Why local approaches still matter (and why national approaches must evolve).
Over the past week or so, people have been getting animated about the new £5m national volunteering platform from RVS.
It’s sparked some great conversations with our clients, team and online about whether volunteering platforms (and their funding) should be managed locally or nationally.
I won’t lie: seeing that kind of funding go to one organisation can sting a bit (we’ve pretty much built Made Open and Time4Good on fresh air and optimism!).
But, empty pockets aside, I would like to offer some balance: it’s also encouraging to see that volunteering is very much on the national agenda.
The real challenge here is to make sure national ambitions don’t steamroll local systems.
Platforms, like people, work best when they’re part of the local fabric; because when it comes to community action, people trust what’s local. TRUST IS EVERYTHING!
That’s not to say national systems don’t have their place.
The problem is more that when well-meaning national initiatives are rolled out in the hope of mass adoption, they’re going to be met with resistance by local organisations who were under-consulted or bypassed entirely.
Such approaches might not matter to the big charities but they risk turning everyone else off.
Can a national volunteering platform succeed? Absolutely.
Will it? Difficult to predict.
For me, the real question isn’t national or local? It’s more: (how) can they complement each other? A two-way API just won’t cut it, sorry.
Enter Time4Good
Time4Good is a kindness-powered micro-volunteering platform that Geoff, Kathryn, Rob Love (founder of Crowdfunder) and I conceived last year, with the incredible support of the Made Open team.
We launched our MVP in October, based on a simple hypothesis: that Time4Good could recruit, retain and reward micro-volunteers better than traditional models.
The early results were genuinely encouraging. Our pilot partners, like Citizens Advice Plymouth and Dean Trail Volunteers, gave us fantastic feedback, helped us iterate and saw real value from day one.
Like RVS, Time4Good is a national platform (actually, it’s global). But, crucially, it’s not trying to replace local platforms and that’s entirely by design.
The difference is that while many national systems aim to centralise everything, to be the one place for all activity, Time4Good goes the other way. It’s designed for flexibility.
It’s where rugby clubs, beach clean-ups, university societies, neighbour groups and even friendship circles can create “circles” (think WhatsApp groups) to share time and skills in whatever way works for them.
Does that sound like a national volunteering platform to you? Probably not but that’s because volunteering is changing and we’re responding to that.
From small charities looking for micro-volunteers, families creating support circles for loved ones (more on this soon), to large companies tracking their social impact, T4G is focused on what it is, but flexible in terms of how it is used.
Meanwhile, local platforms like Can Do Bristol, Devon Connect, Wiltshire Together, Living Well Warrington, Connect Torfaen (I could go on) do an exceptional job of aggregating volunteering opportunities in a particular place.
Time4Good doesn’t aim to replicate that; in fact, it couldn’t. It’s not designed for that kind of central directory function where place is, literally, everything.
In summary, as long as there is demand and difference, there’s room for national and local approaches. They’re not rivals but parts of the same ecosystem.
If we embrace that, we’ll build better platforms and stronger communities; a goal all community tech providers have in common.