ConnectFor

The Rosy Blue Foundation has developed a project, ConnectFor, which invites everyone to get involved and engaged with the causes they care about. This project went live on December 05, 2015, and can be accessed at www.ConnectFor.org.

As a nation, India’s attitude towards volunteering has been decidedly paradoxical. While schools and colleges have mandatory service requirements, and many corporates are actively looking at employee engagement in community service, the culture of volunteerism has never really been fully developed. Even those who are open to idea of volunteering, struggle to find opportunities that are convenient for them, or causes that resonate with them. Currently, the process between when a person decides to volunteer to when they actually find an NGO they are happy to work with is unnecessarily cumbersome, often causing the well-intentioned potential volunteer to give up on the idea altogether. NGOs, on the other hand, are mostly short-staffed and require people with special skill-sets for certain projects but do not have the budget to find the right people or the outreach to target the right volunteers.

In order to maximize the impact of a volunteering engagement, there needs to be a structured and easy bridge between both sides, connecting volunteers and NGOs and that, in a nutshell, is what ConnectFor seeks to be.

With ConnectFor, RBF has built a volunteering platform to assist potential volunteers identify volunteering opportunities from NGOs where they can donate their time. Whether and NGO need volunteers, or an individual wants to volunteer, this is the place to get connected. ConnectFor’s mission has always been Win-Win For A Cause, ensuring that both parties involved in a volunteering engagement have something to take back at the end of a successfully completed opportunity. Additionally, ConnectFor team members ensure that there is always a human interface to facilitate the connection between the volunteer and the NGO, so there will always be someone to assist and facilitate the use of the platform.

The impact created by the ConnectFor project is measured in three basic ways:

• Number of Volunteers – this is the number of people who register to the platform
• Number of Hours Contributed by Volunteers – this is the sum total of all the time given by volunteers towards various volunteer opportunities, and is only calculated when an opportunity is completed.
• Amount of Money saved by Volunteers – this is the amount of money that an NGO has saved by having a volunteer complete an opportunity instead of hiring someone to do it instead.

Get connected now – Happy Volunteering!

To learn more about ConnectFor, or to get in touch, visit www.ConnectFor.org.