hangels historie. Del den med verden.

hangel has begun digitally signing the volunteering, event attendance and blood donation certificates it issues, the impact certificates it gives to organisations, and its badges to the Open Badges 3.0 standard, using W3C Verifiable Credentials technology. The same technology is used by the European Union’s Europass digital credentials. A document received from hangel thus becomes a digital record that can be verified independently anywhere in the world.

Every certificate is signed with two separate keys, Ed25519 and RSA-2048, tied to hangel’s public identifier did:web:hangel.org. The public keys are published on the hangel.org domain; if even a single character of the content changes, the signature becomes invalid. An employer, university or institution can check with one click that a certificate was genuinely issued by hangel and has not been altered, through the verification link on the certificate (hangel.org/verify/…), the QR code, or the certificate code at hangel.org/c. The signed file can also be checked with any Open Badges 3.0 compatible verifier.

The verification page does not simply trust the server’s answer: it fetches hangel’s public key itself and re-checks the signature in the visitor’s browser. The page lists the verification methods separately, including the digital signature, the did:web organisation identifier, the QR and unique code, and the ESCO skills mapping. To protect personal data, the recipient’s email address enters the document only as a salted hash.

Certificate holders can put the verification link on their CVs or application forms, download the document as an Open Badges file (JSON) or a signed VC-JWT file, and print it. The Social Impact Transcript for volunteers (hangel.org/volunteer/transcript) brings together, in a single document, the total hours, the list of skills and the verification link of every approved volunteering record.

The skills on certificates are mapped to ESCO, the European Commission’s skills classification, and written into the certificate in machine-readable form. Only skills whose meaning matches exactly are mapped, and every ESCO address has been checked against the official ESCO interface. The skills volunteers gain therefore become visible in job applications and HR systems in Europe’s common skills language. Volunteering records are kept in line with the principles of the European Youth Forum’s European Charter on the Rights and Responsibilities of Volunteers.

hangel has also joined the W3C Credentials Community Group, which develops global standards for digital credentials. The certificate infrastructure is free for civil society organisations: organisations that publish events or volunteering opportunities on hangel can give these certificates to their participants and volunteers at no extra cost.

hangel has prepared the Volunteering-Focused Employment Protocol, which aims to have volunteering experience recognised as work experience in recruitment, and has begun sharing it with career platforms and employers. The protocol aims to make the work of people who serve the public good visible in the business world and to make it easier for candidates’ volunteering experience to be taken into account in hiring. The issue matters especially for young people: according to TÜİK’s Youth in Statistics 2025, 23.3% of people aged 15–24 in Türkiye are neither in education nor in employment, and TÜİK’s Labour Force Statistics 2025 put unemployment in this age group at 15.3%.

The protocol was prepared together with an implementation guide. The guide sets out principles for how companies can evaluate candidates’ volunteering experience in recruitment. The goal is to position volunteering as more than a hobby, as a valuable experience, and to spread an understanding of merit in which people who work for the public good stand out.

The protocol rests on verified data. On hangel, volunteer hours are recorded on top of attendance taken with a QR code or 6-digit code shown on a screen at the venue; for volunteering, only people whose applications have been approved can check in. Completed volunteering is recorded with the approval of the civil society organisation that published the opportunity and becomes a certificate digitally signed to the Open Badges 3.0 standard. A candidate’s stated volunteering experience can therefore be verified by an employer with one click.

Volunteers can see their approved records together in the Social Impact Transcript (hangel.org/volunteer/transcript): total volunteer hours, how many hours went to each of the UN Sustainable Development Goals, the skills gained and the verification link for every record. The skills on certificates are mapped to ESCO, the European skills classification. hangel also converts every completed volunteer hour into a Turkish lira value based on the hourly value of the work done; occupational wages are based on the ISCO-08 occupational classification and TÜİK (Turkish Statistical Institute) earnings data.

As part of this work, hangel has signed a partnership agreement with the career platform eleman.net. The agreement covers making volunteering experience visible as work experience. Companies’ HR teams, meanwhile, can manage employee volunteering from their corporate panels on hangel, and this data can feed into the companies’ sustainability reports.

Career platforms and employers who wish to join the protocol can write to turkiye@hangel.org. A contact form for companies is available at hangel.org/contact/companies, and information on the protocol is at hangel.org/hangelassociation/projects/istihdam-protokolu.

Uluslararası Sosyal Fayda Derneği (Social Business Global) has prepared the draft “Social Benefit and Sustainability-Focused Social Entrepreneurship Bill”, which aims to give social entrepreneurship a legal framework in Türkiye, as a policy development contribution, and has shared it with the relevant ministries. The text is a civil society draft; it has not been submitted to the Grand National Assembly of Türkiye and is not law in force. The draft is open for comment, article by article, at hangel.org/hangelassociation/legislation.

