April is National Volunteer Month. I recently completed a web usability audit for a nonprofit through Catchafire.org. For those not familiar with Catchafire (and I only recently discovered them), they match volunteers with nonprofits for remote tasks.

When a nonprofit has a project they need completed, say a website design, they post the project on Catchafire. Volunteers can then search through projects and apply to volunteer for the project.

If the nonprofit is interested, a 30-minute phone interview  is scheduled through Catchafire’s scheduling system. The interview is more a conversation to determine if there is a mutual fit between nonprofit and volunteer. After the interview, the nonprofit and volunteer can either accept or pass on the project.

If both accept, the project begins. Once the project is complete, the volunteer and nonprofit mark it as complete on their respective dashboards and can leave comments.

I am impressed with the Catchafire system. It is an easy way to discover projects which match your interests and skills to help a nonprofit by volunteering your time and expertise. Based on their 2019 impact report, Catchafire saved over 2,000 nonprofits more than $26 million from 138,303 volunteer hours.

Catchafire’s 2019 Impact

And that was just in 2019! Those are dollars that nonprofits desperately needed to fund their missions. Without Catchafire, the projects likely would not be completed or other critical areas of mission would not be fulfilled.

Catchafire is likely to grow in impact. There are 84,000+ registered volunteers, contributing an average of $5,200 in volunteer services. It is a great benefit to  nonprofits and the communities they serve. I believe it is a great benefit to the volunteers as well. It certainly is for me.

I enjoy getting to know about all the great work being done by nonprofits, and help them toward achieving their missions by providing my design skills and experience. I enjoyed the process so much that I have volunteered for a new project, designing a website for another nonprofit.

If you would like to learn more about Catchafire, to either post a nonprofit project or volunteer, you can visit catchafire.org.