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Volunteer Opportunities for UX Designers or Developers

· Posted by Mike in UX and tagged , · 4 Comments

code-for-americaPhoto Credits: Code for America

We spend years developing skills and craft to further our careers. That experience becomes a valuable resource that may be put to good work in the form of volunteer time or pro-bono work for nonprofit organizations.

Individually, some of us get opportunities to help others by word of mouth referrals. If you're a UX designer or developer looking for ways to provide your expertise to organizations needing assistance, or a nonprofit in need of some design time, try some of these sites that may help you find the right match.

Conferences

Conferences focussed on matching design/development expertise with nonprofits are a great way to see who's doing what, and talk to a lot of people in one place. There are a handful of well-known events that draw a diverse crowd.

The Feast, for example, inspires with the stories of organizations successfully doing work to improve the world, and then puts immensely talented tech people in the same room with organizations focussed on this meaningful work.

The Nonprofit Technology Conference (NTC) is a conference focussed on Tech projects in the nonprofit sector. The event brings together a large number of organizations in its network, to foster sharing information and collaboration. Networking events at the conference, we're told, are one of the best ways to find out more about a lot of organizations in the nonprofit sector doing work that may interest you.

Searching for Volunteering Opportunities

If you're just starting to do your research about volunteer opportunities, or simply know what type of organizations and work you'd like to contribute to, these sites feature events or listings of volunteer opportunities.

  • Catchafire - Matches professionals to mission driven organizations in need.
  • Code for America - Organizes and builds open source software to improve government services using volunteers. One page provides specific issues that can be worked on.
  • Community Corps - A skills-based volunteering program that matches technology professionals with schools and nonprofits. Organizations request volunteers and the Community Corps lets volunteers search for specific opportunities related to skill. Mostly technical, but there are some categories like website review, which would be relevant for people who do usability evaluations.
  • Geeklist Hack4Good - Organizes hackathons to build solutions to humanity’s greatest problems.
  • Hackathon for Social Good - Organizes hackathons to build web and mobile applications for nonprofits.
  • Volunteer Match - Volunteering site that lets volunteers search for opportunities by cause and locale. Doesn’t provide any match of ability to need.

If you know of any other resource that would be helpful to include in this list, please email us at support@balsamiq.com! We'll be maintaining an ongoing list of resources for volunteering and finding volunteers for nonprofit work.

Mike for the Balsamiq Team

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Comments (4)

  1. Umm, Great Post!!! Thanks a lot for sharing

  2. catchafire.org is another good one