The startup provides students with a central hub to find, request and track community service opportunities for school, clubs and college applications.
Martin Luther King Jr. is often quoted, “Life’s most persistent and urgent question is: ‘What are you doing for others?’”
Perhaps someone’s answer to Dr. King’s question is serving their country, getting involved with their community or helping others overseas. Volunteer work is the answer for millions of Americans of all ages every year by not only providing altruistic extracurricular activities, but also personal growth opportunities as well as creating standout school admissions applications.
For more than 5,000 community members and students across the U.S., their answer to Dr. King’s question is VolunteerCrowd.
VolunteerCrowd is a Wayfinder startup whose online service and mobile app allows students to find, request and track academic-related volunteer projects to help build a service transcript to impress colleges and employers. It also fixes decades-old problems in the volunteer sector and brings new meaning to Software as a Service (SaaS).
SOFTWARE AND SERVICE
UC Irvine (UCI) double alumna Amy von Kaenel earned her bachelor’s degree in economics and MBA and went on to spend over a decade as a technology research analyst for many of the big players in enterprise software, including HP, Microsoft, SAP, Google, Yahoo and Pearson.
Those experiences, combined with her affinity for education and desire to work more closely with technology, led von Kaenel to the educational technology (edtech) space. She joined startup Thrively – a marketplace for extracurricular activities – and later served on the board at Lion’s Heart – a nonprofit, teen-based volunteer organization.
Von Kaenel became interested in volunteer organizations and found that despite being run like businesses, their lack of technology throttled priorities like growth and alignment with students’ academic interests.
“When you have an antiquated technology platform, it makes it difficult to do all the things you want to do with a club or any nonprofit, which is effectively a business,” said von Kaenel. “It was hard to reach students, understand their college and career goals, to get them signed up, to communicate with them and to engage them.”
With those pain points in mind and $250,000 in grants and pro bono services, von Kaenel led an internal effort to expand Lion’s Heart, which resulted in an 80 percent increase in signups and a tripling of Lion’s Heart’s national footprint.
As time went on, students began making requests that club-based structures could not accommodate, including different ways to select volunteer opportunities, alignment of service opportunities with academics, and the ability to take their volunteer transcript with them through their college careers.
Faced with these questions, von Kaenel took it upon herself to commit to developing a SaaS-based student volunteer platform built from the student’s perspective.
SOFTWARE AS A SERVICE
To solve the problems facing students, clubs and educators looking for student volunteer opportunities, von Kaenel took six months off work to conduct research into how this endeavor would fit into the volunteer marketplace and sector.
In 2018, von Kaenel formed the LLC for VolunteerCrowd, which officially launched in 2019.
“One common complaint among guidance counsellors and teachers and club leaders is that students aren’t autonomous enough in volunteering,” said von Kaenel, CEO and founder of VolunteerCrowd. “They need the resources to be autonomous and self-directed. So, we built VolunteerCrowd based on how students live their lives: on their phone.”
Through the VolunteerCrowd app, middle school, high school and college students can find and request opportunities, as well as track their recorded hours for free in under a minute. With the paid service – an annual fee of $99 – students receive additional functionality, including a verified transcript and portfolio that is automatically updated and added to any award qualification such as the President’s Volunteer Service Award, skill and strength endorsements by organizations, notifications and more. The service replaces physical paper logs, and the living transcript and portfolio can be easily downloaded and attached to college applications.
Subsequent customer interviews conducted through the I-Corps program – a market discovery program funded by the National Science Foundation that leads campus innovators through an immersive learning process – revealed that younger students are focused on finding specialized projects like those in the science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields, medical-related projects or, in response to the pandemic, online volunteering. To help students build their college resumes with relevant opportunities, VolunteerCrowd launched the Impact Member plan for an annual fee of $39.
Since its formation, VolunteerCrowd won the Social Enterprise track of UCI’s Paul Merage School of Business’ New Venture Competition, joined the Wayfinder incubator at UCI Beall Applied Innovation and was selected as a finalist for The EdTech Awards 2020.
In addition to the Wayfinder and I-Corps programs, von Kaenel and her team remain well connected to UCI, from taking advantage of grant writing support workshops and mentorship from the many Innovation Advisors at Applied Innovation, to receiving pro bono legal consulting through the UCI School of Law’s second-year students and financial modeling from finance students at the School of Business.
“One of the great things about the Wayfinder program is the potential to stay in it for an extended period of time if you have exhibited growth,” said von Kaenel. “The steady exposure has allowed us to build a relationship with the investment community as they’ve watched us grow. No one is going to meet an investor and form a relationship in one pitch session or one meeting; these are relationships that are supposed to be nurtured.”
VolunteerCrowd’s service could not come at a better time. Recent events, including the college admissions scandal, where 50 people were charged with bribing college coaches and other insiders an estimated $25 million to get their children into elite schools, have shown how important it is to have verifiable extracurriculars on college applications. Additionally, as many universities – including the University of California System – will be phasing out the SAT and ACT requirements, students can rely on VolunteerCrowd’s service to stand out to admissions offices.
VolunteerCrowd, which has seen a spike in users amid stay-at-home orders, launched new features to support meaningful service during the pandemic. These new updates will make it even easier for students to find more educationally aligned internships, virtual volunteer programs and STEM-focused opportunities.
Learn more about VolunteerCrowd.
*Main graphic: Julie Kennedy, UCI Beall Applied Innovation