Starting a website

May 31, 2006 10:09 AM

Help on starting a community service website?

I needed to get community service hours for my high school but couldn't really find anywhere to volunteer. So I decided to make a website that lists opportunities for high schoolers like me to volunteer. It would be kind of like craigslist but targeted towards kids in high school and maybe middle school. I'm sure there must be other sites similar to this so I need to find a way to make mine stand out. Where do I start? Should I call nonprofits and organizations?
Also, could I provide advertising space to pay for the domain name? And donate any extras to charities?

posted by joshuak to computers & internet (3 comments total)

VolunteerMatch and NetworkForGood are two sites I know of that offer the service you're describing; their advanced search also has the ability to restrict matches to Kid and Teen welcome organizations.

Maybe instead of starting from scratch, there might be a way to aggregate their results in some sort of "Kids Only" volunteer site. You might be able to even localize it to display search results near specific high schools so kids could come and just type their school name and get a list of places to volunteer.
posted by Loser at 11:19 AM on May 31, 2006

I agree with you that there must be other sites similar to this, so a good first step would be to find those and understand how they work. See what they do well, and see if there are things that they can do better.

In terms of making your site stand out: the easiest way to do that is probably to target your local community. That way you can make it more relevant for your local high school students and for the local non-profits that will benefit from it. It will also make it easier to collect the listings from non-profits (just call them all, and follow-up with a form for them to fill out), and advertise the site (let your high school know).

You might be able to get some of the larger non-profits to provide sponsorship. Given how cheap bandwidth and hosting are these days, that shouldn't cost much.

If you want to go national, then you're looking at something much more sophisticated. You should see if it already exists --- targeting high school students. If it doesn't, then look at the volunteer sites that target other groups, and build your own tailored to high school students.

This could be a great resource. Good luck!
posted by alms at 11:20 AM on May 31, 2006

Another site that you might want to check is Idealist. They have a section for both volunteers and kids/teens.
posted by kimdog at 12:34 PM on May 31, 2006