Catchafire Launches Scalable Skills-based Volunteer Matching Service

For-profit Social Mission Technology Company Aims to Revolutionize the Way People Volunteer

News provided by

Sep 23, 2010, 01:21 ET

NEW YORK, Sept. 23 /PRNewswire/ -- Catchafire, a scalable professional skills-based volunteer matching platform, today announced the launch of its industry-changing Beta site. CEO Rachael Chong founded Catchafire to improve the quality of the volunteer experience by providing opportunities for people to volunteer their skills in a powerful way. Catchafire is revolutionizing the way people think about volunteering through its innovative user interface and matching algorithm that makes high quality matches between professionals who want to volunteer their skills and nonprofits and social enterprises that need their help. Catchafire wants volunteers to think, "What's in it for me?"

"Since the soft launch of our Alpha site in May, we have matched over 70 organizations with professionals who have volunteered over 3,000 hours to provide over $500,000 in services. Our new site will allow us to do this on a much larger scale," says Chong, who ranked first in this summer's Huffington Post Innovator Series.

Catchafire Beta was built by CTO, Andrew Lin, who came to Catchafire from Hulu.com where, as VP of Technology, he built Hulu from the ground up to the household name it is today in less than three years. "Catchafire Beta is a big step forward in its ability to make great volunteer matches. We have a built a brand-new set of tools and algorithms that can discover and categorize more information about our volunteers and organizations, allowing us to make more informed, higher quality matches," says Lin.

Some of Catchafire's new site features include:

Dashboard - users can now view and act on all of their Catchafire volunteer matches through a single page
Project Logs - users can now keep track of their progress on Catchafire Projects
Project Qualification Quizzes - volunteers are now required to pass a short quiz before they are approved for Catchafire Projects
Facebook Connect Login - users can now use their Facebook credentials to access the Catchafire site
New projects – users can now select new projects in areas including strategy, finance, technology, marketing, public relations, social media, multimedia, and design.

Catchafire is also rolling out its Corporate Solution which provides companies with a pipeline of skills-based volunteer opportunities for their employees and tracking and reporting tools allowing them to measure the impact their employees are having on their community.

"Catchafire is game-changing for the nonprofit community because, we can now find volunteers that provide us with the professional services that we've always needed but could never afford," said Shana Dressler, Executive Director of the Global Cocoa Project, which supports cocoa farmers around the world.

About Catchafire

Catchafire is a New York City-based for-profit social mission technology company that connects skilled volunteers with nonprofits and social enterprises that need them. Catchafire's volunteer projects are packaged as off-the-shelf solutions to address common organization needs and to make it easy for professionals to volunteer in the midst of their busy lives.

SOURCE Catchafire