WebProNews

Tag: Volunteers

  • LinkedIn Teaches Non-Profits How To Use LinkedIn

    Every month, LinkedIn has employees take one Friday off to volunteer their skills for charity, help their local community, or focus on improving themselves. In the past, LinkedIn employees have held a Hackday for veterans, put on a multicultural “Top Chef” competition, and hosted a “WimbledIn” tennis tournament. This month, employees have organized to teach non-profits how to use the LinkedIn website to help jobseekers land a gig.

    Jessica Lau, a relationship manager at LinkedIn, detailed the volunteer work in a post on the LinkedIn Blog. LinkedIn’s May inDay was the LinkedIn For Good Foundation’s first Pro Bono inDay – days during which members of the foundation volunteer their skills. From the blog post:

    We have always been encouraged to volunteer at different organizations during our InDays and these experiences inspired my colleague Ariana Younai and I to take this May inDay to the next level by organizing an event around non-profits. Along with the support of our coworkers, we created a series of trainings to help jobseekers leverage LinkedIn to manage their careers, recruited our colleagues to volunteer, and worked with a few local nonprofits to conduct the trainings at their offices.

    Four workshops were hosted worldwide in Dublin, London, New York, and Mountain View, California. The Mountain View event was attended by non-profits such as Upwardly Global and Goodwill of Silicon Valley. LinkedIn employees trained non-profit employees how to find jobs and manage careers using the LinkedIn website. Volunteers also taught lessons on how to best position themselves on LinkedIn, given the current job market. The goal was to familiarize the non-profits with LinkedIn enough for the non-profits themselves to teach job-seekers how to use the site.

    All of these workshops are part of a LinkedIn For Good Foundation initiative to expand volunteer trainings globally, and sessions are being organized for other cities such as Toronto and Chicago. And, while volunteering promote and teach LinkedIn to non-profits might not be the most selfless cause a LinkedIn employee could devote his or her inDay to, it is certainly true that LinkedIn can be a potent tool for helping the jobless find work.

  • Mobile App for Volunteers Released

    Cabot Creamery, best known as the makers of “The World’s Best Cheddar” has developed a mobile app for volunteers. Reward Volunteers, created in conjunction with Chalo Inc., is the world’s first app designed to allow volunteers to log their hours, post them to Facebook, and garner rewards for their time, for themselves and their causes.

    Reward Volunteers users have the opportunity to win prizes by increasing their logged hours, sharing posts/photos and securing Facebook likes. Rewards include a Burton Snowboard, Cabot Cheese gift baskets, Green Mountain Coffee gift baskets, and lift tickets from Ski Vermont. Five individuals and five non-profit organizations will also be eligible to win $3,000 each.

    The free app is available on iTunes, as of Valentine’s Day. It works for iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, and as a web-based program at RewardVolunteers.coop.

  • Google Maps Visualizes The Path of the Joplin Tornado

    Google Maps Visualizes The Path of the Joplin Tornado

    It’s been an incredibly destructive tornado season in 2011, if you can pardon the understatement. Even after over 300 people were killed by tornado strikes in Alabama, the strike in Joplin, Missouri further emphasized just how devastating these storms can be. While the Joplin disaster did not take as many lives as the Alabama strikes, it’s doubtful there’s any solace in that fact for Joplin residents.

    The death toll in Joplin reached over 100 people, and while there have been some rather unfortunate responses from misguided politicians, by and large, reaction has been swift and heartfelt. There’s also a great deal of data-mining going on, as people flock to the Internet looking for whatever information they can find.

    On Google Maps, there’s a visualization of the path the tornado took while ripping Joplin apart. There’s also a map showing the various business and properties that were struck, both of which can be embedded.

    The tornado’s path:


    View Joplin, MO Tornado in a larger map

    Strikes:


    View May 22, 2011 – Joplin tornado strike in a larger map

    In the path map, the path is designated by fuchsia line, while the starting point is marked in red and the dissipation point marked in green. The placemarks indicate businesses and neighborhoods. The information contained here paints a disturbing, but educational video concerning the destructive power of tornadoes, as if the Alabama and Joplin aftermaths didn’t do so already.

    A hat-tip to the Ozark Storms blog for pointing the path map out.

    There’s also a YouTube video of the tornado’s storm cell formation, as seen from space. If it wasn’t so deadly, it would be beautiful:

    Another video shows the devastation from the eyes of a helicopter. Words cannot do the scenes justice:


    In case you need additional visual evidence of the mass destruction, here’s the before and after picture that’s blowing up on BuzzFeed:

    Aftermath

    After seeing these images, it almost breaks my heart to read about the federal government’s bickering over disaster funds, something the Kansas City Star detailed quite clearly:

    This brings us to a rather shameful debate now taking place in, of course, Congress.

    To its credit, a key House panel has approved an additional $1 billion in federal relief money to respond to a spring of natural disasters. But as soon as cries for help were heard, lawmakers pounced on the chance to make partisan points.

    House Republicans are starting to demand that disaster relief funds be balanced with cuts in other areas of federal spending, essentially using human tragedy to advance their political agenda.

    Thankfully, the scores of volunteers who’ve responded to the destruction caused by these tornado strikes don’t share the same kind of motivations.