Micro-volunteering: Finding the Right Volunteers
In my last post, I looked at IfWeRanTheWorld.com, and asked whether making micro-volunteering ‘social’ would be enough to prove its worth. Jayne Cravens argued that micro-volunteering is useful to NGOs not because it achieves results, but because it helps them to expand and diversify their missions.
Sparked.com attempts to change the views of those like Cravens; its makers want to show that micro-volunteering is a viable way to achieve real goals for non-profits. The site itself, Jacob Colker describes, is “a very mature product”: the result of three years development with almost a quarter of a million users.
The freedom Sparked.com allows NGOs to post almost any task may mean that many remain uncompleted for a long time, but those challenges that are met are hugely valuable for the organizations that have set them.
In a beautiful illustration from the site, Colker told me of a man from Jordan who translated a nine-page document from English to Arabic for a charity based in Cincinnati, Ohio. The charity, Ronald McDonald House, is responsible for housing the families of sick children who go to the city for treatment; the document was their welcome pack. Giving up a few hours to translate the pack, the volunteer saved the charity several thousand dollars, and allowed those it helps to feel more at home in a difficult situation.
Challenge Completed!
Sparked.com shows how micro-volunteering can work if the right people are connected: that’s part of the reason why The Extraordinaries are focusing on recruiting volunteers through corporate social responsibility programmes. They want marketers, financiers, designers and social media gurus to populate their social sphere. By exploiting the specific skills of its participants, micro-volunteering can strike beyond acting as a gateway to more engagement, and do more than market a worthy organization. Its results can become concrete and valuable.
In conclusion, Jacob Colker seems rightly proud of the way Sparked.com has harnessed free time for good:
“Each task that is completed has a dollar value attached to it, and that’s a tangible amount of money that the charity doesn’t have to spend. In this economy, where budgets are being cut, we feel very strongly that sometimes the best way to fundraise is simply to save money in the first place. And if we can help facilitate that, and allow people to feel good about themselves by volunteering for an hour, and make it ridiculously easy for a non-profit to manage the full process, then we’re achieving something great.”
Microvolunteering for the masses
Taking the credit for coining the actual term, Sparked.com is the big dog when it comes to micro-volunteering. Users profile themselves on joining, and are suggested challenges posted (for free) by the many NGOs using the site. Sparked.com is a certified B-Corp, and earns profit through Corporate Social Responsibility programmes.
A jaunty, social media take on the world of microvolunteering, IWRTW encourages interaction between users, allowing them to build up a public profile of ‘micro-actions’ completed.
Not technically focused on micro-volunteering, but around ‘Change Agents’: ‘cool people we’d all like to know who are working all over the globe to tackle the world’s biggest social and environmental problems.’ Users can sign on as `Backers’, and choose to respond to their action requests. These are often micro-actions involving the web.
The site is seeking to earn its crust through targeted advertising.
This UK-based site acts as a kind of directory and information point for micro-volunteering opportunities. Users can search for actions based on their time requirement and category.