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.

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