Guide

Getting started

PinchHitterPool is a global workforce hub in two domains — volunteer work and paid service — with internships as the on-ramp into the workforce. Every discoverable member has a verified phone and a real-person proof (a government-ID check, or LinkedIn plus a $1 card check or a member's vouch) — each badge names which — and the platform never takes a commission.

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1. Join from I need local help (or any “I need” door) and sign in — about a minute.
2. Set up your household — a household is an Opportunity Provider like any organization; a personal email address uses the household path. You can add a spouse or co-admin with scoped access later.
3. Verify through the owner — a verified phone, a checked home address (from Google), and the ID check or LinkedIn with the $1 card. See Verification.
4. Post what you need from Opportunities — paid or volunteer, on-site, with the days and hours. See Postings & hours.
5. Approve the people who claim hours, mark them present on the day, and confirm hours and the agreed amount at close-out. A co-admin (for example a partner) can approve too.
6. Pay the helper directly. PinchHitterPool never handles the pay; the flat job fee goes on your monthly statement — first paid hire free. See What it costs.

Example: a household hires a validated helper for lawn care or a nanny — no agency, no commission; the helper's profile shows a verified phone and a real-person proof, and the household runs any background check it wants itself.

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1. Sign in — About a minute.
2. Your organization — Name, type and where it is. One account owns one organization; invite collaborators from Settings. Only someone signed in with an email at the organization's own website domain can create or verify an organization, and they declare they own it or act for its owner.
3. Verify your Google Business Profile — Connect the Google account that manages the listing, or submit the listing's public link for a two-business-day review. The owner also needs a verified phone. An organization's name must match its verified Google Business Profile — organizations cannot use an alias. To submit the link: open your business on Google Maps → Share → copy the link (only Google Business Profile links are accepted). We check that the website on your listing matches the organization's website or email domain, and that the name, country, state/province and postal code match what you entered — a missing website is the most common reason a review comes back. In the mobile app, sign in at pinchhitterpool.com in a browser and choose Verify with Google; the result shows in the app.
4. Post your first need — Volunteers, skilled help, local help or an internship. From the “Search the pool” door you land on the pool of verified people instead.
5. Run the day — Approve claims, take the day-of roster, confirm hours, and issue certificates or reference letters.

Examples: a nonprofit or faith group recruits food-drive volunteers, manages shifts and attendance, and issues verifiable certificates with logged hours; a local restaurant or store covers a weekend gap from the pool — posting is free, and every candidate carries named, verified proofs; a corporate team finds skilled short-term help by approved keyword — react, plumbing, bookkeeping, tutoring — scoped by country, state, and postal code, worldwide.

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1. Sign in — About a minute.
2. Your skills & area — The lanes you're open to (Volunteer, Paid side hustle, Internship), up to 5 approved keywords, a 200-character About, and where and when you can work: up to five postal codes, on-site, remote or hybrid, your weekly availability, and for paid work your rate (with a negotiable option). Deep detail stays on your linked profiles (LinkedIn, Upwork, your website) — PinchHitterPool doesn't host résumés.
3. Verify — Your phone, then the $3 government-ID check where it is offered, or LinkedIn with a $1 card check; or a paid subscriber who knows you vouches for you. See Verification.
4. Turn on pool visibility — You're findable, and matching openings can reach you. Being listed is free; you control your visibility and can turn it off any time. Free profiles are findable in their own postal code; the $3/month subscription makes a profile discoverable everywhere.
5. Claim hours or apply — Claim hours on volunteer postings, or apply to paid work and internships; organizations can also send you a direct offer.
6. Build your record — Verified hours, milestones, certificates and references. See Records.

My workspace tips: keywords come from the catalog (new words go to admin review first); postal codes repeat across countries, so set your country and state/province too; pick a rate period — a rate with no period reads as unclear; weekly availability windows are saved in your local time zone and apply every week — press Save after changes; confirm your email from the link we send (valid 24 hours). Available now moves you to the top of that search for volunteer and paid shifts and lets organizations send you a short message. A public profile page (first name and last initial, what you do, badges, general area) and a share page (proofs, service hours, certificates, public references and skills) give you links for flyers, LinkedIn, a résumé or EventHubQ — never your phone or email. Inside 12 hours of a shift you can't cancel it yourself; tell the organization so they can release you.

