Funding & Twixtmas

Earlier on in the month, I met up with the Director of UnLtd Wales, Gareth Bickerton to seek some funding for HFH. UnLtd Wales is a funder of social entrepreneurs. He stated, amongst other nice things, that HFH was the most innovative initiative he had seen all year and that there was a good chance of receiving some free funding. This funding can be used to progress 'do good' initiatives like HFH. If I'm lucky enough to be awarded some, I intend to enhance the HFH website so that users can access the micro volunteer database easier. I also intend to get a video made to explain the concept of micro volunteering.

Seeing as HFH seems to be getting noticed a bit more, I have decided to design a logo, which I hope conveys the concept that people can change the world from the comfort of their own home. The logo comprises one half of the globe and one half of a house. I tried and tried and tried to get a pair of pyjamas in the logo somewhere, but came up blank, so the current logo is the final design - unless somebody else comes up with a better one.

Was contacted by Andy Green of Twixtmas during the month to see if we could get a joint campaign going to encourage people to do things for worthy causes during the 5 day period between 27th – 31st December ie Twixtmas. A lot of people just lounge about during this period, so it's an ideal time for people who are time starved for the rest of the year to do some good works. We’ll see whether it was successful or not later on in January 2010.

Was also contacted by Sylvia Ng of Charity Champs to contribute to an internet chat session on micro philanthropy organised by the Canadian website Taking IT Global. The chat session hasn’t take place yet but I was posed several questions, the answers to which can be found here.

Til next time

BBC, UnLtd and a little seminar on the side

Forgot to mention in my last blog, that I was interviewed by the BBC on the back of the Runner Up award in Community Channel’s ‘Make a Difference’ competition. If you’re easily frightened, then don’t click through to the interview, it contains a picture of me prominently displayed.

HFH reached a small milestone during November. It now features over 500 plus actions/invitations in it’s database and there’s still loads more waiting in the wings to be vetted.

At the end of November, I attended a seminar entitled ‘Introduction to Social Media’ which explained about the magic and mysteries behind using Facebook, Twitter and YouTube for creating awareness about your organisation. It was my choice of prize from the competition I mentioned above. Here’s a TwitPic of the event.

One of the twelve attendants at the seminar was a lady from UnLtd, who like me wanted to learn about the social media out there. I mention this as UnLtd is a charity that supports social entrepreneurs. Upon learning about HFH, she mentioned that I was the type of social entrepreneur they are looking to fund as well as support projects like HFH. I was quite surprised at this, as I hadn’t considered myself a social entrepreneur before. Still, I’ve sent an email now off to UnLtd informing them about HFH. We’ll see what happens from here.

And last but not least, I’ve received an invite from Social Actions to share HFH’s database with them. It will be done via RSS Feeds which I know nothing about, but hey a lack of knowledge about something has never stopped me in the past.

Til next time

And the Winner is …………

Not me. I entered Help From Home into a UK nationwide competition a couple of weeks ago for ‘small groundbreaking projects that are making a BIG difference.’ I entered the competition and promptly forget about because it’s one of those things you do impromptu and think ‘seriously, me winning – never.’

Surprise, surprise I didn’t win, but fanfare of trumpet, roll of drums, I did come second. Apparently over 100 project entered the competition and as I’ve found out later, the eleven other initiatives that were shortlisted either were sponsored by some big firms and/or received thousands pounds in grant money and/or have many people working on the project either full or part time. I can claim to none of these, which for me if I’d known about the calibre of the projects entering, I wouldn’t have entered. Anyway here’s the link to the comp announcement page.

The other day, I came across an article on Web land about the connection between kindness and your state of health. Apparently there is a connection and it’s a very beneficial one for the person doing the kind acts. Check out the article here and see whether it’s better to be angry or kind. OK, so you can’t be bothered to read it, but the gist of the article is that kindness is good for you. So take another look around Help From Home and see what kind acts you can do. I am now thinking of displaying a health warning log for Help From Home – but in this case, it will be the warning that you will come into some good health. LOL

Til next time.

There were several reasons why I started Help from Home.
(1) I was already doing home base volunteering and thought others should have know about it (2) there wasn’t really anybody else promoting home based volunteering to the same extent as to what HFH has become.

Well I now need to correct point 2 above as a website called Charity Guide is also promoting volunteer actions which can be done in bite sized chunks. The site’s concept is similar to HFH but not too similar that we’re duplicating information. Charity Guide has been going for 3 years now and I feel that we could strike up some sort of collaboration somewhere, so watch this space to see what happens.

I’ve tinkered around with the website look again. I’ve never been really happy with the home page, so I’ve given it a slightly different look again. I’m hoping this will be last tinker for some time to come.

I’ve been working on the 2 projects that I mentioned in my last blog entry, but only on the tag lines that I intend to use for each of them. Without revealing too much, these are the tag lines I’ve come up with so far. For ‘Unfolding kindness’ its ‘Changing The World with Just a Bit of Paper’ and for ‘ChariTree’, it’s ‘The personalised Present that rewrites the Past to change the Future’. Not exactly tripping of your tongue tag lines, but they are apt to the projects I have in mind to release at a later date.

