Sneak Peak at Aliso Viejo's New $37,000 Website

Ever want to do some good in your community? Help out a church? A school? A nonprofit? Or maybe you're looking for a few good volunteers.

Aliso Viejo is launching a website to connect volunteers with jobs Wednesday at 7 p.m. The new site, Aliso Viejo Exchange, features postings from some of the city's 36 agencies, six schools and seven churches.

AVX was built for $37,000 by We the Creative of Newport Beach. The city will pay another $1,000 a month for ongoing site maintenance.

The city approved up to $50,000 for the site in Jan. 2012. Following routine public bidding for the contract, preparation began on AVX nine months ago, Councilman Phil Tsunoda said.

Tsunoda said he came up with the idea after a cubscout den mother approached him looking for ways her scouts could volunteer.

"The city's only role in this is to put the entities in touch with the people who want to volunteer," he said. "If I were a stay-at-home mom or stay-at-home dad with time to kill—this is a one-stop shop for opportunities."

Groups or individuals seeking volunteers create an account that is then vetted by city staff. Once approved, they post the volunteer job along with a photo.

Whether the organization seeking volunteers is a church, business, individual or nonprofit doesn't matter, Tsunoda said: "We're not the qualifiers of how this conversation goes." 

We the Creative will track usership through Google Analytics, Chief of Staff Kenneth Lim said.

Tsunoda said he wasn't chiefly concerned about how many visits the site receives.

"I think the non-scientific scorecard will be the Boys and Girls Club saying, 'Yes, we think the website has been helping," he said.

Tsunoda said he found other volunteer sites "boring and bureaucratic." He wanted a site that engages its users and makes it easy for them to volunteer.

AVX will have buttons for Facebook and Twitter to make it simpler to post volunteer jobs on those sites.

During a sneak-peak Monday morning, the site featured over 600 volunteer jobs. At 5 p.m. Tuesday, prior to the site's official launch, there were 428 jobs posted.