Blog post by Reed from Washington, DC
We’re without a Kindness Investor for a while it looks like. As always, if you know someone who would like to take on this exciting seven-day adventure, drop me a note.
For the rest of you I’d like to share some tools that I use for volunteering. So for the next couple of days I will do a blog post each day on a resource for finding volunteer opportunities.
Here's a cool video of Sparked Co-Founder and CEO Jacob Colker talking about Sparked and the impact it's making.
The first one is one that every single one of you can use! Sparked (www.sparked.com) claims to be the world’s first microvolunteering network. What’s microvolunteering you ask? Well, the folks at Sparked define it as volunteering that meets four main criteria.
Convenient
It’s volunteerism that fits into your schedule when you have time – typically (but not necessarily) via an internet connected device such as a personal computer or mobile phone.Bite-sized
Volunteer tasks are broken into small(-ish) pieces, so that you can complete a task in the time you have available (whatever that time may be).Crowdsourced
The nonprofit that needs help asks a large(-ish) group for assistance.Network-managed
The time demands of the manager (e.g. a nonprofit staffer) are reduced by distributing as much of the project management and quality review as possible to the network of micro-volunteers. This work management method differs from a top-down model of project management.
I’ve signed up for Sparked and have already completed my first project, which didn’t take me long at all. You can read my blog post about using Sparked to help the Capital Area Food Bank of Texas. What is brilliant about Sparked is that you can volunteer when you have time all from the convenience of your computer. You can help nonprofits in dozens of areas, but here are a few to give you an idea: accounting, blogging, copywriting, data entry, marketing, research, social networking, translating, etc.
All this talk (ok, I’m writing not talking, but you get the idea) about microvolunteering has got me thinking. As you know, the Worldwide Day of Giving is coming up on June 15th! This year you have an option to volunteer if you would rather do that then do a $10 kindness investment. If you are busy and don’t have time to get out and volunteer on that day this is your perfect option. I want to see how many people we can get to do microvolunteering projects on June 15th with Sparked! Right now they have 2,642 volunteer opportunities on their website. Wouldn’t it be cool if all of us Year of Giving followers could get enough people to volunteer that day that we could complete every single task they have on their site? Wow…that would be amazing.
You better start spreading the word fast!
Year of Giving 