Happy International Volunteer Day!

And on behalf of the team at i-volunteer and Red Foundation, welcome to our new site!

After much procrastination i-volunteer has become a reality. I had this idea a couple of years ago and it's great that we've finally made it here.

Social networks have revolutionised the way people communicate across the planet and we are seeing more and more third sector organisations using social media approaches to communicate with their stakeholders. Combine this with the passion of people to make a difference and I believe that in i-volunteer you have a powerful tool for social action.

i-volunteer has been made possible with funding from Red Foundation, a social enterprise I set up in 2006 that supports and promotes volunteerism and social action, and was partly informed by research undertaken via Modernising Volunteering.

On i-volunteer you can blog, post, message, follow and find people and content. You can also set up Groups of special interest, within which you can promote your project, event or just gather together like minded people. The groups function is still in development and you'll soon be able to set up private groups, with site permission, within a day or two.

You'll also find a Features section where we have commissioned editorial by volunteers from across the country, sharing their views and opinions on a wide variety of issues. We will also be looking out for your stories and posts and featuring these where we feel the whole i-volunteer community should get to see them.

We've kept i-volunteer simple, focusing on making the site as easy to use as possible so that people who are not be confident using social media should not feel overwhelmed using our site; using this approach we will grow the site's functionality and features according to what the community wants and needs.

In this early Beta stage we would welcome your feedback on any bugs, niggles and suggestions; as I'm sure you can appreciate we need lots of people playing with the site to help us spot any technical glitches.

There are many people to thank for helping us to get here today, not least my colleagues at Red Foundation - @ChrisPenberthy, @fabiabates, @Georgina @emmaheffer and @debbieu along with @Dazzle and the rest of the Trustees of the Red Trust charity for all of their support and enthusiasm, @SamBarnes for his skill, hard work and endless patience to build the site, Tom Green (@pengecom) for co-ordinating our team of volunteer feature writers, and of course to the i-volunteer editorial team for their great features so far.

Do take the time to have a look around, the i-volunteer community wants to hear your views and news, so please blog, rant, comment, interact and most importantly, volunteer!

Enjoy :o)