Research Findings

The research that led to this toolkit is perhaps best presented by the “Synthesis Report”. A presentation of which, to the Software Working Group in the midst of the project, was recorded here.

Key Findings

We found that the motivating value for timebank coordinators is the wellbeing that comes from connecting with people in the community and nurturing those relationships. This is heart-centered activity.

The majority of their time is spent in four domains: onboarding, outreach, engagement and administration.

Coordinators felt most successful when onboarding was quicker, and more personal; when outreach events were attended and appreciated; when administration/compliance could be performed easily. In other words, when their activity corresponds with their motivations.

Time spent in onboarding and administration domains is dominated by legal, bureaucratic, and administrative tasks that are numerous, necessary, and more or less difficult, according to the personal skills of the coordinator.

Outreach activities are all those associated with communicating with your group, the people in your region, and the broader community. A communication and marketing strategy requires imagination and a raft of different skills: words, pictures, audio, and video.

The domain of engagement encompasses and extends beyond onboarding and outreach; it is, however, harder to provide effective technological solutions for the many varied ways that people engage in that more relational aspect of the work.

The broad purpose of the toolkit is to enable coordinators to be productive in these areas. Our focus is on the use of software tools to support your activity. We provide an introduction to the types of tools that you will need and outline the direction to follow. It will never be a complete solution, but we hope that it will be some help.

Who we talked to

See the report for the specifics, but you can get a general sense of the timebanks we were focussed on from this slightly outdated list on the Timebanks of Aotearoa New Zealand website, or by searching for New Zealand timebanks on the global timebanks search.