There is enormous potential in using the Internet to marshal the resources of faith-based communities to more effectively provide social services to under-resourced communities. Faith-based organizations make up 22 of the top 100 nonprofits in the USA, and over 90% of these organizations’ budgets are focused on social services. Faith-based volunteers in the USA provide over $51.8 billion in volunteer time each year. Christian organizations globally have a combined budget of $390 billion, and Christians together have a combined income of $18.17 trillion. Our vision is to use the Internet to greatly increase the amount of these resources that is going toward social services serving under-resourced communities.

Over the next ten years, the goal of our TechMission Online program is to use the Internet to deliver over $700 million in resources from the faith-based community to provide social services to under-resourced communities. Over the next 10 years, this will include serving over 50 million web visitors, placing 1 million volunteers, providing 150,000 items of creative commons content for nonprofits, providing nonprofit college courses to over 6,500 students and funding 700 full-time interns. The end goal is that these increased resources would enable organizations to serve millions more individuals in under-resourced communities, with hundreds of thousands of individuals participating in youth programs, being placed in jobs and college, receiving educational certification and participating in rehabilitation programs.

TechMission Online is a mashup utilizing partnerships with the largest Christian social service organizations in the world that serve over 15 million individuals from low-income communities each year. Our partners include the Salvation Army, the Association of Gospel Rescue Missions, World Vision, Youth Partners Net, Christian Community Development Association, Urban Youth Workers Institute and thousands of local social service agencies. We enable these partners to rebrand our online volunteer matching service and Web 2.0 portal to serve their individual communities. This enables us to provide a common database of opportunities and set of tools across many different partners. We also provide both Christian and secular brands of our online services so that we can effectively target Christian social service organizations while also providing resources without faith-content to other communities.

Have you ever spent 20 minutes waiting for your train with nothing to do? Or unexpectedly had the afternoon off? Have you also wished that you could give back to your community without simply sending a check or going through a laborious membership signup process? What if you could, spontaneously, volunteer your labor or expertise? Our “Volunteer Now!” project intends to enable this kind of on-the-spot volunteerism by connecting you, via your mobile phone, to volunteer opportunities in your immediate vicinity – or to organizations that can use your expertise over the phone.

A scenario: You’ve just missed your airplane and have 6 hours to kill at the Philadelphia airport. You click the “Volunteer Now!” button on your mobile phone. It asks you how much time you have. You answer “4 hours” and it returns a list of relevant matches. It knows that you are a business executive with a specialty in contract negotiation, so the first match is from “Pit Bull Rescue,” which needs someone to review a contract for a new kennel facility. Your profile history also shows that you sometimes enjoy good old hammer-swinging physical labor. The second match is from “Wister Middle School,” which is 2 miles from the airport and is having a volunteer cleanup day today.

You decide that it’s too much effort to figure out how to get to the school, so you select “Pitt Bull Rescue” instead. Next, you see the organization’s profile screen which gives you some background information and comments from past volunteers. Several prior volunteers rated the organization very highly, so you choose it.

Immediately, the contract is sent to your mobile device. You review it, make notes, and write a short comment that says that everything seems to be in order. You click send and grab a beer. Later, Pitt Bull Rescue calls you to thank you for your volunteer effort and tells you that they’ve decided to go ahead with the new kennel facility. They send you a photo of a dog that was rescued today.

Imagine other examples: You’re a Chinese/English speaker and help a recent Chinese immigrant navigate their hospital’s Interactive Voice Menu in a three-way call. You copyedit a nonprofit’s brochure. You talk a computer novice through the process of using the Windows Start Menu. You identify Martian craters on your phone's web browser via the NASA clickworker program.