-Blog post by Reed Sandridge of Washington, DC
I woke up to terrible shooting pain in my neck. It always happens when I fall asleep on flights. Despite my weighty eyelids, I didn’t think I could go back to sleep. With another two hours or so to go on my journey to Ireland I decided to fire up my laptop and knock out some volunteer work.
That’s right, you can even volunteer from the comfort (can you hear me laughing?) of your own chair as you glide through the air at 600 miles per hour. I cracked open my laptop and connected to the Internet – for a “small” fee. Before we all start bitching that we shouldn’t be paying these fees, let’s not forget how amazing that is in and of itself – to connect to the Internet as you speed around the Earth at an altitude of 36,000 feet.
Children in Cameroon. (Photo courtesy of Connected Youth of Cameroon)
Once connected I logged on to Sparked.com and started browsing volunteer opportunities. I quickly found Connected Youth of Cameroon, an African based nonprofit whose mission it is to foster youth and women’s civic, social and intellectual development while promoting community engagement and development. They posted the following on the micro-volunteer site:
Help us with ideas to attract people to our facebook page
We have created a facebook page and need to invite visitors and even have a fan club page. We need your ideas and suggestion.
So, I did about 15 minutes worth of research on their website and their facebook page and then started putting together some advice for them. It’s that easy. Check out my recommendations.
An airline passenger surfs the Internet from 36,000 feet. (photo courtesy http://www.usatoday.com)
I’m glad that I hopefully have been able to help this young nonprofit, however, I couldn’t stop thinking about a bigger, more systemic problem that we have. We need to get every WiFi access carrier in the world to create a portfolio of websites that anyone can access free of charge. Sparked.comwould be on that list for sure! If we just take the airline industry, imagine how many people stuck on airplanes might be willing to spend 15 minutes online helping out their virtual community instead of watching some dumb B movie that they fell asleep watching on their last flight.
I’ve been told that the airlines and the WiFi access providers are not interested in enabling such a service for volunteer work. Let me know what YOU think…can we make this happen?!
Year of Giving 
I think it’s a great idea, Reed, but figure the wifi people and the airlines aren’t interested in anything that doesn’t bring in money. Perhaps if we think of something that gives them value that they can measure in some way, although not money from the people using the sites…. you have to figure out what would move them.
Agreed. This is exactly the type of consulting I do now is helping create tangible values for the efforts that companies do to help their community.
your imagination is wonderful don’t lose hope make a concrete proposition to one of such companies and follow up something will come out of it.patrick
thanks Patrick! Keep up your good work in Cameroon!
I think it’s a great idea and would tap into so much wasted time on airplanes. Hopefully the good karma and goodwill publicity will be incentives to get it to happen. Thanks Reed!
I might consider starting by trying to spread the word that there are volunteering options while flying. Creating a demand for free in-flight connections to sparked.com would help push the airlines.
To spread the word, it might be possible to get some of the big discount travel services – Orbitz, etc. to put some ideas and links on their pages. They might be persuaded by the “community service” angle. Some airlines like to show off their community service gold star. Maybe some links on those web pages would help get the word out.
Another thought occurs to me. What if people were allowed to purchase internet time at booking? I’d be much more inclined to spend $20 to connect while flying if I am already spending $600 on a ticket. A “limited” option could be purchased for $5 which connects to non-profits.
Just brainstorming.
It seems that most airlines charge a fixed price based on the flight’s duration (I might be wrong). If the service was charged by utilization (which demands a more complicated billing infra-structure) and communities such as sparkle.com were an incentive for people spending more time online when flying, they would go for it (and I think it would be an incentive: you may “trick” people to go online to access such communities free of charge, but since they are certainly going to do other things too, such as check their emails, facebook, etc, you can certainly make a profit). But the way it is at the moment, once you’ve paid, they don’t care how much time you spent online or on which websites you spent your time online. An idea would be to suggest them to advertise communities like sparkle.com on their web portals. That would be good PR for them. I don’t know if they already use this space for advertising, but if they do, they probably won’t agree with this idea either, because they would lose advertising space. But since that’s a charged service, they probably don’t put much advertising (way too pushy I think).
Here’s a scheme that enables people to volunteer in-flight. It goes some way to encouraging people to spend their time on a plane more impactfully, but what it really needs is, as the comments above suggest, for the airlines to provide free internet access to make it more readily accessible.
http://helpfromhome.org/our-projects/help-from-holiday/in-flight-microvolunteering
Hi Mike, thanks for your note. I just spent a few minutes exploring Help From Home’s website…very interesting. How do we convince the airlines to provide free access to the websites of a few predetermined organizations that have volunteer opportunities on them?
I think it’s going to be a long road before we get to the stage of free internet access to help charities on board a plane. Sure, it will do their CSR campaign no end of good, but it will only appeal to those people who are charitably minded.
That said, I run the http://helpfromhome.org website and I already have a PR guru on board who wants to promote the in-flight volunteering project to airline mags. We’ll see what happens with this campaign, but I think it’s going to be baby steps to achieve free internet access to do good.
However in time, as the internet becomes all pervasive and technology makes it more readily available, it’s inevitable IMHO that internet access will become free on planes. I think at this stage in getting people to volunteer on board planes is to put the thought into people’s and airline’s minds that it can be done.
Then, perhaps approach airlines, especially Virgin, who I’m aware have developed a campaign in the past to persuade their passengers to ‘do good’, to provide free internet access for a limited time in-flight devoted to worthy causes. Of course, there’s got to be a commercial aspect to it for planes to subscribe to it (becoz they’re in it to make a profit), and to be honest I’m not an entrepreneur or business person, so I have no idea how that would work