Empathy Library

This concept is the result of a Better Giving Studio month-long collaborative sprint focusing on Hyperlocal Volunteering which you can learn more about in this article. You can read the brief for more context and to see who was on the team.

Why BGS is Excited

Focusing on geographic proximity brings organizations more and better volunteers. These volunteers are more likely to care deeply about the cause, be more accountable, and be more likely to stay involved. See Ideas42’s Behavior & Charitable Giving 2019 and Coalition of Urban & Metropolitan Universities’ Place Based Hyperlocal Engagement to learn more.

• It offers a unified way to educate and onboard prospective volunteers.
• It’s a powerful solution for taking the burden of onboarding off nonprofit organizations and recruitment platforms.

The Opportunity

It’s not unusual for a local volunteer organization to have a small staff and a long to-do list. Recruiting the right volunteers for each opportunity, and preparing them sufficiently adds to that to-do list. Volunteers need to be briefed on local nuances, subject matter, and the history of the neighborhood where they’ll be working. Preparing all of this information takes a lot of time and energy. And often, volunteers won’t read a dense email, so they don’t do the “pre-work.” This can lead to an unsatisfying experience for the volunteer and the cause they’re supporting. Empathy Library curates the most important hyper-local educational materials and allows existing platforms to quickly integrate this content into their on-boarding process. This has the potential to benefit the collective hundreds of thousands of nonprofits engaging with volunteers.

The Concept

Ellie is a leader of a local volunteer organization. She has an upcoming project focused on Food Insecurity in a neighborhood nearby. She logs in to EmpathyLibrary.org and navigates to Neighborhood Specific Modules. Click—she chooses a video related to the neighborhood that was created by another local organization that has done work there before. Next, she goes to Cause Specific Modules. Click— she adds a video related to the topic of food insecurity more broadly. Finally she goes to Skill Specific Modules. Click, click—she adds modules that provide direction on how the skills and interests of a particular volunteer might best help this community.

Once Ellie chooses the right content modules, they’re automatically formatted into an email via integration with Constant Contact. This email is now ready to be sent to future volunteers in advance of the upcoming volunteer event. 

Because the content in the email is quick hitting videos, the volunteers arrive on the day of the event actually having consumed the content. So they have enough context to dive right in and be especially helpful right off the bat. These volunteers have a great experience because they feel prepared and useful. The event organizers have a great experience because they don’t have to do a lot of hand holding to accomplish their goals. 

Following the event, Ellie receives an analytics report that enables her to spot gaps and further curate the educational information she sends ahead of the next event.

What Do You Think?

Are you working on something similar? Have feedback to give us or insights that we should know about related to this exploratory concept? Did you test out this idea, and how did it go? We’d love to hear from you! Please write us a note at [email protected]