Volunteer Opportunities

Our objective is to make sure volunteers are doing more than giving back (or for that matter “giving forward” but that they are also engaged in volunteerism that allows them to grow intellectually and emotionally while also improving their skills, and value to employers (if that’s a focus for the volunteer). Before reading the volunteer types, it may be useful to read about the Giving Forward business model and history of the idea.

Volunteers at Giving Forward get more than just the “warm fuzzies” of helping us help the world. We strive to structure volunteer projects so that volunteers:

  • Get to network with people who can give them their next job, or their dream job
  • Have a memorable experience interacting with a VIP, or being part of the team that does. 
  • Learn skills that will make them more employable or eligible for a raise in their “day job.”

What objective can we help you reach while you help us reach your objectives?

  • Project Manager: (this general purpose role is KEY!) Our projects have many moving pieces. The tech project managers tend to be scrum masters, while the editorial and marketing project managers can choose to use whatever method they think works best to move projects forward.

  • Social Media Manager: Much of the world revolves around social media. As the social media manager, you will create and deploy posts, set up editorial calendars, respond to mentions, stimulate conversations with influencers and celebrities and promote our brands.

  • Hollywood, Sports and Music Industry Liaison: Giving Forward’s GoodBuzz.org runs on celebrity content, both directly donated and facilitated via interviews with our content partner the Miss America Organization (interviews with Miss America and Miss Teen America). We also have stand-up comedians and other notable interviewers who co-create the content.

    Our nonprofit NFT team also brainstorms with celebrities and their publicists to find or create NFTs that we can sell to generate revenue for the celebrity’s chosen nonprofit.

    This role acts as a researcher, liaison, matchmaker and publicist to reach out to the celebrities through their publicists and directly. It’s a lot of fun, and requires good organizational and people skills.

  • Programmers: Our front end websites are often in WordPress, and therefore we have a great need for those who can make WordPress shine. That included modification of themes, configuration and modification of plugins and in some cases the development of plugins from scratch (more advanced). Design skills when combined with WordPress are particularly valuable.  In addition to WordPress related programming (Javascript/frameworks, HTML, CSS and PHP with a MySQL back end), we also have some projects that require development in other languages including Go(lang), Python and Node.js. To determine whether to assign you to the Core SCRUM team or one of the other projects, we’ll probably ask for you to do an assessment.

  • HR Manager: Giving Forward operates using volunteer power. Getting the right volunteers and having them work effectively in teams requires specialized volunteers skilled in recruiting, interviewing and people management.

  • Nonprofit Liaison: Coordinate with nonprofits to:

    • Get their celebrity supporters involved in content creation
    • Educate the supporting stars and their publicists on the GoodBuzz platform
    • Collaborate on events including NFT creation and sale.

    In addition for both virtual and in-person events we will “cover” and report on their fundraising events, and in some cases orchestrate the creation of content by their better known fans.

  • Marketing And Public Relations Intern

    We are looking for a volunteer marketing and public relations intern to join our team and help us launch our cause marketing platforms which will generate millions for other nonprofits. You will have administrative duties in developing and implementing marketing strategies, PR strategies, Social Media strategies and helping research journalists, bloggers and influencers. You’ll also be acting as liaison with influencers, celebrities, and businesses, gathering feedback on how best to create a win-win partnership which will help their selected nonprofit cause.

    You will collaborate with our marketing, PR and advertising team in all stages of marketing campaigns. Your contribution will help us hone our marketing channels, particularly earned media to generate the impressions, clicks and revenue that help the nonprofits we serve (which is nearly all of them).

    This internship will help you acquire PR. and marketing skills and provide you with knowledge of various paid and earned marketing strategies. Ultimately, you will gain broad experience in marketing and preparing you to enter any fast paced work environment.

