How and why Technology Volunteers was born.

How and why Technology Volunteers was born.

At SR2 - Socially Responsible Recruitment we gift 5% of our profits to underfunded charities. This is part of our DNA and what we stand for as a company - people over profit. We're quiet selective over the charities we support - yes every charity is great but we wanted to focus our efforts on ones that do great work but aren't well funded.

When we went to meet our first charity partner back in 2018 Caring in Bristol we got into conversation about how their CRM was out of date and if we knew anyone who would be willing to gift their time to help them improve the ways they we're working with a new system.

A couple of days after, and some researching I couldn't find any platform that connects people in tech with charities so decided to create a meet up group and run an event.

A full house of people who wanted to support these charities. We started off with supporting a project for Caring in Bristol and also a mentoring scheme with Bristol Free School where we connected folk in tech to support A Level students with their final year Computer Science projects.

Once we officially launched things really kicked off and we we're approached by a number of small charities around the South West who we're desperate for support. This was anything from SEO support, mobile builds, social media support and graphic design help. We quickly supported 13 different projects through 6 charities, running off meetup.com and twitter which we're great but we we're growing quickly with 400 volunteers.

I knew it wasn't scalable and we needed to explore another way to do this. I mentioned my idea of a platform on a local slack channel and was approached by Ollie H, founder at CEO of Evri Insight and him and his wonderful team John and George brought us up to their office to get planning.

Building the platform with people aka myself, Caitlin and Chris was never going to be an easy task as we aren't the tech savviest of people and looking at roadmaps, ideas and explaining how they we're going to code and host the site went over our heads at times. But John, George and Ollie have been the best partners. This has been a pro-bono project for them as well, a huge project to build alongside their day jobs so really this is all thanks to them.

Then covid turned up. Although we had to push back the launch we knew we would get the platform live early 2021. Early 2021 soon became mid 2021 but we are now here.

4.5.2021 - GO LIVE!

In 24 hours we have had 37 volunteers sign up to the platform. Already the platform has been shared across the world and we have a lovely charity in Australia get in touch to see if anyone can support them on their climate change project.

Who can sign up to technology volunteers: Anyone, if you are working in tech as a developer, a project manager, a data analyst, support engineer or if it is a hobby of yours and you would like to learn some new skills then please sign up.

What to do if you are a charity and need some support?: Please email us [email protected] and we can discuss the project with you and get it added onto the platform.

We'd also love your feedback. We are a new platform, there could be a couple of bugs, and small issues which we are resolving and fixing quickly.

There are multiple live projects on the platform which need support from UX Designer, IT Support, website builds, data analytics projects.. the list goes on and hopefully will only get bigger.

Thank you for all the love and support so far. Please share with your friends, colleagues and family.

We're here to make the world a better place.

Lots of Love

Alicia x

www.technologyvolunteers.org