The buzz about microvolunteering continues – but, IMO, this form of virtual volunteering is still being talked about it terms of hype, rather than practicalities and concrete benefits. It’s being talked about by bloggers and consultants more than organizations creating microvolunteering activities. The vast majority of blogs and articles about microvolunteering are focused entirely on supposed benefits for volunteers, with not even anecdotal information to support assertions (not even testimonials from online volunteers, for instance, about why they undertook such activities, what exactly they did, etc.), and often without providing actual examples of what online volunteers do in microvolunteering activities, or details on how organizations benefit in such a way that the return on investment is clear. An example: this article from the Institute for Volunteering Research: “Micro-volunteering: doing some good through smartphones?“, about users of the Orange’s Do Some Good smartphone App.
Having promoted this form of online volunteering since 1997 – back when I gave it the not-at-all catchy name of byte-sized volunteering – having created such assignments for volunteers and, even now, managing a microvolunteering initiative, I offer the following:
My experience managing the Donate Your Brain initiatives for TechSoup. In this blog, I try to show just how much work it takes to provide meaningful microvolunteering opportunities. This isn’t a blog to discourage organizations from creating online microtasks for volunteers, but it is insight from a manager of volunteers point of view – and I would love to see many more such testimonials from the people that are actually creating these assignments and supervising the contributions made by volunteers.
A very long list of examples of microvolunteering really looks like. You won’t find a longer list anywhere of what microvolunteering assignments can look like. This web page also provides lots of advice on how to create such assignments and make the program worth doing.
For you researchers out there: it would be so refreshing if, instead of only focusing on the motivations of volunteers to engage in microvolunteering, you did some research on the organizations that involve volunteers in microvolunteering assignments:
- What ultimately prompts them to start creating these assignments?
- What type of microvolunteering assignments are the most common to start with at an organization?
- What type of microvolunteering assignments are the most common across organizations?
- Do most organizations start with a formal microvolunteering program – using that name, getting approval from senior staff to engage volunteers in this way, having a web page and blog announcing such, having an official launch of such activities, etc. – or do they just start offering such assignments without fanfare, even without calling them “microvolunteering”?
- Do most organizations have just one person, or multiple people, creating microvolunteering activities and supervising volunteers?
- What percentage of volunteers engaged in microvolunteering became longer-term volunteers, or became financial donors?
- If an organization’s engagement of volunteers through microvolunteering went away tomorrow, what would be the impact?
And, yes, microvolunteering is talked about in the upcoming Virtual Volunteering Guidebook – just like it was in the last one back in 1999, but this time, we use the snazzy new name.
Re: Testimonials etc. I’ll be adding some user Testimonials to the Help From Home website very soon, along with what impact users felt they made via the actions they participated in. Whilst it doesn’t go all the way in answering the concerns you have, it’s at least a start.
Re: questions for organsiations. These are great questions to ask, and I’d like permission please to use these on the Help From Home website in my dealings with organisations
Mike, you have permission for all eternity to use anything from my blog or web site in your work – I want to see all forms of volunteering succeed! Looking forward to more info from you.
We’ve just participated in a piece of research looking at some of the questions you’ve asked above. I think there’s a report coming out and the organisations who took part are having a workshop on it to explore the findings in more detail. Contact Institute of Volunteering Research if you want to find out more.
Well that sounds like an offer I can’t refuse! Thanks very much.
Hello Jayne, Yes, Amy is right. IVR and NCVO have been working on a project looking at micro-volunteering from a range of perspectives (including fantastic input from our case study organisations and Mike Bright). The report from this project is due to be launched 7 November. It will answer some of the questions you’ve identified here, and we’ll be publishing some best practice guidance also. Best wishes, Joni
Thank you Jayne for picking up this really important discussion. I think you’re right! Mico-Volunteering is a actual buzz word. But for me the word just discribes somthing we know since decads: Volunteers that are highly engaged in their work today once started with smal — mostly informal — tasks in their neighborhood. They’re not become 100%-Volunteers from one moment to an other. That’s the point were Micro-Volunteering can make a difference!