Türkiye does not yet have a law specific to social entrepreneurship. Social enterprises have to operate inside existing structures such as associations, foundations, cooperatives or companies, in forms that do not reflect their social purpose. Because their status does not fit, they are often unable to apply for grants, incentives, public tenders and R&D support. There is also no central register showing the number and impact of social enterprises, which makes it harder to design policy and direct resources where they are needed.

The 29-article draft covers the definition of a social enterprise, the principles of establishment and oversight, and incentive mechanisms. Under the draft, a social enterprise meets at least one of three conditions: directing at least 60% of its profit to social impact, employing disadvantaged people for at least 60% of its workforce, or devoting at least 60% of its production to areas of social benefit. The draft provides for applications for a Social Enterprise Activity Certificate to be decided within 7 working days and for social enterprises to be recognised by the words “Social Company” on their tax certificate.

The draft also proposes that the activity and impact reports of social enterprises and civil society organisations be tracked through DERBİS, the associations information system; that ministries map regional social needs with red, orange and yellow priority codes and share them as open data; and that applications be made online through the provincial directorates for relations with civil society in all 81 provinces. An accompanying volunteering-focused employment protocol also proposes that volunteering experience be taken into account in recruitment.

During its preparation, the legislation of 47 countries and regions that regulate social entrepreneurship or the social economy was reviewed, using official sources only. In 33 of them the legislation is in force and in 5 it applies at state or regional level; the rest are laws that have been adopted but are not yet in force, bills, strategies, or repealed legislation. The page also features a timeline running from the Ahi guilds and the waqf tradition through the first cooperatives to the United Nations resolution on the social and solidarity economy, as well as official statistics on disadvantaged groups in Türkiye, each with its source and year.

Social entrepreneurs, academics, civil society organisations and public institutions can submit their views on the draft as a whole, on individual articles or on the annexes at hangel.org/hangelassociation/legislation. Comments are published on the page all together once ten have been received.

Uluslararası Sosyal Fayda Derneği (Social Business Global), which develops hangel, is running the “Revenue Models for NGOs” conference programme to strengthen the sustainability of civil society organisations, under a protocol signed with Türkiye’s Ministry of Interior. Titled “Building Revenue Models and Sustainability in Civil Society Organisations”, the programme covers 13 conferences in 9 provinces. The Ministry of Interior leads the programme, with Social Business Global as co-lead, and it is supported by the Ministry’s Directorate General for Relations with Civil Society.

The programme aims to help NGOs build a sustainable, diversified revenue model without depending on a single source of donations. The conferences cover five topics: donor diversification, combining individual, corporate and regular giving; corporate partnerships, designing sustainable sponsorship and social responsibility protocols with brands; the shopping-based donation model, which turns supporters’ everyday shopping into regular income; social entrepreneurship, strengthening an organisation financially through economic enterprises and income-generating activities; and transparency and trust, earning donor trust through a transparency index and reporting.

The programme page also brings together national and international grant and support programmes that NGOs can apply to, along with how to apply. Participants can therefore find, in one place, resources that help them put what they learn at the conference into practice in their organisations straight away. The page also includes a library of the project’s training documents and reports, a list of the organisations that have taken part in and been supported by the project, and a newsletter sign-up for the schedule and announcements.

The conferences are free. The programme is designed for volunteers and managers of associations, foundations and sports clubs, with places planned for each NGO’s chair plus two people; priority for young managers is kindly requested. Participants receive an official certificate of attendance. Event certificates issued by hangel are digitally signed to the Open Badges 3.0 standard and can be verified with one click.

The conference schedule, registration and the conference presentation are at hangel.org/gelir-modeli-konferanslari. Those who wish to attend can choose their city and register after signing in; new stops are announced on this page once their dates and venues are confirmed. The cities coming soon on the schedule include Batman, Adana and Diyarbakır.

Through this partnership, hangel aims to build the institutional capacity of civil society and help NGOs reach more people. The platform offers NGOs tools such as volunteering and event management, QR check-in, verifiable certificates, a transparency index and shopping-based donations free of charge.

Sustainable social impact requires far more than the sum of individual actions: it requires a consistent, targeted and verified chain of action. By matching individuals’ social interests with NGO categories, hangel measures which United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) volunteering and support records contribute to. Every volunteering opportunity is linked to a social area, and that area determines which goals the opportunity is associated with: volunteering in education is mapped to SDG 4, Quality Education, and volunteering in health to SDG 3, Good Health and Well-being.

Rather than showing volunteers opportunities at random, matching highlights the opportunities that best fit a person’s profile. The fit between an opportunity and a volunteer is scored out of 100: overlapping skills carry 30 points, overlapping interests 20, being in the same city 20, day and time availability 15, mode of work 10 and language 5. The reasons that raise the score most are shown to the volunteer in short explanations, so people can see why an opportunity was suggested to them.

The platform’s “badge system” is a mechanism that visualises an individual’s long-term journey of goodwill. It was designed not to gamify charity but as a feedback layer that lets individuals see their own impact map. Each level represents the consistency a user has shown in a particular social domain.

