Not-for-profit organisation Big Help Mob is set to launch its mobile app this week, after almost six months of development.
The Big Help Mob app was designed to connect volunteers with not-for-profit organisations needing volunteer support.
The app development was funded by the winnings from the WApp awards and a significant grant from the state government’s Department for Communities’ social innovation funding stream.
The WApp awards, run by Western Australia’s public universities, are aimed at finding the best mobile app concepts. They are judged by venture capital investors from California’s Silicon Valley.
The biggest innovation in Big Help Mob’s app is the use of online social networking to muster volunteering offline, or in the real world.
“We can’t claim to be complete revolutionaries, we are not doing anything on the cutting edge of technology, it is existing technology, but it is our application of the technology that is unique,” Big Help Mob founder Tim Kenworthy told WA Business News.
“We are making it social which not too many people in this space have done successfully.”
The app collates information about what volunteering opportunities there are in Perth, presents them to its users who then sign up for the ‘mission’. Information on which mission they are involved in is fed back to the user’s Facebook page and presented to their network.
Theoretically, numbers of volunteers are driven by ‘friends’ on Facebook viewing what volunteering missions their ‘friends’ are supporting and signing up to the mission as a result.
“So many people who are trying to solve this volunteer-matching problem jump to search engine models,” Mr Kenworthy said.
“They are trying to solve it with a directory model, basically a glorified online phone book.
“That assumes the problem is a knowledge deficit; that people just don’t know. That isn’t strictly true … Red Cross is the third most recognised brand in the world, it is not that people don’t know about ways to contribute, it is that it is not socialised, that is one of the core things.”
Big Help Mob will establish the app in Perth first, before going Australia wide.
“This is local, we are only launching in Perth at the moment and we are trying to get a really deeply entrenched presence in Perth before we think about scaling beyond that,” Mr Kenworthy said.
Uptake of the app will also be driven by corporate organisations’ use of the tool to drive their corporate volunteering activities.
Mr Kenworthy plans for revenue to flow from not for profits using the app to attract volunteer groups, corporates using the app to organise volunteering missions and individuals who get involved in missions.
“We are running as a social enterprise and we want to be self-sustained through earned revenue, rather than constantly looking for the next grant or donation or philanthropic thing; that just isn’t sustainable,” he said.
