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.