ESC Buddy is a web platform, and a mobile application.
It organizes, interconnects and facilitates the communication between the volunteers and the organizations of the European Solidarity Corps. Our communication tool is shaped by and for volunteers and organizations from the fields of youth work and solidarity.
Which features do you find in ESC Buddy?
The purpose of ESC Buddy is to limit the dispersion of information given to the volunteers, by making this information accessible and stored in one central place: their mobile phone. It is a clear support for the volunteers to gain autonomy, and to keep the control on their project, as well as to receive incentives to learn, to socialize and to take all advantages of their experience.
ESC Buddy enables you to:
- Share the events: it works as any events agenda. It encourages the young people to move, to meet, to enjoy a cultural and social life along their volunteering. It permits to display and to invite them to activities of their interest, accordingly with their location, their period of volunteering…
- Set up a step-by-step guide for volunteers using the Timeline: set up a path for volunteers to follow-up along their project. It provides the young people clear milestones, appointments and administrative tasks to be accomplished from the pre-departure phase until the returning phase of a volunteering project.
- Volunteers can keep track of their tasks with the Youthpass journal on their phone: a simple notebook, with 8 chapters for the 8 key competences that structure the official Youth Pass. It permits the volunteers to keep an on-going record of their experiments and learning, that will ease their final learning self-assessment.
- Directly communicate with volunteers with the Chat function: an actual chat
function, to exchange messages between a volunteer and their organization, but also between volunteers, mentors, youth workers gathered in a same group by the application. It can be a direct channel with one volunteer, or with a group of them, even a chat for a specific event. - Share all the resources: a space where to find useful tips and tools to support the community life among volunteers, to adopt a sustainable lifestyle, to manage and maintain their house or apartments…
- Share and delegate specific contacts for each volunteer: a direct access to useful phone numbers and email addresses. From the volunteer’s mentor to the local police station or the doctors close from the house. You can create a list of contacts and then dedicate it only specific ones to each volunteer so they can only see the ones relevant for them.
- Create a profile as a volunteer and keep your data in your hands: a record of the activity dates; a link to the activity agreement…
Who are the ESC Buddy users?
If in your daily work, you coordinate several long-term volunteering activities; or if you are a young person lost with the numerous information received via various channels from your organization, ESC BUDDY might interest you very much.
Our communication tool addresses and involves 3 types of registered users:
- The individuals (young volunteers, alumni, mentors…) who have the use of the ESC Buddy mobile application and its different features.
- The hosting and coordinating organizations, who have the use of the ESC Buddy
back-office and use it to administer their projects and communicate with their volunteers. - The supra-organizations, such as national agencies or wide umbrella organizations who coordinate activities (seminars, training…) for other hosting and coordinating organizations. They have access to their own personal
back-office environment and can disseminate a limited amount of
information directly on the volunteers’ mobiles.
The key-role is given to the organizations that master all the information and data of their own community of volunteers and who enable the links with the supra-organizations.
How to start to use ESC Buddy?
Registration of any user, for the back office and for the mobile app, is compulsory and is done through the website: https://esc-buddy.eu.
The 1st step needs to be done by the organization, that manages a community of volunteers and projects. It is the organization that decides to use ESC Buddy in order to structure and to share information with its volunteers.
The organization sets-up and up-dates the different functions of ESC Buddy according to its needs and wishes.
Once it is done, the organization invites its volunteers to register on the platform and interconnects their accounts with its back-office.
Currently, the use of the back-office and of the application is totally free of charge for the organizations and the volunteers. In the future, a minimum user fee to ensure the maintenance costs of the system should be required to the organizations for their back-office. The use of the mobile application will always remain totally free.
Is ESC Buddy easy to handle?
The system, as well the mobile application are ergonomic and easy to handle.
However, as any user organization is responsible to set-up its back-office, a specific care must be given to select and present correctly the information shared via the system.
It requires to have clear internal processes and an experience in volunteering management.
It is recommended to any interested organization to foresee several days of preparation and tests before to generalize the use of the platform with its volunteers.
ESC BUDDY shows to be very appropriate for wide-scale coordinating organizations, who need to spread information to several volunteers. For hosting organization used to single placement, ESC Buddy might not help in making the communication more efficient.
Support can be given upon request to escbuddy@compagnonsbatisseurs.be
Who is behind ESC Buddy ? Discover its history…
There is a nice volunteer’s story behind ESC Buddy.
Its author is Aleksandar Ristic, nowadays professional youth worker in Young Researchers of Serbia, Serbian-based volunteering NGO, and former European volunteer in Compagnons Bâtisseurs Belgium.
It is in the course of its volunteering that Aleks could notice the critical role of communication to ensure successful projects. His hosting organization used different channels for communication, and despite their efforts, information still got lost. The idea for a system that would better connect the organization to a volunteer and a place for a volunteer to have all the information in one place became clear. That’s how ESC Buddy was born.
Presented as a “personal project of solidarity”, Aleks could count on a lot of support from CBB to precise and achieve its idea. They made it evolved to ensure the tool will take into account the need of the volunteers and of the organization from the field.
The Belgian National Agency “BIJ-Bureau International Jeunesse” did not need much convincing about all the potential impact of the project. It brought to it a fundamental financial support, that permitted to start the development with the involvement of young Belgian developers (Arkdevel & MUG Agency).
The result is https://esc-buddy.eu
Several years later, we are still developing this tool, hoping to support many organizations and volunteers on their project. You can contribute by trying out the tool and checking would it be useful for you and your organization.
Don’t hesitate to contact us at escbuddy@compagnonsbatisseurs.be
