Micro Volunteering


Happy Volunteering Week Everyone!

In honour of Volunteering Week, I wanted to post about something that has caught my eye. And that is, micro-volunteering. Micro-volunteering is the concept of having volunteers help your organization out, one bit at a time. Rather than looking for someone who can make a year long committment, break down the tasks into chunks and assign those.
If you need someone to design a brochure, then they can do that without having to make a long committment. You can get more specialized volunteers. I'm volunteering currently as a web writer for a United Way agency in Toronto.

One site that is taking micro-volunteering to the web is Urbantastic. Located in Vancouver, Urbantastic was created to help busy people help out a cause they believe in.

Says founder Ben Johnson "It's inspired by the collaboration models of projects like Wikipedia and Open Source Software. We believe there is a pool of young, talented people who are not actively donating time to causes they believe in. There is a desire, but the avenues of engagement are inadequate. We are in the process of correcting this using the tools of that generation."

What the site does is showcase the current volunteer opportunities and gives volunteers a place to show off their skills and experience.

It will be interesting to see if micro-volunteering takes off. I think it offers up a chance for nonprofits to lower volunteer costs and use more skilled people.

How does your organization utilize volunteers? And do you find them on the web or elsewhere? Tell us below!

3 comments:

d mourey said...

thank you. I can see this idea growing all over. Where I live, in Rochester NY, we have a volunteer board through our United Way but it's hard to get to, not advertised and doesn't have the micro idea.
Love it thank you. I voted for my city and joined.

Lindsey said...

You should try using Twitter as a way to post volunteer opportunities. I've seen that used successfully as well.

Anonymous said...

Be sure to check out www.sparked.com too! It's a great place to become a micro-volunteer in about 60 seconds or less.

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