With the launch of Sparked.com a few weeks ago, microvolunteering is getting a lot of buzz these days from organizations, companies, and technology experts.
To date the interest has focused on the enormous possibilities of the format — how nonprofits and NGOs can use new platforms and tools to turn broad audiences volunteers into completed crowd-sourced projects.
But in a sign of the rapid evolution of micro-volunteering, more attention is now being paid its risks and “quandaries.”
Over at Energize’s excellent online journal e-Volunteerism, Mike Bright has written a detailed article examining the history and issues surrounding micro. Bright is founder of UK’s Help from Home, a Web site for micro-volunteering, one of the most comprehensive databases of microvolunteering opportunities on the Web. After itemizing micro’s “greatest hits,” he then points out micro’s many negatives, which often get lost in news reports.
As he writes, micro has some challenges for organizations:
- Because most micro-actions are performed by an individual acting alone, it could be perceived as a lonely occupation and will not appeal to everyone
- Micro-actions are small tasks which, when combined with other people’s actions, produce an end result. Each volunteer is therefore divorced from seeing the whole picture and the ultimate outcome, which could be a bit frustrating if you’re the type of person who wants to see instant results
- There is usually no contact with the recipients of your action. You don’t get to see their smiles when you have helped them out. You have to be self-motivated to know that you are doing some good, and not everyone is.
- Even though your actions are combined with others and you are therefore engaged in teamwork, there is rarely any direct interaction with fellow micro-volunteers. So, you may not feel part of a team and lose that satisfaction.
- With traditional volunteering opportunities, you can normally see proof for yourself that a result has been achieved with your actions. With micro-volunteering there are limited ways to “see” success or prove results reported on a Web site.
- From the organisation’s point of view, there is less control over and interaction with the people they are reliant upon to help them out. It may take more effort to convince, motivate and encourage people to participate in their micro-action.
- Micro-volunteering is not exactly well known yet, so people aren’t aware that micro-action can benefit worthy causes and don’t go looking for them. Organisations that want to benefit from people performing micro-actions have an uphill struggle to gather a pool of people to help them out. The time spent encouraging and finding micro-volunteers may be better spent on other things with more effective results.
- It is quite possible that we could become frantically busy doing a lot of stuff that does make the doer feel great – which is important – but doesn’t add up to the systemic change needed in communities. Does busy mean the same thing as impact?
Bright also points out the risks of micro for volunteer managers:
“There’s a danger that if we now go in and start pitching volunteering that takes less than 10 minutes, we’re going to make it even harder to win over staff round and get their mindsets changed. “
Bright also describes three challenges to organizations: concerns about screening, health/safety of volunteers, and retention. At Help at Home, Bright screens projects from NGOs to minimize risk to minors. Policies like his may make micro less of an option for organizations that help at-risk populations.
Meanwhile, organizations that may have stout policies for the health and safety of volunteers and staff on their premises tend to avoid the issue when it comes to micro. As he writes:
“… A cursory spot check of some of the initiatives featured on Help From Home reveals that most organisations do nothing about heath and safety issues, perhaps because it is just not necessary due to the way in which initiatives set up their micro-volunteering actions….”
Finally, a big part of the promise of micro has been that it represents an easy first rung in the ladder of engagement of supporter and an organization. And yet, early reports show that retention is a serious challenge for many organizations investing in micro.
Bright quotes Jacob Colker of The Extraordinaries (producers of Sparked.com), talking about their first ventures in 2008 and 2009:
“Like any website, there’s a natural churn of users after a while. In the past, with image tagging for example, there’s only so much image tagging one person is willing to do before they get bored.”
In addition to some great insights by Jayne Cravens, a pioneer on virtual volunteering, the article also produces a bullet list from Randy Tyler, an early advocate for micro, on the serious questions organizations should ask as they explore where microvolunteering fits in.
It’s a thorough report on one of the most innovative trends in volunteer engagement today. Click here to read the article, and then please share your thoughts with us.