Privacy option: you can show a public alias instead of your real name; search then matches only the alias. Examples: a volunteer with two hours lists their skills and availability so any validated organization nearby can find them; a side-hustler offers evening skills — remote, onsite, or hybrid — and never pays a job fee.

Internships — students and the organizations that offer them

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Every internship posting shows its compensation type (a required field, filterable), the legal declaration for unpaid and stipend internships, and a validated organization. Internship hours are counted on their own, never mixed with volunteer or paid hours.

Youth (13–17) and guardians

1. Confirm your age during setup — “I'm under 18”, then “I am 13 or older” (required; PinchHitterPool is not available to anyone younger). Tick “I am 14 or older” to open paid side-hustle work, with a parent or guardian's validation. PinchHitterPool never collects or stores your birth date; youth-mode protections apply automatically.
2. Verify your phone by text message.
3. Get your guardian's vouch — copy the short code from your Verification page and give it to your parent or legal guardian. They must be a verified adult member (phone plus the ID check, or LinkedIn with the $1 card); they enter the code on their Validate a member page and the validation is live at once. No LinkedIn, card or ID check is asked of you.
4. Volunteer work and internships are open once you are validated; paid side-hustle work opens at 14.
5. Claim youth-safe hours — a posting can allow 13+ with guardian consent; those claims are never auto-confirmed. Adults-only postings say so.

A 13–17 member cannot vouch for anyone.

Vouching — validating a member who has no card

1. The member opens their Verification page and copies their short vouch code.
2. The voucher — their legal guardian (a verified adult member) or any paid subscriber who knows them — enters it on Validate a member (Settings).
3. A legal guardian's vouch is live at once; any other subscriber's vouch is reviewed by a platform admin.

• Vouch codes last one week. Card-validated members get their location from their billing address; a vouched member enters it themselves.
• Each subscriber can vouch for up to five people (email support to vouch for more), only needs to be subscribed at the moment they vouch, and may cancel afterwards with no penalty — the validation stays.
• The profile then says “Validated by a subscribing member” rather than “Payment verified”, so nobody is told a check ran when it did not. Adults use the vouch alongside LinkedIn.
• Apart from a guardian, only paid subscribers can vouch; a vouch you received does not let you vouch for others; a vouch never earns a referral point; a 13–17 member cannot vouch.

Listing on EventHubQ

EventHubQ is our sister event app. Hosts and planners there can find verified PinchHitterPool organizations and people and add them to an event — for example as a vendor.

1. Get verified first — an organization lists only after it is verified on PinchHitterPool.
2. Switch it on — organizations from My organization (“List us on EventHubQ”); people from their Verification page (“Show my profile on EventHubQ”).
3. Choose how hosts reach you — your phone (verify it first), your email, or both. Only signed-in hosts and planners see them, never the public.
4. Accept the EventHubQ listing terms — required to be listed. When the terms change you are asked to accept them again to stay listed.

• What hosts see of an organization: name, description, website, city and state, and your Google Business verification — never your team or your address.
• What hosts see of a person: first name and last initial, city, skills and verification badges — never your address.
• Turning the listing off hides you at once; events that added you show you as no longer shared. Payment is agreed between you and the host — no commission. Listing is free; after your first 3 months on EventHubQ, each completed food order costs a flat $1 (see the listing terms).

Verification — what every member needs

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• Every member confirms a phone number by text message. It stays encrypted, is shown only to paid subscribers and the platform admin, and is never public.
• There is no score and no star rating. A public profile shows each check as verified or not verified on its own. None of them is a background check — PinchHitterPool does not run background checks; both parties do their own final checks.
• Only validated profiles are discoverable. Unverified profiles stay private until verification completes.
• Until verification is done you can browse and set up your profile, but you won't be listed or able to apply. Your Verification page shows each step with its status and one action.
• The $3 ID check: photograph your driver's license, state ID or passport and take a selfie. Just finished on Stripe's page? The result appears within a few minutes — reload to check. Left before finishing? Continue — it takes about two minutes with your ID and your phone camera.
• Partner-run background screening is planned as an optional paid add-on; until then both parties perform their own final checks.
• Outside Stripe's countries, manual payment verification via Google Pay or another vendor is the other route (admin-approved; SoftTelRG LLC reviews every request for compliance with U.S. laws and sanctions).
• In limited cases a PinchHitterPool reviewer records a card-level or ID-level result by hand — for example where Stripe is not available, or where the reviewer personally examined a document. The member's verification page says it came from a reviewer; other members see the same badge. Nothing is charged, and no referral point is earned.

