Meeting a need: Forgood founder Andy Hadfield
Forgood is an online volunteering portal that connects people with skills they wish to share to organisations or causes that need these skills. Chief executive Andy Hadfield describes the platform as “online dating for the social sector”.
“Our innovation is a technology platform that mobilises domestic resources. We facilitate the desires of citizens and the private sector to contribute to improving the lives of the poor, by increasing the scope and efficacy of their contribution, across the full spectrum of development challenges. We foster social and corporate citizenship.
“The majority of the world’s poor live in countries that for real impact, it is vital to mobilise all forms of domestic resources. These resources largely exist in the private sector. Encouragingly, many businesses in these countries realise that contributing to poverty reduction and development is good for business, building market and brand loyalty as well as increasing staff productivity, retention, skills and morale. While many give money, most fail to mobilise their most valuable resources: their human and infrastructural capital.
“This problem is exacerbated in smaller companies, which seldom have the human resources necessary to enable any structured contribution. While the desire to make a contribution often exists, implementation is mostly fragmented, inefficient and mismatched to local socioeconomic development challenges. This is the challenge that Forgood aims to solve.”
The organisation was first established in 2009 but the current format and business model has only been actively in place since November 2014. This necessitated a public re-launch at the beginning of 2015.
Citizens, companies and their employees are linked to an approved group of organisations when they sign up on forgood.co.za, enabling them to contribute their time, skills and goods to meet the actual needs of these organisations.
“Civil society is starting to find its voice again,” says Hadfield.
Organisations requiring civil assistance create a profile page, which includes background information, contact information, relevant marketing material, certification, audited financials, photos and stories. This gives them the option to create listings called “needs” for goods and services. This becomes accessible to users of the platform once it has been through an approval process.
Users can search for “needs” that match their skill sets or interests and find opportunities by location or organisation type and easily connect to the organisation through the site. This input allows Forgood to track the intervention to its conclusion and measure the impact. Users also have the option to create an “offer” of goods or services and specify the location and type of organisation the offer is available to, as well as any conditions the offer is subject to. These offers are matched to organisations on the database that meet the criteria and they are then able to liaise directly with the user. The quality of the interactions is managed by means of a dual rating system where users rate the organisations they have worked with and vice versa.
While the public platform is open to anyone who wants to make a difference, the unique business model employed by Forgood is the provision of a service to the corporate community that generates revenue by allowing companies to easily manage their corporate social investment (CSI) activities. They pay a monthly licence fee for this service, which allows them to create campaigns, manage needs and offers and generate real-time reports of employee activity.
“If you know enough about the role players, you can create a platform that connects the right skills to the right needs,” said Hadfield.
Forgood’s clients include industry leaders such as Discovery, Tsogo Sun and Makro among others. This platform presently makes 90 matches a week, connecting people with skills or resources to offer with causes they feel passionate about, enabling them to make a meaningful difference.
“Effective volunteering programmes can be powerful tools for building employee loyalty and brand affiliation,” says Hadfield. “Our dream is to use technology to bring scale to social problems, capacitating the developing world through the correct matching of resources to needs. We’re also blazing a path as a social enterprise. We believe in changing the world.”