effective than ever.
Campfire is a purpose-built, Volunteer Management and Social Impact Data Collection software solution, that has enabled Orange Sky to do more with less and scale across Australia and New Zealand to more than 2000+ weekly active volunteers.
The purpose of Campfire is to help fellow volunteer-led organisations to easily onboard, manage and measure the impact of the great work performed by their volunteers, and organisation as a whole. Allowing amazing organisations to significantly reduce unnecessary admin time and costs, so they can focus on the more important aspects of their mission (and at the same time capture data for easier funding and grant applications).
When Orange Sky co-founders Nic and Lucas started to expand their operations in 2016, they returned to their Brisbane headquarters and quickly realised they had no control or visibility over:
What their volunteers were doing?
What were the outcomes of their service?
What was the status of each shift? (and where they even being completed?)
Was there any feedback from the volunteers?
And, importantly, was everyone safe?
After a global search to find a suitable solution – they realised there was nothing that fit their needs, so they developed their own.
In 2018 Orange Sky won the ‘Impact Challenge’ with Google donating $1 million into the solution in order to take it to the industry and help other volunteer-led organisations to better manage and scale their positive impact to the community.
Since then, Campfire has quickly grown and with input and feedback from users, the platform is being continuously developed to make sure it remains relevant and is meeting the expectations of volunteering in the years to come.
If you would like to learn more, please check our website. Or email info@campfireapp.org.