While the main focus of this website is to help volunteers find the information they need, we also want to make it easier for organisations to get exposure, as these pretty much go hand-in-hand. In particular, it is our aim to help smaller organisations make themselves seen. This article will outline some of the ways that this can be done here on the website. While a lot of organisations have added themselves to our free directory, few are aware of the many other ways in which to gain more exposure here on the site - and wider advantages of doing so.

Things You Can Do

Get a Certified Review for Your Organisation Listing

This is quite basic, and several of the organisations listed have done this already. There are two types of reviews available on VolunteeringInfo: the first is an uncertified or normal review, which anyone can add to an entry simply by browsing on to it and scrolling to the bottom of the listing, where there the review submission form is located. The second is a certified review, which is one that has been sent to us directly by a volunteer who the organisation in question can confirm has volunteered for them. Normally, these will be provided by volunteers who have agreed for the organisation in question to give us their e-mail so as to allow us to collect a review from them.

To arrange for a certified review to be added to your organisation entry, we ask that you send us an e-mail containing the contact details for at least one past volunteer of your organisation. We will then get in touch with them, preferrably by e-mail, and ask them to write a review.

Benefits for Your Organisation

The main benefits of supplying a certified review include:

• You will appear in searches where the "has certified review" search option has been set to "yes"
• A considerable amount of our search-engine visitors arrive through search terms including the phrase "review", making it more likely for organisations with reviews to gain visitors
• Upon adding a certified review, we will post an article to our front page containing a part of the review and a link to your entry, again leading to more exposure
• Since we are independent and not associated with any particular organisation, a certified review on our website will generally be more trusted than one provided elsewhere. Linking to this review from your own website may give more legitimacy to your reviews.

Get You Volunteers Blogging

We're always on the lookout for ways to give our visitors insight into the life of a volunteer. We are currently looking for future volunteers who would be willing to write a blog about their experiences right here on VolunteeringInfo. We would provide them with a customised blog, unlimited space for images, videos, text, etc, and a custom domain (e.g. hxxp://TheirName.volunteeringinfo.org - alternatively, if they own a domain of their own, we would be happy to point that to their blog). Further arrangements would be discussed through e-mail as necessary.

Benefits for Your Organisation

• Their blog would contain obvious links to your organisation entry and website, thus directing more traffic to both.
• As with certified reviews, it would provide a great opportunity for yourselves to link to an independent source of information about your organisation.
• News updates would be posted to our frontpage every so often, directing visitors to the blog, which would in turn direct more people to your organisation.

Get Yourselves Blogging

Volunteers are far from the only ones with interesting things to say about volunteering - organisations generally have a wealth of information on the subject. If you would be interested in blogging about your projects, news, future developments or opionions on political and social developments related to the countries you're active in, we would be more than happy to accommodate you with a blog space.

Benefits for Your Organisation

The benefits for this are much the same as above.

Write an Article

As you can read in the post below this, we are now accepting article submissions from our registered members. This is a great alternative to blogging if you don't quite have the time to undertake the writing commitments of a blog. Articles on anything related to volunteering or traveling are welcome, but our guidlines must be adhered to (please see the post below for further details on our guidelines).

Arrange Interviews

Our hunt for people to interview is never-ending, and we are always keen on asking a few questions to people with experience in the field of volunteering. Whether this person is a past, current or future volunteer of yours, your receptionist, or indeed the managing director of your organisation, we firmly believe that they can provide some valuable insights into volunteering, and would love to talk to them. To arrange an interview, first make sure that the person you're suggesting would be interested and is OK with you giving us their contact information, then get in touch with us to discuss the details. We generally conduct our interviews through online chat or e-mail, but we would also be happy to phone the person in question up if they prefer.

Benefits for Your Organisation

Once again, the interview would be posted to the front page and contain not only regular mention of your organisation, but a link to your entry here on the website. The more links that point to it, and the more often it is mentioned, the more visitors your are bound to get.

Write More & Update Your Entry Regularly

The more information you provide in your organisation entry, the more consideration you are likely to b given by visitors who browse on to it. An empty looking entry with only a few lines of text and no image is likely to be far less attractive to any visitor who stumbles on to it, and thus they are more likely to leave without giving your organisation the consideration it deserves. We provide several fields to fill with information, including a free text field where you can write absolutely anything you wish to share about your organisation, so there's really no excuse for empty-looking entries!

Updating your entry regularly and keeping up to date will ensure that users aren't confused with contradicting information here and on your own webite. Further, updating your entry lets us know that you're active and trying to provide our visitors with the most relevant information you have, which will make you more likely to appear in the Spotlight position.

That's it for now!

That's the end of this article, which has outlined some of the basic steps you can take to get more exposure on VolunteeringInfo. Future articles will go into more detail and provide further ways of maximising your chances of attracting the attention of the many potential volunteers who visit our website.

Here we go then, the first proper post in the VolunteeringInfo development blog.

New feature - article submission

We've had quite a few people, mainly other webmaster whose sites are in similar niches, ask us whether we accept content submissions. While we do - we've had lots of people write posts for us, Jay Chavez and her Jay's Journey article series, for example, as well as one-offs - the only way to send us stuff so far has been to, well, send us stuff.

Receiving the articles that way meant that we had to transfer whatever people wrote from e-mails and word-files to the website, though, which isn't the most practical/efficient way of doing things in the long run. So, as of a few weeks, some of our registered users have been able to submit articles directly to the site (they aren't published until approved by a moderator, however, in order to assure that they adhere to our guidelines). Since that test has worked out well, we're about to open the content submission up to anyone who's registered to the site - including new members.

So, what can you write about?

In short: anything to do with volunteering. If you represent an organisation, for example, you're welcome to send in an article about that. If you've volunteered and want to share your experience, send it on in! If you've tried to volunteer but couldn't find an organisation that suited you and want to have a rant about the cost of volunteering (or whatever else you feel is holding you back), send it in! While we can't guarantee that your article will be posted, anything that is related to volunteering in any way will be considered. If you article isn't accepted, it will most likely be because:
1) it's not about volunteering or even vaguely related to it,
2) it's offensive or
3) it didn't follow our general guidelines (which you can find on the article submission page, however you will have to register and log in before you'll be able to access it!).

You're also more than welcome to upload images to go with your article. Adding one is pretty similar to how you'd do it in word, except you have to upload it first. While it's all fairly straight forward, we will be adding a guide soon. One thing worth mentioning is that when you upload your images you've got access to most of our image folders; if there's one that seems to be a good fit for the image you're uploading, feel free to upload it to there. If not, you can either create a new folder (which is very similar to doing it in Windows) or simply upload to the default uploading location and we'll sort it out before publishing your article.

It's always a bit tricky to start these things, especially seeing as this is the very first post. The development blog is a new feature here on VolunteeringInfo, and the plan is for us to use it to share what's going on behind the scenes with all of our visitors. Since this wont be of interest to everyone who comes along, we decided to give the blog a face of its own rather than posting it straight to the front page.

While not every little thing we do will be posted on here - there would be little point in letting you know every time a news article is added, for example, since they go straight to the front page - the general idea is that this blog will serve as an insight into the website itself (new/upcoming features, changes, etc) as well as everything that goes on around it; partnerships with other sites, finding organisations, efforts made in climbing the rankings of the almighty google, etc.

That's pretty much it!