Join us for the San Francisco Net Tuesday on September 9:
Involver: How Nonprofits Can Create Video Campaigns for Social Networks.
There is enormous potential in using the Internet to marshal the resources of faith-based communities to more effectively provide social services to under-resourced communities. Faith-based organizations make up 22 of the top 100 nonprofits in the USA, and over 90% of these organizations’ budgets are focused on social services. Faith-based volunteers in the USA provide over $51.8 billion in volunteer time each year. Christian organizations globally have a combined budget of $390 billion, and Christians together have a combined income of $18.17 trillion. Our vision is to use the Internet to greatly increase the amount of these resources that is going toward social services serving under-resourced communities.
Over the next ten years, the goal of our TechMission Online program is to use the Internet to deliver over $700 million in resources from the faith-based community to provide social services to under-resourced communities. Over the next 10 years, this will include serving over 50 million web visitors, placing 1 million volunteers, providing 150,000 items of creative commons content for nonprofits, providing nonprofit college courses to over 6,500 students and funding 700 full-time interns. The end goal is that these increased resources would enable organizations to serve millions more individuals in under-resourced communities, with hundreds of thousands of individuals participating in youth programs, being placed in jobs and college, receiving educational certification and participating in rehabilitation programs.
TechMission Online is a mashup utilizing partnerships with the largest Christian social service organizations in the world that serve over 15 million individuals from low-income communities each year. Our partners include the Salvation Army, the Association of Gospel Rescue Missions, World Vision, Youth Partners Net, Christian Community Development Association, Urban Youth Workers Institute and thousands of local social service agencies. We enable these partners to rebrand our online volunteer matching service and Web 2.0 portal to serve their individual communities. This enables us to provide a common database of opportunities and set of tools across many different partners. We also provide both Christian and secular brands of our online services so that we can effectively target Christian social service organizations while also providing resources without faith-content to other communities.
TechMission Online integrates thousands of faith-based social service organizations into our open source system which is a mashup using Drupal, Moodle, CiviCRM, Google Maps, Amazon, Flickr and YouTube. It includes:
•A directory of over 2,000 faith-based social service organizations mashed with Google maps to show where these services are offered. Goal: 10,000+ organizations in 5 years.
•A directory of 2,600+ volunteer opportunities in FBOs which will soon be a mashup with Google maps to show their locations through www.ChristianVolunteering.org (Christian brand) and www.iVolunteering.org (secular brand). Goal: 25,000 opportunities in 5 years.
•A Web 2.0 portal for the faith-based social services sector through www.UrbanMinistry.org (Christian brand) and www.UrbanResource.net (secular brand). The site Wiki contains 5,600+ free creative commons licensed workshops, podcasts (iTunes), videos (YouTube), documents, books (Amazon), Stock Photos (Flickr) and curriculum materials (goal: 25,000 items in 5 years). We have partnered with the top faith-based social service conferences to provide an archive of audio, video and materials of 15+ years of workshops on nonprofit training.
• www.CityVision.edu is our accredited online college integrated with the above services that provides courses in nonprofit management targeting the faith-based social services sector. Course materials are provided for free online under a creative commons license.
TechMission has 18 full-time staff and 40 full-time interns that help provide technology resources and online services to the faith-based social services sector:
•Association of Christian Community Computer Centers (AC4) is the largest group of faith-based organizations addressing the digital divide with over 400 member organizations. Last year, these organizations served 69,716 participants with 19,890 taking computer classes, 4,749 receiving computer certifications, 1,625 being placed in college, 3,933 being placed in college and 1,238 receiving GEDs.
•TechMission Corps provides 40 full-time AmeriCorps members to serve in after-school programs serving at-risk youth.
•ChristianVolunteering.org has placed over 2,000 volunteers since it started in 2006.
•UrbanMinistry.org currently has 10,000 users and over 5,600 items of content.
• www.SafeFamilies.org provided free online safety training and software to 74,055 families in the past year.
For this project, we have 5 full-time programmers/designers that work on the site and 5 staff that manage content, partnerships and volunteers. We need additional funding to continue to sustain these staff and to hire additional staff and consultants. We could use some additional consulting support in Drupal, Moodle, CiviCRM, PHP, JSP and SQL.
We also need partnerships with other online social change organizations that view us as complementary to their services. We need introductions to these potential partners as well as to corporate foundations and other potentially interested funders.
On a technical level, we still need to finish the integration of our volunteer opportunities into Google maps.We would also like to add a Mashup that would enable us to automatically display local volunteer opportunities and maps to users based on their IP address. We would also like to integrate our portal with Google Translate to auto-translate our content into other languages.
www.urbanministry.org/civicrm/profile?reset=1&gid=21&force=1 ORG MAPS www.urbanministry.org/wiki/encyclopedia-urban-ministry WIKI
www.christianvolunteering.org VOLUNTEERS
www.urbanministry.org WEB 2.0 PORTAL www.urbanministry.org/faceted_search/results/taxonomy:120 AMAZON www.urbanministry.org/image FLICKR www.urbanministry.org/faceted_search/results/taxonomy:116 YOUTUBE www.urbanministry.org/urban-ministry-podcasts ITUNES
www.cityvision.edu ONLINE COURSES