GoVolunteer. Help where you are needed.

People all across Europe show great willingness to help refugees. We developed the GoVolunteer online platform to put this goodwill to the best possible use. Volunteers can discover where their skills are urgently needed and then sign up for the corresponding project with just a single click. Organizers, in turn, can present their projects and find the right helpers. GoVolunteer also provides a comprehensive solution for volunteer management that organizers can use to communicate their needs, manage staffing schedules, and regularly interact with their volunteer communities.

What GoVolunteer offers for volunteers and organizers in refugee support:

For volunteers:

• Find out where you are needed – Discover organizations and projects in your area that are a good match for you and your capabilities
• Sign up with just a single click – Find a project to support, click on "sign up", and you're ready to go!
• Team up to make a difference – Invite friends to take part in exciting projects, post your activities on Facebook and other social networks, and get in touch with other volunteers

For organizers:

• Find the right people – Publish information on your project in just 3 steps and find the volunteers who best suit your needs
• Coordinate helpers quickly and easily – Volunteers simply sign up for projects online. With our management tool, you always have an overview
• Stay in touch with your volunteers and expand your volunteer community – Contact and motivate your volunteers; present your organization and your projects to a broad target group

People want to help refugees, and many are already doing so. The aim of GoVolunteer is to channel this tremendous willingness to take action. Specifically, GoVolunteer:

Lowers barriers: Concern about taking on a long-term commitment often keeps people from getting involved in helping refugees. After all, professional or educational commitments can be hard to predict. GoVolunteer lowers the barriers to involvement so that everyone can really play a part – flexibly and on short notice.

Increases transparency: It's easy to get lost in the diverse, fragmented landscape of aid organizations. Many people aren't even aware of the many ways they could get involved. GoVolunteer is a simple, fast way for anyone who wants to help to find the right opportunity.

Simplifies coordination: As the number of refugees skyrockets, coordinating helpers and donations becomes an ever-greater challenge. GoVolunteer provides aid organizations with a simple tool for ensuring that every donation and every helper ends up where they can do the most good.

Puts skills to work: Volunteers have a broad spectrum of experience and skills to contribute. GoVolunteer enables aid organizations to put this expertise to use – and help even more people than they do now.

Brings people together: In addition to connecting volunteers and aid organizers, GoVolunteer supports contact between refugees and residents of the countries where they are settling – which helps create a basis for successful integration.

Encourages entrepreneurship: Good ideas are everywhere! With GoVolunteer, everyone has an opportunity to team up with kindred spirits and bring their ideas for refugee aid projects and initiatives to life.

By supporting GoVolunteer, you are helping more than just a single project: Your donation supports the realization of many projects throughout Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Each of these projects enables volunteers to play a part in helping refugees. And each volunteer, in turn, helps many refugees to get off to a good start in in their new homes.

• 1,000 organizers – By supporting GoVolunteer, you are helping more than 1,000 initiatives and organizations over the coming months to make their refugee support projects a success. Our simple tool for managing volunteers makes coordination easier, so organizers can concentrate on their real mission: helping those who have fled war and upheaval.

• 10,000 volunteers – By supporting GoVolunteer, you are helping thousands of people to volunteer their skills where they are needed most.

• 100,000 refugees – By supporting GoVolunteer, you are helping countless people who have lost everything to find shelter, education, care – and new friends!

The goal of GoVolunteer is to be the central coordination platform for refugee support efforts in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. To realize this vision and meet our users' needs even better, we need to invest now in improvements to our platform. We urgently need your help to make this happen.

Your support will help enable us to achieve a number of goals, including:

• One-stop solution for volunteer management (150 developer days): We want GoVolunteer to precisely meet organizers' needs as a complete solution for coordinating volunteers. A clearly structured calendar and easy-to-use organizer dashboard will merge volunteer planning activities and communication with the volunteer community. This approach will simplify coordination even more, making it easier than ever to realize projects.

• Community for refugee support (220 developer days): The purpose of GoVolunteer is to become THE social network for those with a social conscience. We want to make it possible for volunteers and organizers to communicate via a project wall. In our vision, a newsfeed will keep every user up to date about activities taking place in relevant projects and organizations. Personal profiles will show volunteers' capabilities and interests, and provide better matches to project needs. And everyone will have the ability to invite friends to take part in projects and plan aid activities with other volunteers.

These community functions are extremely important in creating lasting ties with volunteers – because voluntary support to help integrate refugees will be needed for the long term – not just for months, but for years to come!

Realizing these new functionalities will require ca. 370 additional developer days. This represents an investment of EUR 110,000, based on a discounted developer per diem (we only hire developers who are intrinsically motivated to support refugee aid and willing to volunteer part of their time). We will invest any remaining funds in a new user-friendly design and better service for organizers and volunteers using GoVolunteer.

Realizing the new organizer dashboard (with an easy-to-use calendar and basic volunteer management functions) will be possible as soon as the funding threshold of EUR 30,000 has been reached. This stage alone will greatly reduce the coordination burden on refugee support organizers.

We are counting on you to make this dream for so many organizers, volunteers, and refugees a reality!