Jobs for Change is a career service and jobs marketplace that aims to help people find and develop a career they love in social change (which for them means nonprofit, government, and social enterprise jobs). To do this, they’ve hired a team of career advisors who will each be writing a daily blog to provide advice and guidance to a different demographic of job seekers – from College Students to Sector Switchers. You can also ask the team of advisors any question you’d like and get a public response, sort of like Yahoo Answers but powered by experts.
We are currently building the largest database of nonprofit, government, and social enterprise jobs on the web and have just hired a team of career advisors to provide daily advice and guidance to help people of all backgrounds find and develop a career in social change. We have also partnered with more than a dozen leading organizations that will give Jobs for Change reach to millions of people interested in deeper civic engagement.
I am curious how Idealist and Social Actions play into this since they are the most frequently visited/used sites by myself and others I know to find both jobs, volunteer opportunities and more in the social benefit sector. I’m also excited to see how the advice and question/answer content develops. After the site is post this initial launch, it’ll be nice to relegate some of the home page to valuable content, too (and not just logos of partners).
What do you think?
- Have you tried it out – what do you think?
- Do you use Idealist.org or SocialActions.com already? Do you think you’ll switch?
- Are you an organization with job openings – will you list your opening on Jobs for Change?
- Do you go anywhere else online to get career advice?
most of the listings on the change.org were lifted from other sites without giving credit. So won’t be using it.
Jeff-
Thank you for sharing your honest concern! Do you work for a nonprofit organization that uses Idealist to post job or volunteer opportunities? Have you given this feedback to the Change.org team – and if so, what did they say? I’d be happy to pass information along via any connections I may have!
Thanks again!
Is Change.org a not for profit?
Hi Steven-
According to the Change.org “About Us” page (http://www.change.org/info/about), it is not a nonprofit organization, but a social venture.
Thanks for asking!
Hey guys,
This is Ben from Change.org – thanks for the questions. As we’ve mentioned to others, in order to test the new Jobs for Change service when it was in private beta, we seeded the job listings database with positions from our partners that were posted elsewhere on the web, mostly from their own websites. When we launched the beta last week we kept many of these on the site so other users could test the search functionality.
Rather than shunning the extra free promotion, many nonprofits have thanked us for the exposure we’ve given their listings.
The only complaint we have received is from Idealist, which asked us to remove postings that were made over the weekend by a few of our users who apparently took them directly from the Idealist site. We removed those immediately and have looked through our other postings to make sure they were not taken from nonprofits who had posted on Idealist.
Also, to answer Steven’s question – as you can read in our About Us page, Change.org is not a traditional non-profit but rather a social entrepreneurship company that is part of the growing movement of organizations using innovative business models for social change. (http://www.change.org/info/about). Like Craigslist.org, a similarly mission-driven company, our domain name reflects this unique mentality. (It also reflects the more mundane reality that http://www.change.com was unavailable when we were founded and remains – gasp! – a high end lingerie site.)
Thanks for the questions, guys. If you ever want to contact me directly with further questions/suggestions/ideas, please feel free to do so at ben at change.org.
Best,
Ben
Ben, thanks for taking the time to reply! It’s great to hear directly from the organization on this. I think there are always kinks and bumps when launching any user-centric site or user-generated content platform. Thanks for offering transparency!
Ben, is this still promotion if you’re not referencing the not for profit you are seeding from? I checked out many listings and there is no link back to the source.
It looks like you are still seeding from non profits that aren’t partnered with you, will these include links back the original non profit?