‘Micro-volunteering’ highlights positive impact of technology on voluntary sector

By Sophie Hudson, Wednesday, 15 September 2010, 4 Comments

It’s easy to become jaded by the endless stream of technological advances we see practically every day.

But one piece of technology I recently became aware of that made me sit up and take notice is an app which allows people to donate just a few valuable minutes of their time to charities in a quick and convenient way.

The Extraordinaries http://app.beextra.org/ is a micro-volunteering network website where not-for-profit organisations can register and post challenges they need help with.

Individual volunteers can also register with the site and they then receive an app which allows them to browse the challenges on their phone and volunteer to help out with the projects which match their skills.

A quick internet search has yielded results of other apps out there doing similar things, such as iVolunteer.

However, the uniqueness of the Extraordinaries is that people can volunteer just a few minutes of their time to give their expertise towards a challenge a charity is facing. It’s know as ‘micro-volunteering’.

One charity was recently trying to find an inexpensive way of digging a well in Kenya, and through the network was connected with a US-managed but Kenyan-based well digging company within a week.  

The creator of the App, Jacob Colker, recently won a Rolex Award for Enterprise, which provides support for innovators ages 16-30, for the project.

It seems to be well-deserved recognition, as the app really highlights the hugely positive impact that technology can have on the sector during a difficult economic time.

It may be harder to secure monetary donations from people, but securing donations in the form of time are still more than possible, if you do it in an innovative way.

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  • Jamie Thomas

    Thanks for the mention Sophie. We’ve been promoting the micro volunteering concept for some months now as it’s still a fairly new concept in the UK – the Extraodinarires are a US site that have led the way accross the pond. But there is some activity going on here, check out Help From Home who have a profile on i-volunteer and have some great blogs on the subject as well a bunch of micro opportunities that you can start doing right now http://www.i-volunteer.org.uk/helpfromhome/ We’re also launching a micro volunteering campaign on next week which we hope TS will mention :o )

  • jacob from The Extraordinaries

    Thanks so much for writing about us! Real quick, I am not the founder alone. We have an amazing team of people including Boris, Ben, Shauna, Chad, Jordan, Joseph, Jeff, Britt, and Sundeep. Check out the rest of our team here! http://app.beextra.org/content/team

    Also, we’re soon launching a new product called Sparked. You can find it at sparked.org — hope you can check it out in two weeks! Thanks again.

  • Michael Bright

    Thanks to Jamie from i-volunteer for mentioning Help From Home http://www.helpfromhome.org/ . The micro volunteering arena is definitely taking off. For instance, Help From Home contains over 500 micro volunteering opportunities for people to participate in and they’re all designed to take between 10 seconds to 30 minutes to complete. We’re in the process of updating the Help From Home database at the moment and we reckon come November, there should be over 700 vastly varied micro actions to choose from that can all be done from within your own home.

  • Simeon Stewart

    Great site, thanks. We also run a micro volunteering site where people can help out on anything. By doing so users earn goodwill points which they than can use to support charity projects. Presently we work with Whizz-Kidz, Carousel, Conflict and Change and Action Against Hunger. Legal & General are our corporate partners and make the funding happen http://cofacio.com

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