Skills for Good (SFG) is a youth-led ground-up initiative that matches skilled volunteers to meaningful projects with social organisations.
I came across SFG in a mass electronic direct message (EDM) sent to our university cohort and was simultaneously impressed and surprised such an initiative didn’t already exist in Singapore. I applied to be a volunteer with them, indicating my skill sets, and within a week, they got back to me with a personalised list of volunteering projects I could apply for. After duly applying for 2 projects and having an introductory “chit-chat” session with 3 SFG team members, I later received a thoughtful email about the volunteer quota on both projects being maxed out and that I wasn’t included in those quotas. I was, as expected, disappointed at the outcome, but again, impressed that they had such standards for their deliverables despite them all being on a voluntary basis. I replied, asking for more details about why my application wasn’t successful and offered to interview their founders about how SFG started, out of my own interest. They emailed back, with truthful and specific answers to my queries, and took me up on my interview offer.
So, here I am, one Saturday afternoon, on a Zoom call with Isaac Phua and Ellie Lew, two of the six SFG core founding team members, to talk about how SFG started, their greatest challenges and some advice for future social entrepreneurs.
For those who are unfamiliar, what is Skills for Good (SFG) about?
Isaac: In short, Skills for Good is a ground-up initiative that helps to connect skilled volunteers with social organisations, be it non-profit organisations (NPOs) or social enterprises, to do skills-based volunteering projects. The whole idea was started because we realised that more and more non-profit organisations and social enterprises were suffering from the lack of digital operations – digital in the sense of marketing or operations – and they’re not very familiar with how to use webinars or Zoom to conduct their day-to-day operations. And that’s why when Covid hit, it affected a lot of non-profits really hard – many of them had to stop their programs, had their funding cut… At the same time, a lot of individuals, especially students, have skills but were not able to find internships because of the Covid situation and because, you know, “work from home”, so you can’t go out and do a part-time job. We felt that we could be the intermediary to try and close that gap on both sides and create some social good. So, that was how the concept of the Skills for Good initiative came about.
Was there a specific social organisation that brought this to your attention? Was it based on any of the founders’ personal experiences?
Isaac: Mm… There was no specific social organisation…
Ellie: Yeah, when we started out…
Isaac: It was more from a volunteer-centric perspective. We felt that a lot of students weren’t getting any kind of jobs during the summer period.
Ellie: And to add on, because I'm in WSC [Nanyang Technological University’s Welfare Services Club (NTU WSC)], all the RSPs [regular service projects] stopped their programs.
Isaac: So, a lot of the students had the free time, we thought that maybe they could channel their skill sets and free time to helping social organisations. We kicked off a survey to 120 NTU, SMU and NUS students to understand what people’s interests in skills-based volunteering were, what type of skill sets they could contribute, etc. And we realised a huge percentage, like 90%, of all these students said that they're interested in skills-based volunteering. At the same time, we were doing a bit of online research, and saw that a lot of NPOs were suffering from the Covid pandemic and then we started reaching out to them to try and understand what their pain points were. We spoke to a couple of organisations, like Breast Cancer Foundation, Lakeside Family Services, and CampusImpact, and they told us that they were suffering from a lack of digitisation, and that’s when we thought, “Okay, you know, they could” [bringing his hands together], “then we could come in as an intermediary.”
How did y’all meet or get in touch with one another? Specifically among the co-founders, because not all of you are from NTU right?
Isaac: Okay, uh, that’s a funny story. Ellie and I are good friends, and she was the one who came up with this idea because she saw this gap in the market, so she communicated it to me and I thought, “Wow, this is quite an interesting idea.” I spoke to a friend, Kai Jin, who’s another one of our co-founders, who was really interested in starting up a company, like an SME or a start-up. He thought that this was an incredible idea, and it was worth working on, and the 3 of us came up with the survey. Then, as we started to grow bigger and bigger as an organisation, we realised there were other gaps we needed to fill…
Ellie: Yeah…
Isaac: We needed someone to help out with marketing, someone for technology, etc. so we started to bring in our friends. Kai Jin brought his friend along, like Peilin, then I brought in my friend Clarita, who I knew from Conjunct [Consulting], which is a non-profit consultancy firm. Peilin then brought in her friend, Ruyan, to anchor volunteer management… And that’s how we established ourselves, and as we grew even bigger, we realised our operations needed even more people, so we brought in more friends from SMU and NUS.
What did y’all find surprisingly easy, and/or difficult during the initial stages of starting SFG?
Ellie: Hmm, the easy part… was getting interested and capable people to join our team. Our cause was quite strong, and we had quite well-linked connections, be it in the social sector, marketing, or in tech. So, that was one of the easier parts of our journey.
Isaac: Yeah, finding people to join the call, forming Skills for Good management team, was probably the easier part of it. What we found exceptionally challenging was building our first website…
Ellie: Yeah.