    • Assist in marketing and advertising promotional activities (e.g. social media, web, eMail)
    • Prepare promotional presentations
    • Help distribute marketing materials
    • Manage and update company database and customer relationship management systems (CRM)
    • Help organize marketing events
    • Fully support company’s PR strategy and execute it in different phases
    • Create and curate engaging content
    • Communicate and build relationships with current or prospect clients
    • Effectively utilize company’s social media and blogs
    • Create and distribute press releases
    • Assist in administrative duties
    • Build and update media lists and databases
    • Perform research and market analysis activities

  • Copywriter / Writer / Publicist: Collaborate with content creators including those in Hollywood, Music and Sports. When interviews from VIP celebrities include newsworthy announcements or titillating moments, we then pitch those stories to other venues as “news” to be re-reported. Much of the news in both the regular and celebrity area is re-reported news where one venue breaks the story and all the others re-report with commentary. Similarly, as a platform, GoodBuzz.org, like Instagram will sometimes be so worthy that it gets coverage in other publications. 

    We also will be drafting press releases and social media posts.

  • Graphic Designers / Video Editors: Designers and video editors play a role in designing elements of our web presence and custom images for content, plus in creating marketing materials that we use to explain our cause marketing business model. Video editors take our more important video content and do light post-production work on them.

  • Ad Operations: We’ll need help with both forms of Ad-ops.

    1) Managing our PSA (public service announcement) inventory: We’ll have an opportunity to put IAB size banner ads on other publisher’s sites in unsold ad inventory. Those banner ads will lead folks who click to a Giving Forward site (probably Hollywood Herald to start)

    2) Monetizing the pageviews and video-views we get when readers arrive via any source (including having clicked on a PSA ad). We’ll test different mixes of ad exchanges and monetization providers.

  • Fundraising / Donor Development: Giving Forward plans to be self-sustaining, but that doesn’t mean we can’t do more good more quickly with donations.

    1) Crypto Millionaires: They got into BTC, ETH early and are sitting on millions in value. Sometimes they buy NFTs, and we hope they will also donate emulating the Pineapple Fund.

    2) Traditional philanthropists: While our preference is for them to allow us to help them multiply the impact of their currently planned donations to other nonprofit, we can certainly use a bit of help as well.

    3) Corporate philanthropy and CSR: Similar to traditional philanthropy our primary role is to multiply the impact of planned donations to other nonprofit, for some initiatives such as executing a large virtual concert we might look to gat some help.

  • Sales, Business Development and Marketing Intern

    We are looking for a volunteer who can help us source donations of products, services, special events and gift certificates which we can then create into a sweepstakes on SweepsForACause.org.  Our cause marketing platforms will generate millions for other nonprofits.

    This volunteer position / internship will help you acquire sales, business development and marketing skills and provide you with knowledge of various sales and marketing strategies. 

    • Identify prospect donors
    • Perform research and market analysis activities
    • Set up Zoom meetings to discuss a possible donation (you choose if you want to pitch or have senior management do it).

We may have missed some areas of our business in the list above and you may have some unique skill that you believe might be helpful in us realizing our objective of thousands if not millions in advertising driven donation revenue going to all sorts of worthy causes. If you are interested in any of the above or have additional ideas, please email volunteers at givingforward dot org. Feel free to include a resume, link to your LinkedIn and how many hours a week you plan to have available, as well as any pertinent information.

Business Donations: How you can help (Agencies, Design Professionals, Writers and Video Producers):

IAB size banner designs: We expect to procure several billion display media banner impressions within the media ecosystem to drive clicks to Herald Times. Regardless as to whether we get 10 million or billions of donated impressions, the banners we run need to be GREAT. That means a high CTR (clickthrough rate) is best. Engaging and provocative banners that border on click-bait, but remain tasteful so that the publishers donating the inventory feel that we have not detracted from the experience. We’ll need fresh banners regularly and the ones that deliver the highest CTR to the higher-yielding categories of articles will, of course, get the heaviest rotation. For details on what we need, see our BANNERS PAGE.

Run Our PSA Display Media Banners: We will even let you select the nonprofit that gets the “readers choice” 25% of our revenue when you include that nonprofit in the UTM of the landing page. There are several ways that you can run our display media advertising banners if you are an advertiser, an agency, a publisher, an exchange, a market research company or another player in the ad-tech ecosystem who needs a “g-fill” guaranteed fill ad as a PSA. To grab the banner creative and ad-tags visit our PSA page. The banner impressions we want are from a variety of scenarios, including but not limited to:

