Like many non-profit organizations, we are grateful for the volunteers who help us accomplish our goals and work toward our mission. Volunteers frequently help us at Community Nights or Carpe Librum booksales. Because of the pandemic, we had to cancel all our in-person programs which provided these volunteer opportunities. Thanks to a sponsorship from The Morris and Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation, we acquired a membership to Catchafire, a volunteer-matching service focused on increasing digital capacities of small non-profits.
For National Volunteer Week, we wanted to highlight three volunteers we connected with through Catchafire that have helped strengthen our programs and help us share our story with the public in general.
Revamping the Digital Hub
Turning the Page’s opportunity to utilize Catchafire could not have come at a more important time. At the beginning of the pandemic and the transition to remote learning, we knew we needed to create a new system to keep parents and families connected to resources. Our programming team spent the spring and summer of 2020 creating an educational resource database and brainstorming how best to share it with the parents and students we serve.
By partnering with Catchafire volunteer Katie McLaughlin, we were able to collaboratively create a system that works well for our team on the backend while appealing to users on the frontend. Katie helped us decide on the platform Edmodo to re-launch our Digital Hub and learned the ins-and-outs of the platform. She created helpful resources for our team about the best way to make posts and engage with families. Her patience, tenacity, and ability to anticipate even the most specific and detailed questions made her a fantastic volunteer.
Now, six months later, our Digital Hub continues to thrive. Parents can join our online community using either cell phone or email. In addition to connecting people, the Digital Hub will put all the tools that we use in one place, allowing us to connect with and support parents in an entirely new way. Set up to resemble social media, we can spread the word about school and community events and parents can engage with posts by liking, commenting, and participating in polls. Resources are both shared and stored, meaning that parents will not always have to dig or search for a specific post to find what they need. We have a full database sorted into categories most relevant to our families including math, social-emotional learning, science, literacy, and more.
Utilizing a Google Ads Grant
For our relatively small team, one of the most important contributions from Catchafire volunteers is the outside expertise they bring to the table. When Turning the Page received a grant to create ads through Google, we knew that our biggest hurdle was going to be learning the Google interface and how best to utilize it. As we interviewed volunteers for this project, we focused mainly on applicants with a strong background in Google Ads.
Nathan Kellan fit the bill. Nathan’s extensive experience (particularly with non-profits) saved us lots of valuable time in the beginning: rather than learn how to create and run ads through Google, we were able to simply create the content of our ads and get them up and running right away with his assistance. This was especially crucial in December 2020, when we were running a limited offer of “private shopping sprees” in our fundraising bookstores. We are continuing to use these ads to get more attention for both our programs and our upcoming booksales around the DC area.
Recreating Our Website
As with any business or nonprofit, we often greet the public first through our website (the one you’re looking at right now!). As we’ve continued to develop new programs like the Family Room and Mobile Meetings over the past year, we also decided we needed new ways to share these programs. To that end, we decided it was time to give our website a facelift. We are currently working with Courtney Trusty to create an entirely new website.
After a preliminary interview, Courtney helped us to think further about the purpose of our website and to clarify what information we need to share out. She sent us a few mock-ups of potential designs and structures and has been working hard to make sure all our content flows smoothly on the new site. Whether our audience wants to learn about recent programming events or upcoming booksales, we’re looking to make our new website as user-friendly as possible. This will be an invaluable development for us, as our website is often our most accessible point of contact for parents, students, customers, and donors. We are hoping to launch our new site within the next couple months and are excited for you all to see it!
As we begin scheduling out Carpe Librum book pop-ups in DC and Chicago, we’ll be looking for more in-person volunteers – learn more about how you can help!