Isaac: Thinking about the different features, the process flow, how to get volunteers on board… the user experience… Yeah, we spent hours on research…
Ellie: Like many weeks… hahaha…
Isaac [nodding]: Yeah, many weeks… Researching different types of competitors, what the different service offerings were, before we came up with this. And this was only our beta version of the website… Our tech lead, Clarita, has a final vision in mind, and she’s slowly gonna build it up. The final form of the website will function like a platform, where volunteers can just sign up, select projects, and apply for them. So, it doesn’t have to be through an EDM, you know?
Ellie: And the matching [between volunteers and skills-based projects] will be done automatically by an algorithm we’re gonna build.
Isaac: Social organisations can also just create the project on the website itself – our key goal is to make skills-based volunteering seamless for both target audiences.
Ellie: Correct, and for everyone to get a chance to volunteer.
You guys mentioned you did some research… So, what are some similar organisations or “competitors”, and how would you differentiate yourself from them?
Isaac: There are a few in mind when you think about skills-based volunteering, the top-of-mind would be Empact, where they try to find professional volunteers to help out social organisations and they focus a lot of their services on things like… uh…
Ellie: Shared services.
Isaac: Mm, shared services, which are accounting or HR services – compulsory for organisations to have – and they charge a low cost for that. So that’s their key service. But they also focus a lot on helping corporations plan skills-based volunteering events for non-profit organisations. We tried to differentiate ourselves from them by becoming more like a platform or an application where you can apply for projects easily and for social organisations to create projects. So that was on one front, skills-based volunteering. But from the platform side, there are a couple of similar platforms out there, like the government platforms – Giving.sg, SG Cares. There’s also a volunteer switchboard… And Bantu, that basically has a web platform, where people can apply for volunteering projects. But the key gap that we saw in the market was that these platforms offered very event-based, not skills-based, opportunities.
Ellie: I mean they do offer all kinds of volunteering, but it’s very hard for NPOs sieve through all the volunteers of varying skill levels to do quality design work, for example. And they won’t know whether or not they are actually good, because it’s just a platform. There’s no matching involved here. So that’s something that we wanted to do. We wanted to provide a go-to platform where NPOs, social service agencies, if they need any help regarding skilled gaps, like marketing or graphic design, then they can come directly to us.
Isaac: Then we can reach out to capable volunteers like yourself.
Ellie: Hahaha…
Isaac: Then you can help.
Okay… [smiling] What have been some of the most rewarding moments y'all have experienced since starting SFG?
Isaac: I have to say there were two very key rewarding moments, so the first was when we launched our website and then our sign-up list [gleaming with joy] and we got over 400 people that signed up over a period of 2 days.
Ellie [very happy]: Yeah!
Isaac: We were very shocked… We weren’t expecting such a huge inflow of demand.
Ellie: Yeah, we were actually expecting around 50 – that was our internal target…
Isaac: Yeah, 50! And we overshot that by 8 times! So that was really amazing to see the kind of passion youths like us have, and the interest in serving social organisations. That was amazing... That was number 1. I think number 2 is the results that we bring to social organisations. After we put volunteers such as yourself on projects, we tend to check in on the social organisations very frequently, so about twice a month, or sometimes even once every month. And when you get really good reviews from these social organisations, you feel like, “Wow, this initiative is really bringing a lot of positive impact to people.”
As of now, how many volunteers do you have in your network, and how many organisations do you keep in contact with?
Isaac: I would say total volunteer pool would be about 400 and we’re now trying, because we’re still a small organisation that started only two months ago [in April 2020], to get as many projects as possible to let everybody have a chance. I mean you’ve been through the process yourself, you apply then sometimes there’s just very few slots, so we try to give everybody enough projects so that they’ll have a chance. So now we have about 400 volunteers and for social organisations, we’re keeping in close contact with about 12-13 social organisations. And each organisation can give us 1 to 3 skills-based volunteering projects.
Okay, what do you like and dislike the most about running SFG?
Ellie: Hmm, personally, I like how our core team is really very passionate. We would meet many times a week, just to talk about what direction we are going, and how to provide more opportunities for volunteers, how to provide more help for social organisations, that’s something that I really like – the passion, and commitment of the team members. Uh… dislike for me, it’s the many meetings that we have to go through every week. Hahaha…
Isaac [laughing too]: The likes and dislikes are the same…
Ellie: Yeah, because most of us have full-time internships, so on weekdays, you already have to deal with so many things at work, then at night you need to do more work… It’s enjoyable talking to people but actually doing the work, it’s very tiring, but at the same time it’s very fulfilling too.
Isaac?
Isaac: Uhh, for myself, I think what I like the most is the opportunity to get to speak to a wide range of people – you get to talk to volunteers, you get to communicate very frequently, as Ellie has stated…
Ellie: Haha…
Isaac: …to the Skills for Good management team, and yeah, you get to talk to a lot of social organisations, understand how everyone is dealing with Covid… You get to learn a lot on a weekly basis, just by speaking to so many people. What I dislike would be how this whole Skills for Good initiative is almost 24/7 work for me… Because you have to frequently reply to clients whenever they ask for anything, to volunteers whenever they have questions or to schedule interviews, and to the management team for internal communication. It can be quite draining after a while. And I didn’t expect it to be like this when we first started. Yeah… so you really have to think a lot about what you’re trying to achieve as an organisation and why you’re doing this, to fuel you through the process.
