Nakhweh is a new portal that was recently launched in Jordan, aimed at being a tool to foster and develop voluntary work in the community, through bridging the gap between available programs and volunteers.
The site tries to achieve its goal by offering a number of online features to support the networking of leaders and volunteers in the community.
The portal is the brainchild of Kamel Al-Asmar and Hadi Nasereddin of Ideation Box from Jordan.
The following is a little Q&A we got to do with Kamel to know more about Nakhweh, how things have been going so far and their plans for the future. A big thanks to him for taking the time to answer our questions and offer some insight into Nakhweh.
Tell us more about Nakhweh and your goals for it in your own words.
Nakhweh.com is basically a website that aims to help in the matching process between the volunteers who are passionate about serving their communities and the organizations that need the help of those volunteers.
Nakhweh has been launched on the 19th of August with the least options that make the website usable and functioning in a way that serves volunteers and organizations simply yet effectively. That decision of launching the project at its early stages has been taken for two main reasons, which are: The Holy Month of Ramadan and to be the first in taking such an initiative before anybody else.
Our vision for Nakhweh is to make it the official volunteering platform for Jordan in a short time, to help other social entrepreneurs and to plan events every while and then to support a cause.
How did you get the idea for Nakhweh? And what made you passionate about it as a project?
Nakhweh’s original idea started with a small Facebook group (Volunteers of Jordan) that I started after participating, as a volunteer, in an event that was held by a special needs center in Amman, I got the information about the event while I was listening to one of the radio stations in my car. I always had this passion of helping those who really need help, but I wasn’t able to find the way to do it, so I thought it’s definitely not only me who was facing such a problem. By starting that group, my friend and I worked hard to be able to help those who have the same passion for the voluntary work and we believe that we have done a great job.
We worked closely with the organizations and tried to give people the information they need, but at some point we became very overwhelmed so we thought of taking the initiative of building such a tool that works on behalf of us, especially that the project is one of a kind in Jordan and we missed it for a long time.
How has the reaction been so far from the community?
Honestly, the reaction was very impressive and way better than what we have expected and planned prior the launch, or lets call it a soft-launch. We exceeded the 850 registrations in the first couple of weeks
We made sure to have Nakhweh placed in the social media sphere in Jordan and for some extent the region through our Facebook page, Facebook group and the Twitter account, which also helped us a lot to measure the feedback and reaction from our users.
Nakhweh seems to be mainly targeted for Jordan, but the need is wider, do you have plans to extend it for the whole Arab world?
Actually Nakhweh as a start is targeting Jordan and it’s aiming to develop the voluntarism locally, we are still learning from our experience and we figured out that there is a lot of collaboration that should be done with the organizations and the volunteers offline.
Definitely we will take into consideration the expansion to cover the region, but we believe that we should build an experience about the whole thing before moving forward with that step after we master it in Jordan, mentioning again that there is a lot of work that should be done offline so the physical presence of a team to run the website is necessary.
How many people are in the team behind Nakhweh?
The core team of the website consists of two people; my partner Hadi Nasereddin and I. But on the side we have a lot of friends who are working and consulting with us on everything that’s related to the website including: marketing and social media, copywriting, following up with organizations and managing the events. Those friends are volunteering with Nakhweh as they believe in the idea.
Nakhweh seems to be a non-profit endeavor by Ideation Box, how do you plan to make it sustainable?
So far we didn’t start thinking of monetizing it in a way or another, since we created the project for a cause we believed in and it’s proving us right everyday.
What plans do you have for Nakhweh in the future?
We believe that the power of the website is with its users, so for the time being we are concentrating on promoting the website to reach as much as we can of volunteers and organizations.
Also a main concern for the future plans is the interactivity of the website, so we are working on developing a couple of ideas that will work to give Nakhweh the life; for the time being two of them are in the implementation process which are, the volunteering groups section that supports the groups of volunteers that are not considered as organizations, and the other one is to establish a way of communication between the organization and the volunteers.
Nakhweh is a “borrowed” idea! Its patron “borrowed” it while part taking in an entrepreneurship competition with the people behind the original volunteering portal idea.
So much for entrepreneurship and novelty…