An eTaskBoard was designed for many communities, but always with a profit motive, that is, until recently. The realization came during the time I volunteered to paint a school fence. Several kind-hearted souls joined me, and two important issues surfaced:

• None of us were painters, and our work product showed it.
  
  
• Most of us had a day job paying a better hourly rate than earned by painters, a few of us many times that hourly rate.

We worked about 3 hours and included a lawyer who normally charges $250/hr, a $150/hr project manager, a $100/hr financial planner, and a $50/hr plumber who did the best painting. The teacher organized the volunteers because the school couldn't afford the $300 bid by professional painters. The disparity between value we could contribute and value we actually produced came to $1350 [3 x ($250 + $150 + $100 + $50) - $300]. This didn't take into account the value of the camaraderie of the volunteers, which was significant, but it also didn't take into account the painting quality and the $300 loss to the professional painters.

A small problem was that the school lost an opportunity to get their fence painted, and to put $1350 toward teaching kids. The big problem is how often this is repeated to shortchange non-profits everywhere.

During the time my hands were bumbling with a paint brush, I was free to think about the changes needed to apply eTaskBoard to this problem. Surprisingly, not one line of code needs to be changed. When each worker's account is set up in the Accounts Payable module, each need be set up to pay into the same account, the account of the non-profit. eTaskBoard makes this easy to set up. By calling workers volunteers, everything else falls into place.

The volunteer application process can use the same forms to identify billable skillsets, and it already includes a field where volunteers can specify the number of hours per week or month they are available to work, that is, their donation. The employer marketing can begin with the non-profit's existing supporters -- the school's parents, a church's parishioners, a hospital's recovering patients, a charity's corporate donors, etc. Many of them work for companies already buying the services provided by the eTaskBoard and for the same price and at the same quality. The Coordinator still has profit and loss responsibilities, but with the net income (aka profit) going to a worthy cause.

The basic idea remains a task-based ecommerce system of virtual workers.

Talking with my fellow fence painters, we discovered some unexpected benefits beyond the mission of providing the full value of volunteers to the non-profit.

• The non-profit's eTaskBoard represents a reusable database of volunteers without the need to find them and re-mobilize them for every non-profit project.
  
  
• The possibility of migrating eTaskboard employers to private-practice work was not lost on the lawyer for work beyond his donation.
  
  
• When we were conceited enough to eliminate the plumber from participation because he was not a knowledge worker like the rest of us, he described work he was starting to pick up that involved reviewing pre-bid architectural drawings for piping effectiveness, and city permit applications for plumbing code compliance -- all knowledge work suitable for the virtual workplace. An eTaskboard can become the vehicle to explore surprising new career paths.
  
  
• When we finished our painting, we all realized we had no way to use our donated time as a tax donation. We had no paperwork to validate the value of our donation. With eTaskboard, our contribution in hard dollars would be in a printable report. Technically, we earned the cash first, and an instant later handed it over to the non-profit -- and we could prove it.
  
  
• Employers would make out checks to tax-deductible non-profits. How much of that would be tax deductible since they had received value for their payment would be a conversation to have with their tax accountant.

The bottom line for a non-profit is that an eTaskBoard is an innovative new fund raising vehicle.

For volunteers, each of us have a limited amount of money and time to donate to the causes we support. An eTaskboard implementation could maximize the value of the time we donate.