Starting your Online Volunteering

Starting your Online Volunteering

Being an online or remote volunteer can be a great value to charitable organizations.   It's a way for you to use your strengths and training, even your connections, to provide a service that many non profits can't afford.   You are essentially becoming the marketing and creative intern for our organization and our success depends on you.

However, online hours are not intended to be the easy way out.   It requires creativity, care, and organization.   You may also have to ask your court liaison if the judge will accept the remote hours.

You will have to document every task and include screen shots with time stamps.  If you are a blogger, you may want to create posts that can serve as a timeline.

This article is an introduction to the needs of our organization, EarthPaint.org.    We will continue to update our entire blog, giving you a step by step path to virtual volunteering success.

In 2015 we were hoping to create paying jobs for people with special needs so we started collecting unwanted latex paint.  Homeowners would drop off paint and we would teach our teammates how to sort and open cans, and then pour them into 5 gallon buckets, which would be available for people to purchase.  Within two weeks we had collected more paint than we could ever process with 4 people.



In 2017 we became our own 501c3 charitable organization and we were now able to collect donations and offer community service opportunities.  Oh yeah, by then we were collecting and processing 500 gallons of paint per month.    So we took things to the next level.

We opened a 4000 square foot facility designed from the ground up to provide work opportunities to more people with disabilities.   We now employ 10 adults with special needs, 2 job coaches and a safety manager.    But there is a roadblock,  all of our funding come from the paint itself,  which is not enough to sustain the organization or its growth, much less the marketing of our products.

Online service hours could be what we need to share our story with the world and encourage people to donate and sustain/grow our program.

We need help with the following and more...

• Sharing our social media and getting people to follow us on facebook, youtube, instagram,, twitter and more. 
• Sharing our products available for sale on Amazon and locally around Chicago
• Create marketing content for us that will help people understand what EarthPaint.org is and get them excited about us. 
• Introduce our charity to people who can project us to a mass audience.
• Write articles about us that could be printed in national publications or posed on popular websites.
• Create video content that we can use on our Youtube Channel.
• Produce music, jingles, or commercials that we can use to market our products.
• Rewrite these blog posts to be more effective.
• and whatever you can dream of that will draw support for our multiple causes. 

Please read our posts to learn how you can use your skills to benefit each other.

Here is a news story about us.   This will help you communicate our mission.

Youtube

We have a growing collection of videos that we post to YouTube.   Here is our Channel.

Above is an example of how well our paint works. We know that people want paint that covers well, that lasts a long time and washable.   We have all of that.    Ours also makes a huge impact on the environment and is made by adults with disabilities. 

We need help in a few ways.


We need subscribers!    We need your help to encourage people to subscribe to our channel so that YouTube will alert them when we post something new.  This is a link that will automatically Subscribe to EarthPaint.org Channel

If you have a way to encourage people to subscribe without tricking them, do it. 

You can make a video(s) of your own,  as an influencer.
We encourage creativity and fun.  We want people to want to watch our clips so they can learn about all the ways that we help.   An emphasis on buying our paint from Amazon may be just what we need to continue our missions.

This was a video that we made for GivingTuesday.   It is a funny spoof that got 14k hits.   It took about two hours to make.

There are a lot of ways that you can use your YouTube skills to help our charity!  

Amazon sales and Smile

Our Paint is on Amazon.com.  Click this link to see our product listing.  The fastest way to help is the share the products directly from our product pages, or sharing links.

We have worked hard to find a way to feature our paint on huge sites like Amazon.   Now that our products are listed and available for sale, we need help telling people to buy it instead of going to the big box stores.

Here are some compelling reasons to purchase our paint...

Despite the cost of 29.99 per gallon, we only net $2 per sale due to shipping cost and sellers fees.  But that is not the point.  The Point is selling paint that would have been in a landfill if it wasn't for us, and getting it back on the walls.

No only do we need top help the world know about our paint, we also need them to choose our organization on Amazon Smile.   If you didn't know about it,  click the Smile link.
People can contribute to our cause with just everyday shopping.

The most important thing to remember is, they have to save a bookmark to their smile page, shopping on regular amazon does not count.

Social Media

Using your social media to spread the word about EarthPaint.org


We all know that we are addicted to checking our social feeds.   You can help us by creating or sharing content that your network of followers will see.

