Do-it Trust announces partnership with LinkedIn

On the 6th of February 2015 – Do-it will be supporting LinkedIn’s new set of features to help UK charities find and connect with skilled professionals who want to donate their professional expertise and time.

Have you noticed that there is a new feature on your LinkedIn profile? It’s the Volunteer Experience & Causes section.

As a professional, you can now share your skills on your LinkedIn profile by ticking t he boxes “joining a nonprofit board” and/or “skills-based volunteering”. You can even say which organizations you are supporting.

In partnership with LinkedIn, Do-it, the UK’s national volunteering database, now provides professional volunteering opportunities from Do-it.org to fill the new system with relevant volunteer opportunities.

The Volunteer Marketplace puts charities in touch with relevant LinkedIn members who have expressed an interest in volunteering. Whilst professionals will now be able to browse thousands of specific, high quality volunteer opportunities that non-profit organizations are seeking to fill. You can decide to volunteer in a lot of sectors such as education, environment, health & social care, poverty etc. You can then include those experiences on your LinkedIn profile.

“We are tremendously excited to be working with LinkedIn to offer yet another way of bringing skilled volunteers to the organizations which need them. As a collaborative organization, we are proud to have added this partnership to those already announced with Third Sector and The Guardian and we hope to work with others in the future to make volunteering a genuinely mainstream activity.” said Dave Amos, Development Director of the Do-it Trust.

The Volunteer Marketplace was first introduced in the US a year ago, since then the number of volunteer positions available on LinkedIn has increased from 500 to more than 30,000.

Over a quarter of a million UK professionals have already signaled an interest in volunteering on their LinkedIn profiles and, with 17 million members across the UK, many more are expected to sign up.

Ariel Eckstein, Managing Director of LinkedIn EMEA, commented “Talent is just as critical to the charity sector as it is for businesses, and charities often struggle to find the right fit skilled volunteers and trustees. We have hundreds of thousands of professional members who want to volunteer their skills but, until now, there was no easy way for them to connect with charities through LinkedIn.”

Jamie Ward-Smith, CEO of the Do-it Trust, added “This is a fantastic opportunity for small, community groups and regional charities to find the skills that they need in these challenging times, by publicizing their opportunities for free on the world’s biggest professional networking site.”

Now we all know what we have to do on our LinkedIn profiles!

Little by little, a little becomes a lot –Tanzanian proverb

About Do-it Trust: It is a registered charity which runs the site to promote volunteering in the UK launched in 2012 with the aim of modernising volunteering and social action through the use of new and emerging technologies.