FounderBuzz

Transcript by Speechpad:

Scott: Hi, I'm Scott Olson with FounderBuzz. I'm here with Karen Bantuveris with VolunteerSpot. Thanks for joining us today, Karen.

Karen: Thanks for having me, Scott.

Scott: I'm actually talking to a few companies now that are social ventures, ventures that are looking beyond just simply turning a profit and came across you through a friend. I would love to hear a little bit about yourself and what you do.

Karen: Absolutely. VolunteerSpot is a social venture, and what we do is we help improve the community volunteering experience. That's for people who are volunteering at the most local level, helping at their schools, helping with their Scout troops, helping with the small non-profit that might be running an after school mentoring program or a community garden or a soup kitchen out of a church.

What we do is we make it very easy for people to volunteer by making it very easy for them to sign up to volunteer. So that makes us the social part of our social venture. What makes us the venture part is who's actually doing the volunteering.

Women, moms, between the ages of 35 and 50, volunteer three times the rate of everybody else in the U.S., and they're really the social fabric of our community. And so we found a way to aggregate these moms while they are doing good and supporting their kids' schools and sports teams and all their local non-profits, and we give brand the highly targeted access to these moms. It's really a do good and make money venture.

Scott: Now, school funding is just such a huge issue across the country right now. Have you seen just a lot more activity on your site as volunteers just become more important than ever in supporting the infrastructure of our school systems?

Karen: You bet. There's more demands for volunteering. Parents are required in the classroom where there used to be aides. Parents are required to help in the cafeteria, in the library where there used to be staff. Then, parents are required and I'm saying required. It's really not volunteering. It's mandatory to help with fundraisers for their schools.

In fact, there was a very popular New York Times article back in December that I was in about moms pushing back about over volunteering and how they're being asked to do so much and they're stretched so thin. VolunteerSpot was featured as a way to help make that easier, because any mom that is organizing a group of volunteers or any person organizing a group of volunteers can do it much simpler with VolunteerSpot. We're sort of like an e-vite party invitation on steroids for group volunteering.

Scott: Is that the area where you're getting the most activity is in education? Are there other areas where you see yourselves getting a lot of traction?

Karen: Absolutely. VolunteerSpot is about 75% what I would call school-family volunteering. So an organization doesn't use us. A volunteer leader, that parent that raised their hand and said, "Hey, I'll do it," that's the person who uses VolunteerSpot to organize their group sign-up. It could be the parent that's helping at school or at Sunday School or with Scouts. They're probably in multiple roles.

The other group that we support are non-profits, work place volunteering, and faith-based volunteering, people volunteering in their churches and congregations. What's interesting about those groups is they're still predominantly women 35 to 50 who are the people who sign up to help in those groups.

For large non-profits, like the Red Cross, for example, they have local disaster action teams, and those are volunteer teams within a big group. They don't have access to the large proprietary volunteer management software. So they use us to coordinate their groups. We save them one to two man days a month in volunteer coordination time.

Scott: That's great.

Karen: Then small non-profits it's huge, like community theaters and mentoring programs and literacy programs. We can save those groups one to two hours of man time in coordination. They used to use spreadsheets and reply e-mail and phone messages to get people on the schedule, and that's all automated. So now they can spend that time on programs, and they can extend their programs. We have literacy programs that are now offered. They've gone from two programs to nine because we simplify their volunteering

We've got seasonal homeless shelters that they used to be open for two days. They're interfaith shelters that are now open five days a week because we take care of the volunteer coordination burden, and that's the real social mission kind of work that we do.

Scott: Well, that's nice. It seems like you're providing a great service and having fun doing it. I certainly wish you the best of luck.

Karen: Thank you so much.

Scott: I appreciate you taking the time today.

Karen: Thanks a lot. Take care.

Scott: Thanks. Bye-bye.