How it works

Our aim with this website is to make it easy for people to give small amounts of time, and easy for community groups & organisations to benefit.  We wanted people to be able to arrange volunteering in minutes not months. 

Our service

We provide a web platform that makes it easy for people to give small amounts of time, and easy for community groups & organisations to benefit.  With Spots of Time volunteering can be arranged in minutes rather than months and without the  need for lots of forms and bureaucracy.

To do this we've created a set of bite-sized, fun activities; the kinds of things we'd normally share with friends and family but instead extending them out to the wider community. They're intended to add value for organisations and be the topping on the cake rather than being a case of volunteers running services.  We think this is where small amounts of time can be used best, to create enjoyable human moments that lift people's day. 

The clever bit is that the organisations only pick the activities they'd like to host and indicate when they can welcome people.  This means there's no need for a back and forth - people can only ever sign up to do something a local group wants and at a time that suits them.  So in that way our website can act as a way of matchmaking what people want to give with what people would like to receive.

We work with organisations that are interested in engaging volunteers in new ways and making use of the small spots of time that people can give.  We provide a flexible tool to make this process easier, we advise on how to reach out locally and get the best from using our site but we also believe that the groups we work with will be best placed to know who they want to reach out to and the best places to get the message out locally.

Our research

To inform our website we met with, listened to and tested with people who wanted to be more involved in their community and also with community organisations who could benefit from people's help. We discovered a number of important things that have informed everything we do.

For local voluntary and community groups: we found that many simply didn’t have the time and resources to respond to offers of help. Especially with economic times being hard people were busy keeping day to day services going. When we ran our first pilot without any technology to help us we saw this ourselves directly. Its hard to keep track of volunteers once you have more than a dozen and its incredible the number of phonecalls and emails you have to send to find a time, place and activity that suits both sides.

For people who want to give time: we found that many people did give informally when they were asked when it came to finding opportunities themselves they often struggled. Most volunteering options people were able to find required a long term commitment each week which whilst fine for some, put off others with family, study or work commitments. P

And on both sides: people didn't know what it would be useful to give or receive. Only when presented with options did people start to really engage - it seems a blank page can give all of us writers block hence our set of activities to get people started.