Assistant Volunteer

Based on United Nations, around 1 billion of people volunteer globally, but only around 30% of theses volunteers volunteer formally through organizations. We indicate three problems/opportunities: 1) there is a huge amount of volunteers that requires management; 2) there is an even larger amount of people (70%) that could be used to enhance the power of formal volunteering; 3) volunteering history is lost making it hard to certify volunteers for their achievements.

Assistant Volunteer helps organizations manage volunteers and actions. A reliable and efficient way to screen, match and certify volunteers for actions. An innovative platform aiming to:

• Provide everyone with the necessary inclusion to the volunteering community through a digital hub.
• Assist organizations to evaluate and certify volunteers
• Maximize the positive impact of voluntary work

With Real-time information Assistant Volunteer, Nonprofit Organizations and the volunteers create a robust community working on social impact. 

According to the United Nations, around 1 billion people volunteer globally but only around 30% of these volunteers do it officially through an organization. Informal action is the most common form of volunteering globally, especially in developing markets, which have insufficient access to basic services, security and protection. Formal volunteering exposes communities to new organizational norms and values. It can open access to community networks, strengthen community capacity by training people in new skills, widen access to resources and enhance opportunities for employment. 

Through our technology solution, we aim to shape new conditions under which voluntary efforts are made, providing new opportunities to everyone. We provide everyone with the necessary inclusion to the formal volunteering community through a digital hub. 

Assistant Volunteer offers organizations new tools to mobilize, organize, incentivize and evaluate volunteers and actions while also offering volunteers new opportunities for feedback and certifications. 

Also, statistics on volunteers, the work they do, the skills and time they contribute to improving the lives of others are lacking. As a result, volunteering remains undervalued and its potentials under-realized. Our project seeks to boost understanding of the true size (economy) and scope of volunteer activity by improving its measurement with better data.

Assistant Volunteer is a SaaS solution that creates a volunteering hub and offers tools to harness the power of volunteering. It consists of a cloud platform, web apps and mobile apps that work together in order to meet the expectation of all involved parties.

The dynamic management system offers organizations the tools to recruit, train, coordinate and evaluate volunteers and actions, allowing them to rise to any challenge that comes their way. 

The central registry of volunteers, algorithmically, screen, match and certify volunteers for actions in a reliable and efficient way, simplifying recruiting.

The volunteers’ mobile app empowers volunteers with everything they need to get the job done, offering more opportunities to engage in volunteerism, as well as feedback and certifications. 

The citizens’ mobile app provides a trustworthy and secure channel for communication either to request assistance or suggest actions to solve the community’s challenges.

The collaboration web app provides organizations with the ability, to request from each other, to co-organize an action.

Finally, the data collection on volunteering will help to calculate the value of volunteerism, including economic value and boost understanding of the true size and scope of volunteer activity.  

Since 2020, we have been designing our solution based on the expressed needs of voluntary organizations and volunteers. We have talked with over 150 volunteers and 15 organizations in Greece, Europe and Africa and we heard from them that existing systems aren’t suitable for their needs. Most of the organizations keep using excel spreadsheets or complicated CRMs to keep track of their actions and volunteers, making their information hard to reuse and exchange, as well as, they add more workload. 

In order to improve the whole voluntary system, there is a need for everyone to have access to the same tools. And that’s what we did. We created Assistant Volunteer side-by-side with volunteers and organizations through user-centred research.

During our research (we held interviews), 90% of organizations and volunteers were interested in our project, characterizing it not a convenience but a necessity.

Assistant Volunteer serves several different categories of users: 

• Volunteers,
• Organizations, including companies that want to use our solution for their Corporate Social Responsibility programs, as well as governmental entities like municipalities, ministries etc.
• Communities including citizens that require volunteering assistance.

For volunteers, Assistant Volunteer creates new prospects for volunteering, providing everyone with the necessary inclusion to the volunteering community. We offer recognition for the volunteering work by participation history, certifications by participation in training programs of organizations and a way to keep their volunteering portfolio in one place. 

