I gave up trying to find every organization engaged in virtual volunteering back in 1998. Why? Because by 1998, when I was directing the Virtual Volunteering Project, I had already found hundreds of such organizations, and knew there were probably thousands more organizations engaged in virtual volunteering – I gave up and focused exclusively on discovering best practices.

Now, 13 years later, I dare say most nonprofit organizations, at least in the USA, involve online volunteers, even if they don’t know it; most organizations allow at least some volunteers to do some service online. For instance, Girl Scouts of the USA doesn’t say they involve online volunteers, yet I’m an online volunteer with Girl Scouts: 90% of my duties coordinating communications here in my part of the world are done online, from my home, via my computer. When I do workshops on virtual volunteering, attendees come up afterwards and say, “I’ve got online volunteers and didn’t even realize it!” And that’s good, because it means they aren’t distinguishing between online and onsite volunteers, something far too many organizations try to do – they are treating them all as just volunteers (and I mean just volunteers in the most praiseworthy of terms). Animal shelters, homeless shelters, communities of faith (churches, mosques, temples), community gardens, community theaters, nonprofit zoos, YWCAs and on and on involve online volunteers, to create web pages, to write articles for a newsletter, to test an online tool, to translate text from one language to another, to moderate or facilitate an online discussion group, to tag photos, to edit video, to research a subject online and gather information, to make regular posts to Facebook, to Tweet regularly, and on and on.

There is no database of organizations involving online volunteers, just as there is no database of every organization that involves volunteers. I hope that organizations that research volunteering, such as the Corporation for National Service, will finally catch up to the practice of online volunteering and start asking organizations about their virtual volunteering engagement for their volunteering studies!

What I have kept up is a list of organizations that recruit or involve online volunteers primarily and specifically; opportunities range from mentoring students to mentoring entrepreneurs in developing countries to helping to code software to offering tech advice to nonprofits to reporting on your local weather. Some tasks take an ongoing commitment, and some are so-called micro-volunteering (episodic volunteering online – it doesn’t take an ongoing commitment). I published the list to show what real online volunteering / online community service / virtual volunteering looks like – as opposed to highly questionable ones.

This is on one of my monetized pages so, yes, there are ads. But no study of online volunteering should be limited to this list – remember, if an organization involves volunteers at all, it’s very likely they involve online volunteers – or could!