EarthPaint Facebook Page    Like or Follow our page first.  We will have to verify your posts by seeing your profile, if you don't follow our page, we will have trouble finding you.

We are regular posters and many of our posts can be re shared to your page, or even better to pages of people that you know.     The most important thing to remember is that you have to post or repost regularly to make an impact.

It is encouraged to write a little something that people can read that helps them understand that you are working with EarthPaint.org and that the should take a few moments to read and react to your/our post.



You can add tags #EarthPaintOrg  and @earthpaintorg  so that we can see and be alerted of your posts.    The post above took about 20 minutes to draft, tag, location, and connect everything back to EarthPaint,  but then an additional hour to share to individual pages and even a few facebook groups.
After the post went live there was an additional hour responding to comments and questions, taking the time to direct people to www.EarthPaint.org  and also sharing the YouTube links (coming in another blog post)

This is just one option.   You can go as far as creating fundraisers for EarthPaint Org by adding donation buttons to posts or even to your birthday.

All of these activities add up to about 3 volunteer service hours if you calculate the original time and then several revisits to posts throughout the day.


This can be replicated with Twitter and Instagram, snapchat...  you name it.


Instagram,   We almost had to shut down our shop when our source of air circulation broke.   In an act of desperation, we made a quick post..
.
After a few posts on Instagram, we raised the money that we needed.   This is just an example of the effect that posts have.   We don't want you to make up anything or mislead people , but having a true and attainable need helps us in a profound way.


We currently have the need to replace the broken engine on our delivery truck.  This is a big one, because the repair price is $3500.   Using this picture, you could create a call to action that could stimulate donations.    Without this truck, we cannot attend recycling events that have made up a large portion of our income , which we use to pay our special needs staff.




Modifying images and coming up with hashtags took more than an hour when we did the post for the shop fan.   Creating a message and following up with questions takes even more time.

This is also a 3 to 6 hour opportunity if done well and repeated with variations of the picture, message/story and tags.   Again don't forget to tag us @earthpaintorg 


As long as your efforts are recorded clearly with a breakdown of time spent, hours can be awarded.





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Starting your Online Volunteering

Being an online or remote volunteer can be a great value to charitable organizations.   It's a way for you to use your strengths and training, even your connections, to provide a service that many non profits can't afford.   You are essentially becoming the marketing and creative intern for our organization and our success depends on you.

However, online hours are not intended to be the easy way out.   It requires creativity, care, and organization.   You may also have to ask your court liaison if the judge will accept the remote hours.

You will have to document every task and include screen shots with time stamps.  If you are a blogger, you may want to create posts that can serve as a timeline.

This article is an introduction to the needs of our organization, EarthPaint.org.    We will continue to update our entire blog, giving you a step by step path to virtual volunteering success.

In 2015 we were hoping to create paying jobs for people with special needs so we started collecting unwanted latex paint.  Homeowners would drop off paint and we would teach our teammates how to sort and open cans, and then pour them into 5 gallon buckets, which would be available for people to purchase.  Within two weeks we had collected more paint than we could ever process with 4 people.



In 2017 we became our own 501c3 charitable organization and we were now able to collect donations and offer community service opportunities.  Oh yeah, by then we were collecting and processing 500 gallons of paint per month.    So we took things to the next level.

We opened a 4000 square foot facility designed from the ground up to provide work opportunities to more people with disabilities.   We now employ 10 adults with special needs, 2 job coaches and a safety manager.    But there is a roadblock,  all of our funding come from the paint itself,  which is not enough to sustain the organization or its growth, much less the marketing of our products.

Online service hours could be what we need to share our story with the world and encourage people to donate and sustain/grow our program.

We need help with the following and more...

• Sharing our social media and getting people to follow us on facebook, youtube, instagram,, twitter and more. 
• Sharing our products available for sale on Amazon and locally around Chicago
• Create marketing content for us that will help people understand what EarthPaint.org is and get them excited about us. 
• Introduce our charity to people who can project us to a mass audience.
• Write articles about us that could be printed in national publications or posed on popular websites.
• Create video content that we can use on our Youtube Channel.
• Produce music, jingles, or commercials that we can use to market our products.
• Rewrite these blog posts to be more effective.
• and whatever you can dream of that will draw support for our multiple causes. 

Please read our posts to learn how you can use your skills to benefit each other.

Here is a news story about us.   This will help you communicate our mission.