Micro-volunteering: An Interview with Jacob Colker, Cofounder of Sparked.com
At TEDxNASA 2010, Ben Rigby, CTO and cofounder of The Extraordinaries, gave a simple but astounding statistic:
In the time the world spends on Facebook each day, we could build 55 Empire State Buildings.
Rigby explained how he and his colleagues are on a mission: to hijack a small portion of the millions of hours spent on the web, make good those seemingly inconsequential moments waiting at the bus stop, and allow people an easy way to use their spare moments to help charitable causes. Finding a way to tap into this time and use it constructively could, in theory, create a revolution in the social sector.
Wanting to discover more, I spoke with Jacob Colker, the company’s CEO and cofounder, about the ideas behind their micro-volunteering platform, Sparked.com:
“Close your eyes and think of volunteerism. The mental image that comes up in most people’s minds is a homeless shelter, or a food-bank, or a hospital, or a park cleanup. That’s what we’ve been taught volunteerism is. The problem is that those experiences require a very structured process. From the moment you decide you want to volunteer to the moment you’re actually able to volunteer, there’s a whole ton of hoops to jump through.”
Procedures such as interviews, criminal record checks and training present a number of off-putting obstructions to the would-be volunteer. Even once these have been overcome, volunteering is no easy undertaking.
“There’s a requirement of a time commitment of at least four to six hours. You have to set out a time, and schedule it over weeks and months, because it’s not worth NGOs going through the whole process just for one day.”
In the lives of most working people, these four to six hour-long free periods don’t exist. “74% of Americans don’t volunteer, and the overwhelming number one reason is that they don’t have time.” Colker explained, however, that The Extraordinaries’ research showed that people do have free time: it just isn’t all at once.
Sparked.com Landing Page
“We hear people saying that they’re too busy, but we also see that people are spending a lot of time online. We spend 400 million hours on Facebook, every single day. We spend 24 million hours playing solitaire every day, and we watch two billion videos on YouTube every single day. So we realized that people do have time, but it comes in 20, 30 minute, or hour long chunks, not six hours at a time. So we set out to build a platform where people can share that hour, or half hour with non-profits all over the world. And that’s the essence of micro-volunteering”.
Sign up to Sparked.com as a micro-volunteer, and you’re asked to input your interests and skills. The site then suggests challenges tailored to your specific profile: ‘micro-actions’ uploaded by hundreds of participating NGOs.
“We focus on projects that can be completed within 2 minutes and 2 hours. The reason we consider micro-volunteering to be so powerful is that it solves the problem of time.”
Sparked.com Project Page
From a volunteer’s point of view, this seems like a fantastic idea. Many of us want the opportunity to ‘give something back’ in our own time, and micro-volunteering is certainly a flexible and low-commitment option.
But how much good can such tasks achieve? Can short-term projects and incremental micro-actions actually help to solve real problems? And can micro-volunteering really compete with other online activities that have proven so addictive, such as watching videos on YouTube, or checking Facebook?
In my next post, I will be speaking with Jayne Cravens, consultant to mission-based organizations and the writer of the brilliant Coyote Communications blog. In the meantime, I would love to hear your thoughts on micro-volunteering, and the experiences you may have had using sites such as Sparked.com.