Volunteer Managers today work hard to promote given tasks trough via a wide range of media cannels (from public pinnboards to Twitter and Facebook). In Germany most of this tasks are not ‘micro’! Given tasks are mostly created for volunteers that’re doing somthing regulary for a longer time (e.g. reading newspapers for blind people once a week). Tasks with a planed end are really rare in Germany!
I think, if volunteer managers would provide ‘bit sized’ engagements they can open a door to volunteers that’re not willing to give up their autonomy of time — volunteers that whant to support special causes or organizations with an amount of time their’re comfortable with. If the engagement feels good I am sure (!) they’ll be comfortable with giving more time and perhaps assuming more responsibility in their volunteer work; they’re going to start a volunteer carrier…
For me — as some kind of digital nativ — it is just a logical step to provide Micro-Volunteering tasks throug the Internet. In an highly individualized society Social Media such as Facebook, Twitter & Co. is the new neighborhood. Volunteering biographies and carriers are starting here!
Sure! All that are only my thoughs and I have to give at minimum anecdotal information to support my assertions. And I try to do so: This year I managed the relaunce of a website. I didn’t want to do all the work (not the relaunch work and not the following …) alone and so I tried to engage some Micro-Volunteers out of the community. I just gave them the framework for their tasks and pushed them to fill it (for intance the gallery page and the history page). It was hard work but now the page is not mine alone! It’s a community product and some people continue to volunteer for it. I have a photographer that manage the gallery page and the flickr channel and I have an video editor for a sigle project. Also the forum is used in a way we pland it (… as public information channel outside of Facebook)….
I agree with Hannes that Microvolunteering has been around for ages, but I think that needs some clarification.
Sure, small bite-sized voluntary tasks have been around ever since nonprofits requested people to take part in actions that took about an hour-ish or less to complete, eg being a volunteer taxi driver for a blind person, or doing an hour shift on a charity stall. Lately, I’ve noticed more and more orgs latching on to the word ‘microvolunteering’ to describe tasks they already had on their books, but hadn’t attached that word to the task, ie they seem to be experimenting possibly to tap in to what the word microvolunteering conveys (no commitment, little time – as opposed to what traditional volunteering conveys with commitment and time etc), perhaps to see if they can ‘recruit’ more volunteers for an event.
However, Hannes mentioned that microvolunteering describes something we’ve known about for decades, and I’d like to just clarify that. I’d like to say that there was a point in time when ‘modern microvolunteering’ started to become more popular and named as such, with the advent of platforms solely dedicated to facilitating a match between online bite-sized actions and volunteers came into being. This started with Microvoluntarios.org (now defunct) in April 2008 to the latest one just announced in September, 2013 called http://www.communiteer.org/. You can see a timeline of this progression in my article, History of Microvolunteering http://bit.ly/GEcPtZ (which is open to being amended, if you feel I’ve got it wrong).
The latest diversification, where nonprofits are relabelling small offline traditional tasks to microvolunteering ones seems to be a small but growing trend amongst nonprofits, and is shifting the goalposts to a more expansive arena to the one when I first entered back in 2008.
Some examples of this relabelling include: http://on.fb.me/1f7CaeL + http://bit.ly/1cfSV6t + http://bit.ly/1a0QuP5
Just want to point out that microvolunteering is actually MUCH older than 2008 – it’s older than even the World Wide Web. Nonprofits were posting byte-sized opportunities to help out on soc.org.nonprofit and a variety of newsgroups in the early 1990s, and probably sooner. The earliest virtual volunteering tasks were microvolunteering, and people were promoting them as ways to help out for people who don’t have time to volunteer in traditional roles.
So, again – it’s a great, snazzy name for a practice that’s been around for a long time. And it’s great that it’s now becoming something talked about by even more people. It’s taken much longer than I expected – but, then again, volunteer management trends frequently surprise me.