Ellie: Yeah, correct. And it takes many, many hours to think of what to do, how to provide the best experiences for both social organisations and volunteers alike. That’s really very challenging.
Isaac: Yeah.
Mmm… Where do you see, or how do you envision SFG in one year?
Isaac: Wow, that’s an interesting question…
Ellie: We do have a plan…the KPIs that we wanna reach…
Isaac: I think… within one year, we want to have achieved three things: [counting off his fingers] more projects, more volunteers engaged, and more social organisations coming on board. So that we can create…
Ellie: A wider network.
Isaac: Yeah, and how we’re planning to achieve this is to develop our website, until its final form, where it’s a functioning ecosystem – potential volunteers can easily sign up for projects and social organisations can easily create a skills-based volunteering projects whenever they need the volunteers.
Ellie: And for it to be scalable as quickly as possible.
Isaac: Yeah.
What advice can you give to anyone who wants to start an organisation with a social cause?
Isaac: For me it would be 2 things. The first, you must have a very strong purpose, because you don’t get any kind of money out of it, there’s no profit to keep you going. So, whatever you’re doing must really be out of that interest in serving the community You must really have that…
Ellie [nodding]: That passion to keep you going all the way.
Isaac: And you must really believe in it very strongly, because it will guide the direction of your organisation as you aim towards it. For us, Skills for Good, it’s really about providing people with the opportunities, creating that social impact for social organisations. So that has guided us throughout our entire journey. Our original concept and what we have today is quite different, so that is what like steered us. I think that’s the first thing. The second, you need to be able to find capable people to help you.
Ellie: Mm!
Isaac: The team is very important. You need to have people who are competent, plus very passionate, and committed.
Ellie: Correct.
Isaac: Because when you start out, in social entrepreneurship or a social initiative, a lot of people will want to join you, and some might not want to join you for the right reasons. And that would create problems in terms of commitment – you give them a task and they don’t follow through. But if you have a very capable team, you can trust them with the task, they will follow through and you will get results.
Ellie, do you have anything else to add?
Ellie: Mm, more or less the same… But, actually a lot of people have commended us on how we managed to get such a huge team, all of them very committed behind that single cause, providing that accessible platform for volunteers to do skills-based volunteering for NPOs. So, these were some things we learnt, and we feel are important for future social entrepreneurs to note.
Isaac: I think maybe if I want to add one other important thing, it’s to always test the concept of anything you want to run. You cannot just assume people will want to volunteer; you need to find a way to test it. For us, it was through surveys…
Ellie: Yup. Also, be adaptable. As briefly mentioned, we didn’t start off with the concept that we have now… We initially thought we wanted to just do a platform, but we did some market research and saw how some platforms in Singapore, where there was no one to run or man them, in the end became obsolete. So that’s how we changed our structure to be more manpower-intensive, as of now, where we do the matching and active project management to ensure the quality. Maybe in the US, it works that way, where you can just have a platform without manning it, but in Singapore it doesn’t work, so you have to learn how to adapt, how to change your ideas and remain relevant.
Isaac: Mm, yeah.
Ellie: Quite a bit of advice… haha…
Is there anything else about SFG you’d like potential organisations, or volunteers to know, to convince them to join or engage with your services?
Ellie: Uhmm, perhaps that we offer quality service? We do take a lot of pride in our quality control measures. And our partners have given us feedback that we do provide very good quality deliverables – well-designed, timely, punctual. So yeah, I mean one of the main reasons why we need some marketing is to reach out to the NPOs.
Just to clarify, what’s the difference between being partners with social enterprises vs. NPOs?
Ellie: Okay, just to briefly explain the difference… Social enterprises are companies, they get revenue and profits. But the profit is generated for a social cause. They don’t subsist on donations. For NPOs, they're non-profit organisations, so most of them are usually charities or institutes of public character (IPCs), and they solely subsist on donations from the public, from the government. etc. To use a simple analogy, the former offers paid tuition to all sorts of people then they use the money to help a particular underprivileged group, while the latter offers free tuition for that particular underprivileged group. So, that’s the difference. At the moment, we’d like to reach out and partner with more NPOs to help them as much as we can, in addition to our current partner social organisations.
I see… Okay, so that’s it!
Isaac: Okay, thank you!
Ellie: Thanks so much for this!
If you’re interested to volunteer with Skills for Good, click here to sign up! If you’re part of a social organisation (NPO or social enterprise) that needs skilled volunteers, click here for more details! You can also check out Skills for Good on Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn!
If you’d like to be interviewed for your organisation’s general marketing and/ or publicity, you can contact me via this email, cayennetay@gmail.com.
Thank you for reading!