Best Ways to Find Volunteer Opportunities

*Hint – it’s not what you think!

Premiere Search Engine vs. Scout Search

Despite being the “world’s 4th most valuable company by market cap“, Alphabet (Google) does not help its users find volunteer opportunities near them. As the screenshot above shows, you can share your location and enter the same keywords in both Scout and Google’s search engine and you will get over 50 results from Scout but just 1 relevant search result from Google.

It is not clear why Google displays organizations from 30+ miles away to 750+ miles away in its first ten results, when there are many opportunities less than 15 miles away. It is likely a result of the premiere search engine utilizing algorithms that favor large well known websites over the less sophisticated websites that represent small, local nonprofit organizations. With approximately one million nonprofit organizations across the United States focused on local impact and subsisting on <$50,000 annual revenue, Google’s overlooking simple websites is a significant failure.

Scout Search Platform vs. Directory Database

Volunteer Opportunities	Scout	VolunteerMatch
In town	22	0
In bordering towns	18	2
In nearby towns (4-8 miles away)	60	4
Irrelevant results within the first 25	0	16

Dating back to the early days of the Internet, Volunteer Match and sites like it (Catch a Fire, Idealist) rely on nonprofit organizations visiting their websites, creating accounts, and filling out forms to submit “listings.” Like paper newspapers, directory websites need organizations to manually give them all the information. It is, therefore, not surprising that these directory websites are far from comprehensive and ultimately fail to surface the full landscape of opportunities.

With today’s search technology, there is no longer a need for an online directory database that requires manual submission of information. Nonprofit organizations can simply update their own websites and a search engine platform like Samaritan Scout can ‘discover’ them and surface these results to potential volunteers.

In the screenshots above, you can see what the largest volunteer directory website in the US displays after a person selects one township (Summit in this case) in New Jersey. The first 5 results are opportunities in states as far away from New Jersey as Colorado and Texas. It then shows 1 opportunity at one organization in Summit – though the description of the activity states the location is in Newark and Jersey City, 13 miles and 20 miles away from Summit, respectively. It displays one opportunity in a bordering town, but this is not for an individual volunteer as it explicitly requests companies to contact them for a “Corporate Volunteering Day.”

Scout’s platform, by comparison shows 22 different opportunities all within Summit for individual volunteers at 5 different organizations. It then surfaces another 18 opportunities at towns that share a border with Summit and another 60 opportunities between 4 and 8 miles away.

Comprehensive, yet Focused, Search

This is the difference between a search engine focused on finding volunteering opportunities on the websites of registered nonprofit organizations and the ‘search’ experiences offered through directories and Google. As the volunteers at Scout have been saying to each other for the past year, “Isn’t it about time we leverage powerful Search and AI Technologies to help people build a positive community and DO GOOD?“