Volunteering Gets an Extreme Makeover
Life-Changing ABC Show Promotes Foundation's Web Tool to Viewers

By Katherine Watier

The Points of Light Foundation & Volunteer Center National Network are working with the Walt Disney Company, the parent company of ABC and its Extreme Makeover: Home Edition show to help connect potential volunteers with Volunteer Centers and opportunities in their community. 1-800-Volunteer.org will serve as the volunteer matching service for the show's community service portal, ABC: A Better Community. This partnership reflects the Foundation's commitment to making 1-800-Volunteer.org the premier volunteer matching and management portal - providing Volunteer Centers with national promotion for their posted opportunities, and ways to increase the number of potential volunteers.

Extreme Makeover: Home Edition is a top-rated reality show that focuses on remodeling homes for needy families. Increasingly, the program has become cause focused and receives a significant number of requests from reviewers wanting to know what they can do to help. The show has generated an influx of people interested in helping the individual families featured on the program, and others like them. In response, the Extreme Makeover team agreed that it would be more effective to connect their viewers to organizations that support either the featured cause(s) or volunteering in general.

1-800-Volunteer.org has experienced a spike in web traffic (26%) as a result of this promotion, and our users have seen an increase in the number of volunteers registering with their Volunteer Center. Response from organizations using 1-800-Volunteer.org was very positive.

"When we first heard about the upcoming Extreme Makeover: Home Edition promotion, we used one of our volunteers to call all our organizations to tell them. The response was tremendous. The organizations perceived this as a fabulous opportunity to advertise their volunteer opportunities. They were awed to learn that the database was to receive national television recognition," mentioned Lynn Tracy the Community Resource Specialist for the United Way of Lake County in Gurnee, IL.

1-800-Volunteer.org is the total volunteering solution, built for Volunteer Centers by Volunteer Centers, designed to increase the efficiency and quality of volunteering in local communities. Now Centers can utilize the most comprehensive system available for recruiting and engaging Spanish and English speaking volunteers, mobilizing volunteers during disaster situations, communicating with the public, and meeting the complex needs of nonprofit organizations.

What began as a complementary volunteer referral system through the national 1-800-Volunteer telephone hotline, 1-800-Volunteer.org is the evolution of the collaborative work of the Points of Light Foundation & Volunteer Center National Network. Much more than matching technology, this volunteer recruiting and management service is customized to position Volunteer Centers as the hub of the volunteering community while providing powerful tools for those they serve: volunteers, nonprofit organizations, and the causes they champion.

To learn more about the 1-800-Volunteer.org system, contact Katherine Watier at KWatier@PointsofLight.org or call 202-729-3231.