  1. Unsold publisher inventory: When bids for impressions don’t reach the minimum that the publisher is willing to accept typically there is an ad “trafficked” into “priority 14” in the publisher adserver. We’ll gladly take that slot and monetize on behalf on the nonprofit you pick
  2. Passback inventory: Sometimes an ad impression is passed back to the publisher adserver. (also into priority 14). We’ll take that passback
  3. Brand unsafe ad impressions: Often DoubleVerify, Moat, IAS or another technology will categorize the page of a publisher site as “brand unsafe” for a particular advertiser. We’ll gladly take that impression and monetize it for the nonprofit the publisher selects
  4. Advertising research “control” groups: When advertisers or their agencies want to measure the effectiveness of an ad, a targeting method or a particular large publishing deal, they take a small percentage of the purchased impressions and run a PSA. We’ll take that impression and monetize it on behalf of any cause.
  5. Abandoned impressions: Sometimes an ad exchange, SSP or other ad-tech player has been instructed to fill unsold ad-slots rather than pass-back the impression to the publisher (because the publisher has to pay the adserving company even if they serve a PSA). We’ll take that impression
  6. Catch-all PMP donated impressions: The programmatic plumbing in the advertising technology world is quirky. If an impression is about to get passed back to the publisher due to being unsold, if there is a PMP deal in place for a $.01 CPM with Herald Times / Giving Forward, that impression will come to us directly without pinging the publisher adserver again (at least that’s what the programmatic experts tell me). The idea is that as a publisher you don’t actually bill us the $.01 CPM but rather donate it. It’s a bit of a “hack” of the system that allows us to grab the impression without unnecessary passbacks and load on the ad-tech ecosystem. If as a publisher you need the $.01 CPM from Giving Forward, and your catch-all PMP sends us traffic that monetizes, we are open to that conversation. Of course, we’d prefer that you pick a nonprofit and put in in the UTM on the landing page and let us monetize on behalf of the causes you love while helping us too.

Contribute Content (agencies, writers, journalists, videographers, actors, influencers): If you have writing or video skills, talk to us about what you might be able to contribute. Generally, our category falls into one or more of these buckets. We’ll also tell you why we like each bucket.

  1. Re-reporting with light commentary: For the last several years, the majority of news stories in print or in video are re-reporting of a scoop by a different publication, broadcaster, newswire or government/corporate source. If you and your team have the ability to create great content that re-reports breaking news, we’d love to have a conversation. As a re-reporter (with light commentary), you get to pick the nonprofit that gets the 25% “authors choice” of the ad-revenue. After we launch the registration app, the reader picks their 25%.
  2. Op-Ed Submissions: These submissions may or may not reference existing news coverage and are similar to op-ed submissions at major newspapers.
  3. Interviews: We have a strong preference for someone notable or if less notable, able to provide a great quality interview) Some of us know someone famous, knowledgeable or notable. In your case, perhaps you know an “influencer” on YouTube, Twitch, Facebook, Twitter or Mixer. Better yet you know someone in:
    • Hollywood
    • Music
    • Sports
    • The Press: a broadcast journalist or traditional journalist
    • Politicians: local or national
    • Business (business celebrities or influencers, including nonprofit executives)
  4. Live coverage: (once things get back to “normal”) We plan to cover events, particularly charity fundraisers and other events where there is a red-carpet. Pictures and interviews at these events will form the basis for coverage. The Giving Forward (our parent nonprofit company) studios are across from Madison Square Garden, so once we have the publicists interested, we can have stars in music and sports pop across the street for a quick video interview.
  5. Win-Win Interviews: Can you orchestrate an interview (on Zoom for example) between two celebrities? For example, can you get the President and CEO of the ASPCA to interview Leonardo DiCaprio? Could you get Ariana Grande to interview Serena Williams? Arnold Schwarzenegger to interview J Lo? The topic is less important in cases where the celebrity is a big name. We are OK as long as it is a fun interview, authentic and only moderately self-promotional (think about the Colbert show). The celebs would agree upon a nonprofit cause and the Herald Times editors will tag the content with that cause name so that the more that interview is consumed the more revenue that cause gets.

If you would like to help, we’d love to chat. Drop us a note (volunteers at givingforward dot org).

Thanks.

Great content fills hearts with joy and minds with information. With Giving Forward, advertiser revenue fills nonprofit coffers.

Kevin Lee • President • Giving Forward