Climate Squad: from social media to social movement

V is an organisation funded by the Office of the Third Sector to promote and fund volunteering for 16-25 year olds. V came to Made by Many 8 months ago, asking us to create a vision for future volunteering with the expectation that digital engagement would reduce barriers to young people joining in voluntary action. In May we started working on Climate Squad, joint funded by V and Bank of America, as the first implementation of the strategy we defined with V.

What makes Climate Squad new and different is that the web forms the hub of a largely self-organising movement. Social media is supporting the creation of a youth-led campaign to tackle climate change: as well as enabling recruitment of volunteers it helps individuals (trained as leaders by climate organisation Global Action Plan) to organise and publicise their own events online, share the results and communicate their individual experience of volunteering. The target is to create 3000 opportunities over the next two years in a programme to help schools, businesses and local organisations reduce emissions.

Climatesquad.org.uk has a very economical structure driven by five core design principles: make it easy to enter volunteering (show what it’s like, what you can get out of it, easy registration and application); create a really simple user journey that incorporates the whole lifecycle of volunteering (from finding the right opportunity for you to applying and participating and ultimately sharing your experience); give a rich description of volunteering opportunities that includes pictures and opinions and people, so that young people know what they’re in for and can recognise people like themselves; enable volunteers to create a profile that also records their activity on and offline and creates a valuable history; and above all build a marketplace that connects the right volunteer to the right opportunity, enabling people to advertise their skills.

We’ve also made the data on Climate Squad highly portable by creating an API, so organisations can pull opportunity descriptions back into their own websites and allow people to search anywhere on the web that an API widget is embedded.

The really fantastic news (we think anyway) is that after just five two-week sprints of agile development Climate Squad is now out there and working well (153 volunteering opportunities signed up for in less than 2 weeks) and V has decided to accelerate its programme of change and give all of its flagship volunteering campaigns access to the new platform.

The platform still has quite limited functionality; it’s the essential kernel of the service which, as always with Made by Many agile projects, is the tightest standalone proposition we can create as a quick first release. Now we start building out, and we’ve just completed the first of six further iterations. In November we expect to be launching the full vinspired.com 2.0, with a lot more tools and functionality including new search filters and matchmaking for flagship campaigns (including Climate Squad) complementing the Do-it.org search; a data model that’s suited to both local and national organisations; a video profiling tool; online messaging; uploading video; Facebook integration; volunteer diary and awards; commenting and rating; multiple roles and an opportunity admin system built into the interface.

We’ll be writing more about the thinking and design strategy behind Climate Squad and the future V website over the next few weeks.