Volunteering has played an important role in human societies both in critical situations (like for example disasters due to severe weather incidents) and important events (like for example athletic or cultural events of global participation and impact). Volunteering has been highlighted and disseminated across all levels of education. Recently, higher education institutes have placed significant focus on the importance of volunteering for academic communities and local societies, encouraging the organization and participation in various volunteering activities. However, it is often hard for students, faculty members and administrative personnel of a university to have access to fresh and appropriately organized information regarding the organization of volunteering events and participation opportunities. Furthermore, due to the mainly vague management of volunteering activities, there is usually lack of analytics on such events as far as issues including thematic areas, participation patterns, obtained results are concerned.

Motivated by these observations and with an intention to support volunteering initiatives in our university we exploited the popularity of internet-connected devices and the advances in web technology for designing and implementing a web application to serve as a volunteering platform within our community. Our application can serve as an online channel for connecting various groups organizing volunteering activities and members of our academic community as well as members of the local society in order to raise awareness regarding volunteering opportunities and increase the impact and the benefit for the society. More precisely, our application requires interest groups or individuals to register for gaining access to various functionalities which include creation and announcement volunteering events, list of current, forthcoming and past events which are also depicted on an interactive map, online declaration of participation, demographic analytics for organized events, printing and downloading as well as sharing on social media. All these functionalities are nicely integrated in an attractive, easy-to-use and responsive interface. Our application can thus enable volunteering groups to timely announce initiatives and interested audience to easily get fresh information, select and participate in upcoming events. Being available in both Greek and English, our application can also serve as a means for establishing or tightening cultural bonds between Erasmus participants (students, faculty, administrative personnel) and the local academic community and society. Furthermore, the application enables involved users (groups or individuals) and also administrative bodies to have access to accurate and easily manageable analytics on volunteering activities and events.

We developed our application using the popular WordPress web content management system aiming to enrich and extend the digital repository of our university and eventually encourage our academic and local community to get engaged with volunteering for the improvement of our society “by the people, for the people”.

Keywords: Web application, volunteering, higher education, digital applications, technology to serve academic communities and local societies, WordPress, php javascript, css, html.