A Review of Catchafire.org
Vis-a-vis a conversation with Hilary Mason and Chris Wiggins, Jake Hofman pointed me towards Catchafire.org. Ever since getting involved in the nonprofit technology sector, I’ve been curious about skilled volunteering, and somewhat fascinated by the lack of attention paid to it. Catchafire wants to make it easier for people to participate as effective skills-based volunteers.
Unfortunately, I see a similarities with Smart Volunteer, an older organization that never quite…caught the fire, as it were. The founding stories of these two organizations are almost identical. Replace Rachel with Dan (and others), “investment banker” with “management consultant,” and hauling lumber with painting (schools in both cases!) and you have it.
Both organizations are/were trying to create their own communities of nonprofits and volunteers, rather than piggyback on the far larger communities which already exist. I think this is a critical mistake on Catchafire’s part, because so much energy, luck, and extra effort is needed to build and sustain such a community of users. I was very impressed that they had already build a LinkedIn connector, but I think their service could fly farther, faster as a LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook app.
Even aside from massive general purpose social networks, there are many sites that already have an existing large community of users and nonprofits: VolunteerMatch, Idealist.org, Everywun, Causes, All For Good, Social Actions, OpenAction.org, etc. Also, don’t forget the 20-30 software suites that nonprofits already use for volunteer management.
I think that strategically, rather than trying to directly serve the public, Catchafire and similar startups should build tools that could be licensed or sold to these other companies. This way they could concentrate on solving the tough, general problems that all these sites face – but don’t have the bandwidth or focus to solve for themselves. One of the VolunteerMatch conferencegoers I know said he had yet to hear of such a pitch – someone designing tools & technology with VolunteerMatch as a customer rather than competitor.
I also don’t think either organization has made much progress into the difficult human resources issues of skilled volunteering. Extracting, tracking, annotating, searching, and matching skills is an incredibly difficult problem. Just ask the swollen HR departments at large companies and nonprofits – finding the right person for a job is time intensive, highly domain specific, and frequently prone to costly, inefficient error.
I also think that the projects already populating Catchafire may miss the mark with the general public. They seemed to general and abstract to me at first, and I think the listed projects are too heavily oriented towards capacity building – press releases, donation engine and website support. Perhaps people who want to start volunteering want to serve the mission, rather than serving the organization? I don’t have any articles to cite here, but I’m starting to look for them.
The Catchafire.org site is pretty, but would do well to borrow Kiva’s emphasis on images and tangible, unique stories from the end beneficiaries – third world entrepreneurs in Kiva’s case. Photos and stories pull harder on the heart strings than and motivate people to take action. Again, I lack proven references, but it’s definitely worth an A/B test to see if Catchafire’s conversion rate increases.
Remember, this post is based on a cursory examination of the site and I have not used it heavily as either a volunteer or a nonprofit/NGO. Am I missing the point and trying to shove Catchafire into the wrong pidgeonhole?
Update: I actually spoke with Rachel Chong of Catch A Fire and she explained a little more about their concept and what sets them apart. Their model does commit significant resources to both the task specification and personalized matching aspects of skilled volunteering, and she stressed that charging for the service requires that nonprofits have some ‘skin in the game’ – another choice that sets them apart. I think the more people who are using their skills and resources to enable more skilled volunteers, the better, but I remain unconvinced that this is a scalable model. Nobody has come up with an algorithm for skilled volunteering yet, and it’s just plain hard to scale a services business. So, in other words….we’ll see what happens! Lucky for Rachel, I’m wrong most of the time.
