Crowd-funding wages for COVID-19 Volunteers

A few days ago we introduced the concept of ‘open-volunteering’ for COVID-19. Today we’re adding a new feature that lets people crowd-fund hourly wages for COVID-19 volunteers.

Open volunteering is a simple concept where people working on COVID-19 projects can clock-in and clock-out of work sessions. While they are clocked-in we capture screenshots every 2 minutes to generate a public work-log of their volunteer work. There are many advantages to ‘open-volunteering’ vs more opaque forms of volunteering which we summarized here.

Now there is one more reason to consider open volunteering: people can back you if they like what you’re working on!

Crowd-Funding Hourly Wages vs Fixed Donations

We are really excited about the concept of crowd-funded hourly wages. Compare it to the popular Patreon model where you back someone with a fixed monthly amount. Its pretty easy to see which one directly motivates the volunteer to put in more time and effort.

Fees will be donated back to COVID-19 volunteers as crowd-wages

CoronavirusArmy has partnered with Cognition (a freelancing platform startup that is in the process of launching) to enable the payment processing and screenshot tracking. Their normal platform fees are 20% for freelancers, but in this case they have reduced fees to 15%.

Cognition will be donating all fees earned (minus transaction processing costs) back to selected volunteers on CoronavirusArmy. Exact details on this will made public soon; and anyone will be able to see exactly which volunteers are being backed by Cognition and for how much.