Postings, days & hours, and the day-of roster

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• Creating a posting: from the Opportunities page only. A posting carries a title, lane (volunteer, paid work or internship), pay for paid work (rate or amount, or negotiable), where (on-site, remote or hybrid, with a postal code) and when.
• Manage: opening a posting shows its details first, then the actions — Publish, Cancel, Update days & hours.
• Days & hours live inside the posting: fixed hours (weekly, monthly or picked dates — Outlook-style recurring) or a flexible need (“any day in this range, N hours needed”), each with how many people are needed per hour.
• How many people: count one or two extra as backups in case someone can't make it.
• Direct offers: when you already know whom you need, say what, when and where; PinchHitterPool creates the posting and the hours, and the person accepts or tells you they can't. Nothing about it is public. Enter the ZIP code under “Where” — members without a subscription are only listed in their own area. Someone not on PinchHitterPool yet gets an email with the details and a link to join; once they join and verify, the offer is waiting for them.
• Internship pipeline: review who applied, send an offer (they get a notification and can accept or decline), hire them from the Offers list when they accept, and end the internship with the hours worked — those hours become their verified record and the reference letter is issued from it.
• Sign-up modes: approve (you confirm each claim), open (people join instantly), or invite-only (only people you invited see it). Approve claims one by one or all at once. Reminders go out in-app and by email 24 hours and 2 hours before.
• Day-of roster: inside Manage, mark each person Present or Not here and confirm their hours; for paid work confirm the agreed amount at close-out — the job fee goes on your monthly statement. Verified hours unlock certificates.
• Late cancellations and no-shows: a cancellation inside 12 hours, or not turning up, is recorded on both parties' permanent records with a severity.
• Youth-safe postings: a posting can allow 13+ with guardian consent; those claims are never auto-confirmed.

What it costs — who pays what

• Workers, volunteers and interns never pay to work — no job fee, no credit, no commission, ever.
• Volunteers: free. Organizations bring on 5 volunteers free every 30 days; $10 per cycle for up to 10, $70 for up to 100; more via support. A started cycle is non-refundable; an unused one is refundable.
• Paid work: the organization pays a flat job fee at close-out — $2 minimum, 2% above that, never more than $9 however large the job; first paid hire free; billed once a month. Never a percentage of anyone's earnings.
• Internships: hiring an unpaid or stipend intern is free; a paid internship carries the job fee. Reference letter $3, paid by the organization (included with the job fee on a paid internship).
• Engagement certificates for volunteer work: $1, paid by the organization, never the volunteer.
• Verification: a one-time $1 card validation, or where it is offered a $3 government-ID check; or a paid subscriber's vouch at no cost.
• Subscriptions are optional: $3/month for an individual, $12/month for an organization. Subscribe only if and while it is worth it to you. Full page: Pricing.

Invitations and referral points

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PinchHitterPool grows through trust, not ads. Any member can invite someone they trust from their portal (Invite) — a reliable coworker, a neighbor who does great work, a fellow volunteer; the invitee chooses their own role and starts with a warm connection instead of a cold profile. Organizations invite trusted individuals from People rather than waiting for applications — a volunteer from last season, a helper a neighbor recommended — and invite co-admins with scoped access roles. An invitation is a head start, not a shortcut: every invited member completes the same verification as everyone else before becoming discoverable.