Til next time.

New Features Added

Several new features were added to HFH last month, which I’ll explain below.

One thing that you’ll see is a bit of a facelift to the homepage. I’m trying to focus people’s attention on certain pages of the website in the hopes of getting a bit of interactivity going between visitors to the site.

I introduced two new features to the website. One of which were the ‘Do Good’ cards I mentioned in last month’s blog. These cards have acts of kindness printed on them along with a unique tracking number. These cards are intended to be distributed freely with the added excitement of being able to track the impact you’re making around the globe.

The other feature I added to the website were some ‘Volunteer Challenge’ sheets. The purpose behind these is to encourage people to perform a defined number of voluntary action which once completed will be rewarded with a ‘Certificate of Achievement’. I’m hoping this will be an incentive for people to volunteer more at home.

I haven’t done any promoting of the site in approximately two months, so it’s my intention now to get that back on track. However, things in the pipeline are projects called ‘Unfolding Kindness’ and ‘ChariTree’. More about these in subsequent blogs.

Til next time

Purge, Splurge and Future Features

I’ve had a bit of a purge of some of the actions listed on the website, as I noticed that there was quite a few links that were pointing to out of date pages or sites that were no longer active. The flipside of this, is that I’ve had a bit of a splurge on adding new actions to the website. I usually add three or four per month but this time round I let the floodgates open and added a whole load of them. I’m not going to list them all as that’s the domain of my newsletter to do that, so I'll let you pop over to the August newsletter (once it's published) and see what ones have been added.

As for future features, I’ve added a new mapping facility from Frappr to give a bit more interaction on various pages, namely Leaflet Campaign, Home Volunteer Groups and Volunteer Bureau page.

As I write, a very kind person, namely Peter Bailey, has offered to set up a tracking facility for some ‘Do Good’ cards that will eventually roll out sometime in August. These are cards that will attempt to spread some random acts of kindness that have the ability of being able to track where that card has travelled to, once you pass it on to someone else. Exciting stuff!!!

Also, if time permits, then a new Volunteer Challenge feature will be introduced in August as well. This will be a downloadable sheet of actions, which once completed will be rewarded with a Certificate of Achievement. It’s just another way, among many on the website, to encourage people to perform actions that benefit others.

'Til next time.

Be Extraordinary

Came across an initiative the other day, which in my mind truly promotes the concept of micro volunteering. It’s called ‘The Extraordinaries’ and they are trying to encourage people to volunteer their time whilst for instance they are at the bus stop, on the tube, waiting for a pizza etc. It’s all done via a person’s mobile phone and they’re suggesting that the few minutes that people have spare through the day could be devoted to helping out worthy causes. Check them out. Quote extraordinary!

I hadn’t come across the term micro volunteering before until I’d came across the The Extraordinaries website and I now realise that this is what Help From Home is promoting. Talking about promoting Help From Home has been featured in quite a few blogs last month and is now starting to get Twittered.

I was interviewed by the Huffington Post internet newspaper for an article on volunteering last month. I must say that the reporter did a very good job of what seemed to me to be random ramblings coming out of my mouth. Top marks to her.

I’m trying to promote the concept of Home volunteering to volunteer bureaux as, from my research, they don’t seem to tackle this side of volunteering at all. To this end I had a meeting with my local volunteer centre in Cardiff, UK who agreed to include my website on their books. They advised me to contact the other volunteer centres around Wales, so that is what I am going to do. I’ve actually created a web page for managers of volunteer bureaux to read, so if you know of any do let them know about Help From Home.

As the site continues to grow, so the number of web pages I add to the site grows as well. In addition to the ‘Volunteer Bureaux’ page mentioned above, I’d added a FAQs page and on ‘In the media’ page. Hopefully you’ll check them out.

In order to provide different ways of promoting the concept of Home Volunteering, I’m aiming to produce ‘Do Good; cards rather like these ones here and a Volunteer Workout Plan. The Workout Plan will be based on a Fitness Workout Plan but with a twist. More details will follow once I’ve finalised the details.

On a final note, have a read of this article about some research that shows you are likely to live longer if you are doing something positive in your life like volunteering. Quite extraordinary!

'Til next time.

Here in the UK, its National Volunteer Week, where traditionally people get together in groups at a certain place and a certain time to perform activities that benefit others. Of course, volunteering can also be conducted in the comfort of people’s home, a concept that I believe is lost on many of the main volunteering portals website eg http://www.do-it.org/ In time, it’s my intention to approach them on this issue and urge them to provide a category for home based volunteering activities. Watch this space!

Whilst on the theme of National Volunteer Week, I created a petition to promote the concept of a National Volunteer at Home Day. As the focus of these volunteer weeks is on groups of people getting together, I thought what better time to start a petition to get people to think about volunteering their time at home. If you feel that this is an issue worth pursuing, then let others know by signing the petition. It’s going to be up and running for a whole year, so you’ve got plenty of time to put your name to it and to encourage others to support it.

