Micro-Volunteering and Crowd-Sourcing: Not-So-New Trends
08:42, 21 October 2010
.. Posted in Volunteerism and Volunteer Management0 trackbacks
.. Link
I've added a new page to my web site:
Micro-Volunteering and Crowd-Sourcing: Not-So-New Trends in Virtual Volunteering/Online Volunteering
Back in the 1990s, I called it byte-sized volunteering: online volunteering tasks that take just a few hours or a few days to complete, like translating some text into another language, gathering information on one topic, tagging photos with certain keywords, etc. Now, the hot-new term for this is micro-volunteering.
Let's be clear: it's no different than offline, episodic volunteering; just as volunteers who come to a beach cleanup or participate in a Habitat for Humanity work day don't undergo a criminal background check, don't receive a long pre-service orientation, don't fill out a lengthy volunteer application form and may never volunteer with the organization again, online volunteers that participate in a micro-volunteering task may get started on their assignment just a few minutes after expressing interest.
But just as offline episodic volunteering like beach cleanups are more about building relationships, creating more awareness and cultivating more supporters than getting work done, micro-volunteering needs to have the same goals in order to be worth doing, and that takes having established, tried-and-true volunteer management standards in place.
Micro-Volunteering and crowd-Sourcing are long-term practices -- nothing new about them -- and here are details about making it work for your nonprofit organization/NGO/public sector org.
Trackback