For organizations, we offer state-of-the-art and easy-to-use management system that offers new tools to mobilize, organize, incentivize and evaluate volunteers and actions. Furthermore, we offer a central volunteers registry that organizations can use to recruit volunteers and when needed find people with specific/certified skills. As recruiting qualified volunteers is a top challenge organizations face, especially in period of crisis like the COVID-19, a central registry and the efficient way to screen and match qualified volunteers for actions, will potentially have a huge impact for organizations and their goals.

Assistant Volunteer will provide a trustworthy and safe environment for the communities to communicate their needs and feedback to the volunteering organizations or directly to the volunteers. Allowing organizations to organize more impactful actions to solve communities' challenges.

Finally, our solution could be used from companies (private sector), as an increasing number of global companies see volunteering as a core component of corporate social responsibility (CSR) either to organize their own actions or to collaborate with local voluntary organizations.

Some of our solution’s benefits are the following:

•  Increase the number of volunteers, allowing new volunteers to register online. 
• Reduce time to recruit, breaking down the walls of a manual registration process and speeding up recruitment for volunteers and coordinators.
• Screening and matching of volunteers. Organizations can use our solution to create targeted missions and to find the best candidates. 
• Data. Our solution is a strategic way of managing and leveraging data. 
• Productivity improvement, digitalizing the entire process and removing paper 
• Effective communication of volunteers creates engagement and has a positive effect on retention. 
• Provide assistance to citizens via a user-friendly and trustworthy channel.
• Volunteers gain actual experience and training in new skills to add to their CV.
• Maximize impact for organizations and volunteers
• Provide an SMS service for areas that internet is not available

Assistant Volunteer would enable organizations to grow and manage volunteerism, attain higher levels of community engagement and track and share impact.

Therefore, Assistant Volunteer has great future potential, contributing to the work of voluntary organizations, municipalities, public agencies, local communities, sports event organizer, foundations, NGOs, companies through their Social Responsibility (CSR) programs, home care programs, Universities etc. Our aim is to promote volunteering and make more people willing to volunteer and engage, giving them the opportunity to give back to communities, supporting important missions. 

Assistant Volunteer’s aims to connect and support all involved parties in order to create a global platform that would help in harnessing the power of volunteering, maximizing impact for the society. Therefore, Assistant Volunteer, as an intermediary, and volunteers, companies and organizations, as direct contributors, contribute to achieving sustainable development for all the SDGs goals.

Our solution provides digital inclusion, enabling everyone to participate and thrive in the volunteering community. Volunteerism might not be directly a form of the economy but is a function that has an economic impact. Considering the hours volunteers contribute, we are talking about the equivalent of 20.8 million full-time workers. In terms of economic impact, estimates place the value of volunteer work at $400 billion. 

Furthermore, for areas where the internet is not available, we have designed to use SMS.

Finally, our solution could be used by organizations in order to disseminate their volunteering work and attract sponsorship.

Our solution is between the prototype stage (MVP) and the pilot stage. We have been designing and developing the solution for almost a year now. We have scheduled to run by the end of August our first pilot with DEFY Africa with 40 of their employees. Also, we have agreed to run a pilot with Smile of a Child, adding, after the pilot, features that would help in their search and rescue operations. We have signed an agreement for the usage of our service with the Greece Red Cross, having more than 50,000 volunteers. 

We have participated with our concept and won awards in HackCoronaGreece (2020), GreeceVSVirus (2020), Antivirus Crowdhackathon (2020), SportHack Latvia (2020), HackTheNormal Africa (2021).

Finally, our project was selected by the Greek Ministry of Health to officially contribute to managing the COVID-19 pandemic in Greece.

Influential supporters of our project are MSD Hellas and PwC Greece.

Assistant creates an innovative volunteering hub where all parties involved meet up and participate. The platform consists of the full digitalization of the procedures of actions for organizations and volunteers and the processing, collection of data flow. A cloud-based system with a web and mobile interface with an implementation of machine learning (ML). The hub itself as a volunteering social network will enable the inclusion of all parties at a global scale assisting Organizations to do actions, communicate and recruit volunteers remotely and efficient. This will be catalytic as the platform will allow more direct access to developing places that have the most need for volunteerism.
Our solution has the potential to implement several innovative technologies, which will optimize processes and enhance the user experience:

1. Certifications, organizations will have the ability to certify volunteers for training and skills.
2. Recommendation systems, enables a reliable and efficient way to screen, match and certify volunteers for actions. 
3. Statistics, as the platform maintains participation and impact data it will enable us to compute representative data for volunteerism as a total and its potentials.
4. Organization dissemination, as a social hub organizations will be able to disseminate their work both in the community and outside.
5. A secure and efficient management system for communicating and supervise actions in real-time.