(Photo by iphonepic)
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Hi again. After writing this definition of micro-volunteering, I pondered a bit more and decided that #3 should really be broken up into 2 separate points:
* networked model
* crowdsourcing
I’ve written a post with a little more detail here: http://blog.beextra.org/2010/12/a-definition-of-micro-volunteering.html
thanks.
Hi Robert & readers.
Ben from Sparked / The Extraordinaries here.
Interesting list of quandaries, but confined, I think, to one particular implementation of micro-volunteering. In fact, almost all of these points seem to refer to The Extraordinaries’ iPhone app from 2008/2009. And I’d certainly agree with them in that context… which is why we started from the ground up in 2010 with sparked.com. I think that it’s reasonable to say that none of these negatives exist currently (well, maybe the one about less control over the volunteer, which is, of course, the point. As that’s what reduces the management overhead).
I won’t address them one by one. But for example, the article says that “Each volunteer is therefore divorced from seeing the whole picture and the ultimate outcome.”
On Sparked, volunteers work together to complete a task for a nonprofit. The task activity is threaded (like a blog post), so that you can see where it began and how it ends. The nonprofit marks the task as “successful” or “not successful” and sends a thank you note to all of the volunteers. In the process, there’s often quite a lot of back and forth among the volunteers as they try to figure out the best solution for the nonprofit. It’s quite a collaboration sometimes.
I just put up some screenshots so that you can see what it’s like, visually: http://blog.beextra.org/2010/12/users-and-nonprofits-are-loving-micro-volunteering-on-the-new-sparkedcom.html
There are also a couple of recent quotes there from volunteers and nonprofits. Like this one from a Sparked volunteer commenting on a Care2 blog post:
“I am a member and I feel enriched by it. Some reason I feel like I have helped myself more than those I have helped. And that’s a good thing. Try it!” – John C. [from the comments on this Care2 blog post http://www.care2.com/causes/trailblazers/blog/say-hello-to-the-micro-volunteering-world/
And this one from a nonprofit:
"I got an absolutely fantastic response back from Tim S. with Charles and Ray Design. I suspect his total time invested was less than 30 minutes but he gave a phenomenal critique, all of which got incorporated into our December newsletter." - Robert Connely [from a blog post: http://rcnnolly.wordpress.com/2010/12/06/radical-trust-and-visitor-engagement/]
These are not solicited comments/posts by the way. They’re totally organic. Do a Twitter or Blog search for Sparked. You’ll see lots that are similar.
In sum, I think it’s important to distinguish critique about the concept of micro-volunteering from a specific implementation of that concept. Because, as you can see – a lot of the erstwhile negatives were handily addressed with a new way of implementing the concept. And there may be many other ways in which the concept gets implemented also. So, if there is to be critique (and I heartily welcome it), the critique should address the core concept of micro-volunteering, which is volunteering that is:
1. convenient: it fits into your schedule when you have time – via an internet connected device such as a mobile phone or personal computer
2. delivered in small pieces: so that you can complete a volunteer task in the time that you have available (whatever that time may be)
3. managed using a “networked model” – where the time demands of the manager (ie: nonprofit staffer) are reduced by distributing as much of the project management and quality review to the network as possible.
(I just gave a TED talk on our evolution from iPhone app to Sparked.com platform. where I describe the model btw & if you’re interested: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7-utwTAsPM)
Phew. This is one heckofa long post. Thanks for reading this far if you have!
-ben
CTO & Co-founder
http://www.sparked.com
by The Extraordinaries
Mike from Help From Home here
The article that is being referred to here was mainly focusing on the actions featured on Help From Home, which as Ben says is just one particular implementation of micro-volunteering, ie. those that can be done in under 30 minutes from within your own home. At the same time, it was also trying to cover a broad spectrum of the overall micro-volunteering arena and not just The Extraordinaries iPhone app. There’s presumably a lot I left out, but I felt it was a start as an intro to the micro-volunteering arena.