Badges are awarded in 19 social areas, including education, the environment, disasters, health, blood donation, animals, migration and refugees, accessible living, older people and sport. Each area has five levels: Copper, Bronze, Silver, Gold and Platinum. Points are calculated from a user’s real activity: completed volunteering records count towards the relevant area; the field of an NGO supported through shopping-based donations earns points for the badge in that area; and each new user invited to the platform adds points to the “hangel Volunteer” area. Users can see their badges and progress at hangel.org/my-badges.

Data does not flow only from the individual to the organisation. NGOs receive a transparency score between 0 and 100 by uploading their legal documents and reports, and the score is publicly visible on their profiles. Supporters can therefore judge for themselves the accountability of the organisations they support with their time or their shopping.

The approach used to measure impact is set out in hangel’s Social Impact Measurement and Reporting Methodology (hangel.org/settings/contracts/sosyal-etki-metodolojisi). hangel continues to develop this infrastructure to standards aligned with international volunteering networks and the social enterprise ecosystem.

Many civil society organisations struggle to reach their communities and make their impact visible because they lack digital infrastructure. hangel aims to provide local NGOs, regardless of size, with enterprise-grade infrastructure for volunteering, reporting and impact measurement. The goal is for organisations that cannot set aside a separate budget for digital tools to have access to the same tools as large institutions.

This infrastructure brings an NGO’s day-to-day work together in a single panel. Organisations can publish volunteering opportunities and manage applications, create in-person or online events and take registrations, and confirm attendance at the door with a QR code. The age, city, occupation and interest breakdown of their supporter base can be followed in live charts. By uploading their legal documents and reports, organisations receive a transparency score between 0 and 100, which is publicly visible on their profiles. Team members can be given roles with a defined scope, such as general manager, volunteer coordinator or finance. The panel is free for NGOs; information and the application are at hangel.org/ngo.

The other pillar of the infrastructure is resources. On hangel Market, the NGO share of the commission earned on purchases from partner shops goes to the organisation the shopper chooses, at no extra cost to the shopper. Even a small association can thus build a steady source of support without asking its supporters to pay anything extra.

With multilingual content and country-specific legal documents, the platform aims to deliver a locally relevant experience at a global scale. In Türkiye, agreements with users and organisations refer to the Personal Data Protection Law No. 6698 (KVKK), Law No. 5253 on Associations and Law No. 5737 on Foundations. The platform’s policy documents also reference the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), California’s consumer privacy law (CCPA) and COPPA, the US law protecting children’s data online. All agreements and policies are publicly available at hangel.org/settings/contracts.

For impact data, hangel’s approach is aggregate reporting that leaves personal information out. Under its social impact measurement methodology, reporting is based on aggregated and anonymised data; personal data is processed in line with the KVKK, and special categories of health data such as blood type are not shared in a way that could identify an individual. The aim is to provide measurable impact data that NGOs can use on their own websites, in their annual reports and in funding applications. This approach supports donor trust and strengthens NGO accountability.

hangel was founded with the vision of making the social impact individuals generate through volunteering, donations and community participation measurable, shareable and verifiable. By mapping every qualifying action a user takes onto a social-domain-based scoring model, the platform produces a transparent impact map for both the individual and the partner non-profit organisation.

Our vision is to turn charitable giving from a one-off gesture into a sustainable, trackable habit. To this end, hangel is building infrastructure where individuals can see the real activities of the organisations they support and where volunteer hours are tied to a verified record chain.

On hangel, donations happen through shopping: when a supporter buys from a partner shop, the NGO share of the commission goes to the organisation they choose, at no extra cost to the supporter. In volunteering, attendance is recorded through QR check-in at the venue. Both become visible as badges and levels in the social areas a user supports, while NGOs carry a publicly visible transparency score on their profiles by uploading their legal documents and reports.

The platform references the SROI (Social Return on Investment) and “Theory of Change” methodologies for impact measurement. The Social Impact Measurement and Reporting Methodology published by hangel is built on the chain of change from inputs and activities to outputs, outcomes and impact; Social Value International’s SROI standard and its seven principles; GIIN’s IRIS+ taxonomy of indicators; and indicator-level alignment with the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

The methodology also states the current position plainly: draft theory-of-change chains have been built for the main service areas, the SROI method has been adopted and is being piloted, and no independent impact assurance has yet been obtained. In line with the SROI principle “do not over-claim”, hangel commits to including only verifiable results in its reports. hangel aims to publish an annual impact report on a calendar-year basis, covering a summary of its theory of change, indicator results, SROI estimates where available, the assumptions used and their limitations. The full text of the methodology is at hangel.org/settings/contracts/sosyal-etki-metodolojisi.

User data is collected on a data-minimisation basis and processed in accordance with Türkiye’s Personal Data Protection Law (KVKK) and the GDPR. Impact reporting is based on aggregated and anonymised data, and special categories of health data such as blood type are not shared in a way that could identify an individual.