As we've already told, our solution is between the prototype stage (MVP) and the pilot stage. In this year we are going to run at least two pilots serving more than 1,500 volunteers. In the next year our solution will be used by Greece Red Cross and Smile of a Child serving more than 51,000 volunteers. Also, in the next year, we estimate to gain 5 more clients serving more than 70,000 volunteers. In the next five years we estimate to have on our customer base at least 200 organizations, serving more than 1,5 millions volunteers. 

With the data that we'll collect through our solution for the voluntary work provided by volunteers and organizations, we'll be able to measure the impact of volunteering in the communities they serve.

Assistant Volunteer’s aims to connect and support all involved parties in order to create a global platform that would help in harnessing the power of volunteering, maximizing impact for the society. Therefore, Assistant Volunteer, as an intermediary, and volunteers, companies and organizations, as direct contributors, contribute to achieving sustainable development for all the SDGs goals.

In the first two years, we want to bring about a greater recognition of volunteerism as a powerful force for progress. Therefore, the specific, measurable indicators you are going to use to measure our progress are inequality, sustainable cities and communities and partnerships for the Goals.

Also, we want to measure volunteerism, the actions it inspires and the economic benefits derived from those actions.

Through Assistant Volunteer we’ll provide valuable data to organizations and ensure the work of volunteers is counted for better understanding the impact of volunteering. 

We are a team of five individuals with diverse backgrounds from marketing to business to engineering and we have worked together the last 3 years, in several projects. The three of us work full-time and the other two part time. Also, we use external partners (currently one). 

Nable Solutions is an award-winning startup focuses on providing software solutions with a social impact. Our mission is to exploit advanced technologies to change the way people work and live, solving challenging problems that mater with innovative approaches.

Sotirios Metaxas is a holder of Bachelor’s degree in Electronics Engineering. Since the completion of his formal studies, he has followed several sessions for expanding his view in technology. Lately, he received DPO Executive certification. He’s responsible in the technological development of our project. Also, he has knowledge of running a company as he worked for several years at his family company. Marietta Simou holds a Bachelor degree in Business Administration and has years of experience in various positions, in the fields of sales management and market research. Currently, she’s being responsible for business and financial plan. Theofrastos Mantadelis has a PhD in Computer Science with a focus on Artificial Intelligence and he’s responsible for the Machine Learning and A.I. part of the project. Stavros Kanellopoulos is the UI/UX designer and with the “user first” mentality he co-created the user-friendly design of our solution. He holds a Master’s degree in Human Centered Multimedia. George Pallas is responsible for the development of our solution’s the Back End.

From the very beginning, we collaborated with the largest Greece’s voluntary organizations to develop our methodology from the ground up in order to meet their expectations. So, Assistant Volunteer is designed side-by-side with volunteers and organizations. 

Our team values are built on inclusion and equality. There is inclusion in decision making and equity in roles and responsibilities. In the era of globalization and technology, we believe that we could add members to our team that may be located across the world. Especially for our project, we believe that people with different cultures could be an advantage, a valuable asset. Therefore, we are accessible to everyone across the globe who would like to join our team.

We decided to apply to Solve for the opportunities that would give us to access mentorship and strategic advice from experts. Also, for receiving monitoring and evaluation support to build an impact measurement practice. Another important reason is to gain exposure in the media and at conferences as the networking is important for us to expand our customer base in many countries. 

Finally, receiving access to funding in grandts and investments. As, we are a startup, and the funding is crucial for us in order to continue the development of our project. As well as to keep grow our venture hiring new members to add our team

Our team currently seeks:

• Mentorship to refine the business model and marketing strategy. 
• Connections to potential business partners and B2B clients like  
• Funding support through grants or investments to further grow our venture. Support to grow our team with motivated talented people who would like to help make our vision come true, “to make Assistant Volunteer a global platform that will help harness the power of volunteering”.

