Marisa Flores
sad I’m sad
Marisa Flores June 10, 2011 03:43

Allow international non-profits to post virtual opportunities!

Currently VolunteerMatch does not allow international organizations to post virtual opportunities. This will almost certainly reduce our ability to get help from non local (US mainly) volunteers. This is very sad since one of the great things about this site is that it allows smaller organizations like ours to reach out to talented people around the world. Personally, I can think of many US volunteers that have helped our organization remotely in the past before this policy change. They helped us to grow and succeed all thanks to VolunteerMatch and the connections that it provides.

This type of decision seems a bit strange to only allow US organization to post "virtual" volunteer opportunities as there are many non-profits like ours that can use the help of people that are not specifically located where we are. This is a serious issue for our organization and it is already having negative affects on the amount of people contacting our non-profit to volunteer.

Please support us on this issue by click on the +1 and/or commenting below so that we can get VolunteerMatch to once again allow all non-profits, not just US ones, to have equal access to virtual volunteers. Thanks in advance!
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  • Vicky EMPLOYEE
    Vicky (Employee) June 16, 2011 22:02
    Thanks so much for your input. We're sorry that you're unable to recruit virtual volunteers through VolunteerMatch at this time. It's very helpful to hear your perspective as a non-US organization using our service and we will pass along your comments to our team. We'll let you know if there are any changes to our policy on virtual listings.
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  • Marisa Flores
    sad I’m sad
    Marisa Flores September 01, 2011 17:58
    Hi VIcky,

    Thanks for your reply! I wanted to post an update here to let you know how things have gone since this change. Since your team has forced us to remove our postings of virtual opportunities, we have almost no volunteer applications to our openings anymore. I was hoping things would not get this bad but even while trying to do a non virtual search for our postings I get the following error: "Sorry, we're unable to support non-US search at this time (Montreal, QC, Canada)." So basically I'm guessing no one can find our volunteer postings on your site now that we cannot post them as virtual.

    We find this all very strange because the US and Canada have laws setup to respect the non-profit status issued by either countries, why doesn't that hold on VolunteerMatch? We would be happy to send you documentation to prove our registered status in Canada and all we are asking is that we can continue to post our virtual opportunities as we used to. In the past, we have had lots of success thanks to volunteers that have applied to What's your Impact through your site, so hopefully we can find a way to fix this situation. Feel to contact us for any questions and we'll be looking forward to hearing back from you and your team on this.
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    good point! good point! (undo)
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