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Tomorrow is the Worldwide Day of Giving!

Posted in Update, tagged , , , , , , , , , on June 14, 2011| Leave a Comment »

-Blog post by Reed Sandridge from Washington, DC

Tomorrow is the 2nd annual Worldwide Day of Giving.

Be a part of this grass-roots effort to inspire giving and volunteerism around the world.  There are three simple ways to support this kindness movement.

1. VOLUNTEERING

You can volunteer with any organization.  For those of you who are busy and can’t take off work, consider micro-volunteering on www.sparked.com.  This is one of the coolest websites I have seen.  You can volunteer in the time it takes to eat lunch.  So grab a sandwich and knock out a volunteer project!

2. GIVE A STRANGER $10

So you’re old school?  You want to celebrate the Worldwide Day of Giving by paying forward like Reed did for 365 days.  It’s easy.  Find a complete stranger. Approach them and tell them that you are participating in the Worldwide Day of Giving and would like to give them $10. The only rules are that you may not know the person and you may not receive anything in return for the $10 (aside from the rush of goodness you will feel).

Ideally you will take some time to speak with the recipient, find out what they will do with the $10 as well as a little bit about who they are. If you can take a picture or video, that would be even better – we would love to have you post that here or on the Year of Giving Facebook Page.

 

3. DONATE $10 TO THE YEAR OF GIVING

Your $10 will be used to help those listed on the Lend a Hand section of theYear of Giving website.  Donations accepted at http://www.yearofgiving.org.

I hope that you will share your experience on the Year of Giving Facebook Page

Then sit back and start to watch the phenomenon begin.  Stories trickling in from all around the world. Imagine the different reactions and stories that we will collectively have from Oconomowoc, Wisconsin to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia to Raahe, Finland to Montevideo, Uruguay!

I encourage you to harness the power of social networking to help us get reach thousands of people.  We can do it!

Use #WDoG on Twitter.

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Sparked

Posted in Volunteering, tagged , , , , , on April 20, 2011| 5 Comments »

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!

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