We would like to partner with Voluntary Organizations, Universities, Foundations, Public Agencies, Companies for CSR programs, and other organizations. It’s very important for us to run as many pilots as we can with diverse organizations in many countries because this will enable us to continuously improve our solution leading to higher quality. So, it will be a huge opportunity to collaborate with organizations, gaining this way more experience and expanding our customer base.

Our solution provides digital inclusion, enabling everyone to participate and thrive in the volunteering community, through a digital hub. So, we can help refugees through volunteering to develop new skills and connections needed for formal employment. For example some newly arrived refugees in Greece reported that they volunteer in order to make connections with potential employers, learn the language and learn more about the culture. All of which could help them find a job in their new country. 

So, If our solution will be selected for the prize then we'll use it to continue the development to launch the first versio and co-organize actions, for empowerment refugees to integrate into society. 

Our solution provides digital inclusion, enabling everyone to participate and thrive in the volunteering community, through a digital hub. Volunteerism might not be directly a form of the economy but is a function that has an economic impact. Considering the hours volunteers contribute, we are talking about the equivalent of 20.8 million full-time workers. In terms of economic impact, estimates place the value of volunteer work at $400 billion. 

Also, proving access to everyone in the digital volunteering hub can help volunteers to reduce the social exclusion that is often the result fo poverty, marginalization and other form of inequality.  As well as, with the training programs and the certifications providing by organizations can also help community members develop the skills and connections needed for employment. 
Finally, our solution could be used by organizations in order to disseminate their volunteering work and attract sponsorship.
If our solution will be selected for the The HP Prize for Advancing Digital Equity  then we'll use our prize to continue the development to launch the first versio and co-organize actions, especially in development countries, for empowerment digital equity. 

Our solution provide everyone with the necessary inclusion to the volunteering community through a digital hub. So, through our solution organizations could organize initiative to empower women and girls, through training programs or raise awareness of their needs. If our solution will be selected for the Innovation for Women Prize then we'll use our prize to continue the development to launch the first versio and co-organize actions, especially in development countries, for empowerment women and girls. 

Until today, statistics on volunteers, the work they do, the skills and time they contribute to improving the lives of others are lacking. As a result, volunteering remains undervalued and its potentials under-realized. Our project seeks to boost understanding of the true size and scope of volunteer activity by improving its measurement with better data on volunteering. 

The collection of such data will enable us to: 

• Boost the visibility and credibility of volunteering.

• Improve support for and the management of volunteering.

• Document the enormous impact of volunteer effort.

• Promote a more enabling policy environment for volunteering.

Having access to this collection of data, AI models can be designed to forecast, optimize and learn several aspects of volunteerism

Our platform consist of the full digitalization of the procedures of actions for organizations and volunteers and the processing, collection of data flow.

Using recommendation systems we can optimize the recruiting of volunteers for actions and even in specific cases AI could automate the decision for the participation of a volunteer in a specific action, simplifying recruiting, especially in periods of crisis/disasters.

Using data analysis we will learn a lot about the impact of volunteering and the social effects it has, empowering social research.

Our team will use The AI for Humanity Prize to keep developing our solution, addiding more features. Also, we use the money of the price for business development in order to add many organizations and volunteers to be able to start using Artificial Intelligence. 

Assistant Volunteer is an innovative SaaS solution that creates a volunteering hub and offers tools to harness the power of volunteering. Through our technology solution, we aim to shape new conditions under which voluntary efforts are made, providing new opportunities to everyone. Organizations will have the ability to train volunteers on existing and new skills, as well to certify these skills. We offers to volunteers recognition for the volunteering work by participation history, certifications and a way to keep their volunteering portfolio in one place. For the certification system we have planned to use Blockchain technology in order to verify the certificates. Our team will use the GSR Prize to develop the certification system using Blockchain technology. Also, we are going to co-organize actions in developing countries, in order to train in new skills the local communities. Finally, with the usage of Blockchain technology we could add more features like the donation system that would help communities in digital economy.