Following on from last month’s blog request for volunteers, I’ve actually created a web page so that visitors to the site can see the direction in which I hope to expand Help From Home. Volunteers are required for creating a education/action pack for children/teachers; setting up home volunteer groups in their own community; producing a book centred around the home volunteering concept; creating a web widget for webmasters to add to their websites that show up randomly selected home volunteer opportunities on every page refresh. If you’re interested in any one of them, just pop over to the page ‘Make A Difference’ and see if you can help us.

Big ambitions eh! You bet, but there again the concept of volunteering your time at home is, I believe, not on people’s radar and for this reason, I feel there is huge scope in promoting the idea.

Til next time.

A Few Changes

There’s been a few changes to the HFH website. Here’s a brief list of them:

1) A little purple man should appear in your internet browser’s address bar opposite the HFH web address. It’s called a favicon, if you really want to know.

2) The website had been ‘broken’ in the Firefox internet browser ie. pictures and text on some pages were all over the place. This has now been fixed. There are still problems if the site is viewed in Opera.

3) By popular request a newsletter is now being offered on a monthly-ish basis. Please click here for more details.

4) The whole purpose of the website is to encourage people to volunteer their time from the comfort of their own home. This means that people are performing these actions in isolation from everybody else. To overcome this, an action tracker has been added to the website to enable people to see what actions are being performed by others, in the hope that it will provide a sense of community amongst fellow volunteers. Click on the following link to see the Action Tracker in action. BTW, the Action Tracker was very kindly created by Mark Sinkinson who is a freelance web designer. If you need any website design just contact him here, he’s very good and very capable.

5) The 'Forum' and 'Submit a Site' web pages have been substituted by a ‘Soapbox’ page. Same format as the previous 'Submit a Site' page, but this time a different emphasis has been placed on the theme of what can be contributed. Check out the following link to the Soapbox page.

Well that’s enough changes for one month. Till next time.

Perplexed, Puzzled and Pondering.

I’m now back from Southern India and involved in arranging a school twinning exchange with the school I visited whilst on holiday. All this can be done from home and without getting out of my pyjamas. If that isn’t a great example of what this website is all about then I don’t know what is.

I’ve been perplexed and puzzled by some of my promotion efforts to spread the word about HFH. I’ve joined (or at least tried to join) various Yahoo groups whose 'raison d’etre' purports to be the promotion of information and actions that benefit people or organisations that would be considered as worthwhile causes. I question some of the notions behind some of these groups, as my attempt to join or put a message about my website within some of these groups were denied. They either want to help people or they don’t want to help people and I honestly believe that my website would be a valuable source of information in their efforts to help others. To this day I still remain perplexed and puzzled over their decisions.

I am pondering various developments for HFH. A visitor to the site has asked about the provision of a newsletter. This is in the pipeline and just needs to be slotted into my busy timetable. I have also been pondering on ideas for a kids zone on the website where the actions are surprise, surprise geared to things or causes that would be of interest to children. Watch this space and keep watching, as this will take a long time to get off the ground.

All this takes up time and what I could really do with are some volunteers to help me out. Well, low and behold I have already had one offer of help but a few more would certainly be most appreciated.

Yours perplexed, puzzled and pondering.

Getting The Word Out

I have been quite surprised at the events of last month. What with one thing and another, I actually only really got down to promoting the site during the 2nd week of January and then that only lasted for 1 week, coz something else cropped up.

On the 1st weekend that I started to promote the site, I contacted the local newspaper, South Wales Echo, who picked up on it straightaway. A pic of the article is to the left - yes that's moi. On the back of this article, I was then contacted out of the blue by BBC Radio Wales. An interview for this radio station has yet to materialize, so I'll reserve that news for Febs' blog - if it happens.

I should also be getting an article in a locally produced magazine as well during February. My website was actually mentioned in the monthly ezine by 365act.com. At the moment, all this publicity draws in a small but steady stream of visits to the site. Not bad considering I haven't really done that much to promote the website.

I changed the emphasis in the tagline for Help From Home to make it read that you could change the world in your pyjamas - a much more intriguing tagline, methinks. I'm also going to be changing the Easy Random Actions part of the site, as displayed on the right of every page. Here, I'm going to place the emphasis on actions that can be performed under 1, 5, 10, 20 and 30 minutes. Once again, methinks this may be more intriguing to visitors of the site.

I also want to get more user interactivity going on in my website, whereby a user can record that s/he has performed an action and this then will be tallied up with everybody else's actions. Here's an example of what I mean. I am only a novice web designer, so I have no idea how to go about doing this. More research is needed by me, methinks, unless you the reader know how to do this, in which case I'd be grateful of your help.

I'm on holiday in Southern India during part of Feb and March, so the next blog will be sometime in mid March. One of the things I will be doing in India is visiting a school where I plan to donate lots of pens and pencils which I'm told they need. Hopefully I'll get a photo to prove this.

Til next time.