Straits Times 19 Feb 12;
Mr Keith Tan (left) and Mr Ivan Chang teamed up to create StartNow.sg, a networking website designed to be a conduit between organisations with volunteering opportunities and people who want to help. -- ST PHOTO: TED CHEN
Find a non-profit organisation and you will find a mountain of paperwork: detailed donor and volunteer lists are kept on outdated spreadsheets in overlapping files often riddled with errors.
When student Ivan Chang, 23, spent a summer painfully coordinating these details at the Make-A-Wish foundation, where he is a senior wish granter, he figured that, with new technology, there must be a better way.
It led to him and architecture student Keith Tan, 22, creating the website StartNow.sg
The site is a networking tool designed to be a conduit between volunteering opportunities and people who want to help.
Organisations can create a free profile with details about their goals, events and pictures to inform potential volunteers about their work. 'Understanding the cause is a very big part of what makes a volunteer,' said Mr Tan.
Consistent contact with the organisation also keeps volunteers coming back, he added.
Start Now created a one-click portal which allows organisations to upload and easily modify volunteer databases into groups and categories. With a click, they can mass e-mail volunteers about events, speeding up what is now a time-consuming process involving outdated spreadsheets and copy-and-paste e-mailing.
Start Now also helps organisations cut out guesswork by linking groups and volunteers via interests, event times and locations.
'Convenience is ingrained in the younger generation,' noted Mr Chang, as is social belonging.
When a volunteer joins an event, a link posted on his Facebook feed notifies friends of the event and allows them to join.
People want to volunteer with their friends, said Mr Chang. 'It's intimidating to go alone.'
Another inhibiting factor is the lack of long-term satisfaction volunteers may feel after the event. Without feedback or 'thank yous' from the organisation, volunteers might lack the motivation to return.
Start Now has tackled that problem by allowing volunteers' profiles to list events attended and hours dedicated, providing a benchmark of volunteer work that they can be proud of.
The site also provides a space where organisations can give feedback to volunteers. 'Consistent engagement is key,' said Mr Tan.
Start Now is designed to be useful for managing volunteers in schools and companies as well, allowing them to detail the events and hours worked.
A few clicks on the easy-to-use database generates stylised volunteer reports useful for year-end analyses and assessments.
The biggest challenge for Start Now was meeting the diverse needs of its users.
'A lot of time was spent debating how to arrange, classify and design information and features such that the site would be easy to use for users and easy to adopt for organisations. The last thing we wanted was for a platform to be a barrier,' said Mr Chang, an information systems major at Singapore Management University.
He designed its internal infrastructure and database while Mr Tan, a National University of Singapore (NUS) architecture major, designed the user interface. They started site development last July and have taken leave from their studies to focus on it full-time.
Last September, the pair were awarded Spring Singapore's YES! Start-ups grant, which gives $4 for every $1 raised. They pooled their savings to raise $12,500 and received $50,000 for their efforts.
While Start Now is a non-profit site, the pair are working on ways to monetise without compromising on its social objective.
Mr Tan explained: 'When you put a social objective before one of profit, there are instances in which operational decisions might not make financial sense.
'In the long run, however, the need for cost sustainability forces us to ensure that all our efforts and operations create value for society because our very survival depends on it,' he added.
Plans to generate revenue include selling sponsorship and advertising space and providing consulting services to institutions.
The website will be officially launched at NUS' Social Business Week, which starts tomorrow.
Lydia Vasko