The article was also written before Sparked went live with their new website, so actually does refer to The Extraordinaries iPhone app, but only as one of a number of different micro-volunteering action types. Knowing what I now know about Sparked’s new website and Ben’s definitions of micro-volunteering as mentioned on his latest blog post, the article would have incorporated these in an effort to provide an overall flavor of the micro-volunteering arena.
To balance up the quandaries that Robert mentions in his blog post, I think it would be fair to cite the pros of micro-volunteering that I include in the article. Again, these are mainly related to home based micro-volunteering (be it online, offline or on your smartphone) and as this is only one part of the overall micro-volunteering arena, may not be specifically related to Sparked et al:
* Micro-actions can be conducted anywhere, at any time. You can do them while watching television, riding on the bus, or even reclined in bed! Volunteering can go wherever you go. People can control the environment in which they volunteer their time, making it potentially safer than traditional volunteer opportunities.
* Most micro-actions do not require commitment, which strips away one of the barriers that inhibits people from performing traditional volunteering. You can dip in and dip out whenever you want.
* Practically all micro-volunteering opportunities require the minimal of training: You just read the instructions and go. This really pushes micro-volunteering into the ‘easy’ bracket and once again, removes a stumbling block that often prevents people from volunteering in the first place. These attributes might encourage people to explore similar, additional actions and so the overall time spent on philanthropic actions might increase.
* You can now squeeze in more volunteering time, in-between your traditional philanthropic commitments.
* The huge diversity of the type of micro-actions goes beyond traditional volunteering opportunities – so there is more scope to do more good in new ways.
* The range of micro-volunteering opportunities makes it all inclusive – no barriers to age, race, creed, culture, gender, etc.
* As with all virtual volunteering, it enlarges the volunteer pool to include people who are house-bound, have disabilities, have free time only at irregular intervals, or are located anywhere in the world.
* It has the potential to engage people in volunteering at a level they are comfortable with now, doing something they want. But at a later date, maybe when their lifestyle changes, they will be more likely to commit more time to that volunteering cause (which they might not have done if they weren’t involved in it by micro-volunteering earlier in their life).
Help From Home, at the moment, just documents other initiative’s micro-volunteering tasks and tries to feature a broad range of activities that could be classed as micro-volunteering. The article was written to hopefully ignite some sort of discussion about the micro-volunteering arena, so that in time some sort of consensus line of thought can be adopted for Joe Public to recognize and relate to what this arena is all about.
To throw something else in the mix, the UK newspaper The Guardian, reports that government ministers are looking at incorporating micro-volunteering into UK’s Big Society agenda, part of which is to encourage more social good towards others. Ben, I hope you may be able to be a part of that agenda, because I think (and this is only a gut feeling at the moment, until I get more info on it) that Sparked could have a role to play in it. Here’s the newspaper article. Micro-volunteering is mentioned near the bottom http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/dec/07/give-more-big-society-charities
End of rambling on and on!
Mike
Founder, Help From Home
Hi everyone, I just wanted to thank you for writing such a great article. A couple of friends and I had actually been cooking up a microvolunteering service, and when we saw this article we knew there was a market.
ChangeMachine integrates an innovative live collaboration platform to allow college students to work with each other on microvolunteering tasks.
Follow our blog
http://changemachine.wordpress.com/
and our twitter @_ChangeMachine
Thanks!
Paul
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Thanks for highlighting Mike Bright’s excellent article in the most recent issue of e-Volunteerism (www.e-volunteerism.com). However, please note that this is not a “blog” — it’s an online journal, now in its 11th year of publication. We invited Mike to write this full, multi-page article for us because we try to offer our subscribers cutting-edge ideas from the people who do the innovating, anywhere in the world. Of course, readers can respond onine to all articles, which is not possible in a printed journal.
Thanks again.
Susan J. Ellis, Editor, e-Volunteerism
Hi Susan,
Thanks for pointing this out – we have made the correction. We’re pleased to be able to share Mike Bright’s excellent work, and e-Volunteerism’s great content, with the nonprofit community at VolunteerMatch.