• Invite one person at a time — never a list or an upload. When they join and become discoverable (the same checks that decide whether a profile appears in search), you earn 1 point, worth $0.50.
• Redeem points as PinchHitterPool credit against your own subscription. Rewards are promotional — never a commission on work and never earned for a sign-up alone; credit is simply a discount on your own plan.
• Members 18 and older can instead combine 200 points into a $100 gift card, on the website only (pinchhitterpool.com in a browser). Gift-card requests are reviewed by hand for now: PinchHitterPool contacts you and arranges the card from a vendor it chooses (for example a Google Play, Apple or Amazon gift card) that takes no fee out of the reward.
• Gift cards are a thing of value: you are responsible for any tax on them where you live. Under U.S. IRS rules, once the gift cards you receive in a calendar year would reach $600, SoftTelRG LLC must hold a completed Form W-9 (or the applicable W-8) from you before arranging another card, and may report the rewards as the law requires; support collects the form, and it is never stored on PinchHitterPool. PinchHitterPool never stores gift-card codes and does not give tax advice.
• Up to 200 invitations a day and 200 outstanding; one pending invitation per email address, released after 72 hours; one point per invited person for the life of the platform; a vouch never earns a point. Being invited creates no account, and every invitation email carries a one-click “don't invite me again” link.
• Only card-validated members earn points; organizations may invite but do not earn points.

Messaging

Messages between an organization and a member are chosen from a fixed list of short coordination phrases — there is no free-text box anywhere, which keeps the channel safe for both sides. Each side gets 5 messages per job, shown as a running count. Messages are deleted 90 days after the last one in a conversation; anything you need to keep should live outside the thread.

Blocking and reporting

• Block sits next to Report on a member's profile, on a posting, in a conversation and on a direct offer. It works both ways: neither of you can find the other in PinchHitterPool search or contact the other, a conversation you already had stays readable but takes no new messages, and the other person is not told. Blocking an organization or household blocks its owner.
• Undo right after blocking, or unblock any time from Account → Blocked members.
• Report opens Contact → Trust & Safety with the profile, posting or conversation filled in. We handle reports within 1 business day and remove objectionable content and the accounts that post it. In an emergency, call your local emergency services first.

Verified hours, certificates, milestones and reference letters

• Hours are confirmed by the organization you worked with, not self-reported, and counted separately by lane — never added together. Public profiles show counts only; organizations are never named.
• Certify past service: give certificates to people who served with you before PinchHitterPool, one person or a whole group. You attest the dates and hours, your signatory signs, and each person accepts before it is issued.
• Volunteer work can earn an engagement certificate ($1, paid by the organization) with organization-verified hours, the organization's note and logo, and a link or QR code anyone can check. Paid work needs no certificate — its record is the verified hours, jobs and milestones on the profile.
• Milestone badges mark 10 → 25 → 40 → 100 → 1,000+ hours. Hours can be exported (CSV) and subscribed to as a calendar feed.
• References: ask people who know you from your References page; a profile shows how many references you have and how many came from verified PinchHitterPool members.
• If something goes wrong, either side can raise an incident; the other side responds and the outcome is recorded on both histories. Disputes are never public by default. Abuse leads to suspension, never quiet deletion.
• Your account: you can close your own account at any time from Account, and switch roles there too (see Switching roles); Privacy explains what is kept and for how long.

Guide articles

The same help as above, one topic per page — the answers the assistant draws from.

• What is PinchHitterPool?
• The five lanes and the ten doors
• Joining and signing in — Microsoft, Google, Apple or email
• After you sign in as a Service Provider (a person)
• After you sign in as an Opportunity Provider (an organization or household)
• One account, one role — and why the portal is gated
• Verification for people — phone, then the ID check or LinkedIn with the $1 card
• What 'verified' means — and what it does not (not a background check)
• Verification for organizations and households
• Registering an organization: domain match, ownership and disputes
• My search found nobody (or no opportunities) — what now?
• Posting an opportunity, adding days & hours, and the day-of roster
• Members aged 13–17 — what teens can do, and the guardian's part
• What it costs — who pays what
• Internships — paid, stipend or unpaid, stated up front
• Referral points — invite one person at a time
• Messaging — fixed phrases, no free text
• Verified hours, certificates, milestones and reference letters
• If something goes wrong — incidents and disputes
• Privacy — what is stored and what never is