Platform uses big data to match Hong Kong volunteers with causes that need help
- This month is peak volunteering season, with initiatives for pets, pupils and the elderly among locals’ favourite causes to donate time to
- Those and other trends were revealed by Social Career, a platform using data to help link up volunteers and NGOs
Hong Kong has entered peak volunteering season, and initiatives aimed at helping pets, pupils and elderly people are among locals’ favourite causes to donate their time to, a data-driven platform has revealed.
The platform, created by the non-profit tech company Social Career, has revealed other trends as well. For instance, when Hongkongers choose a volunteering activity, their top priority is proximity to where they live. And the Lunar New Year season brings with it a downturn in volunteering, with do-gooders returning around Easter.
October and November, meanwhile, are the most popular months for getting out and lending a hand.
The Social Career platform uses big data to match local volunteers with the NGOs who need them.
Established in 2016, the platform provides a clearing house for volunteering opportunities on its mobile app, while its 20-member team analyses the data it generates.
That data, in turn, enables the platform to better match volunteers with their preferred activities and helps NGOs to recruit suitable help, says Social Career CEO Matthew Tam Chun-kit, a 43-year-old banker-turned-social entrepreneur.
“Data comes in to drive the balance between demand and supply,” he says, adding that NGOs sometimes approached Social Career to ask for help when they had difficulty recruiting volunteers.
Tam says more Hongkongers have taken to volunteering over the past two years, especially university and secondary school students. Some want to give back to society, while others hope to earn school credit, but they are increasingly willing to make longer time commitments rather than treating volunteering as a one-off.
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Social Career now serves about 800 NGOs, matching them with around 80,000 volunteers who have donated some 800,000 hours of their time between them. Many are students and young professionals.
But Tam says growth has slowed down, and the platform still has a long way to go before reaching his target of accumulating 1 million volunteers.
The coronavirus pandemic has proved to be a challenge too, with NGOs scaling back their volunteering offers because of social distancing, even though demand for them remains high, according to Tam.
The platform has begun thinking of new ways to cope, including by adding more opportunities to help out online and with “micro-volunteering” – a new trend in which people give only a little bit of their time, for example, by taking 10 minutes during their commute to help a student solve a maths problem.
Tam says that at the end of this month the platform will start featuring more lifestyle and personalised content, including by telling the stories of volunteers in photos.
Erwin Huang, associate professor of engineering practice at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, says Social Career is a good example of how data plays an increasingly important role in local social entrepreneurship.
“Data can help us replan our available resources and make their use more effective,” says Huang, who was a speaker at this year’s four-day Social Enterprise Summit earlier this month.
Huang notes there have been more data-driven initiatives among Hong Kong’s more than 10,000 social enterprises of late.
Using big data, such as the government’s population by-census statistics and even weather information, can help social enterprises bridge the gap between a community’s needs and the services that can address them. That, in turn, fosters a more holistic approach to meeting the needs of individuals and society as a whole, Huang says.
“Information technology has created the potential to match up two things in the right place to bring out their value,” he adds.
