On-demand volunteerism by mobile phone
A perceived lack of time is one of the biggest barriers to volunteering, and virtual volunteering is often cited as an ideal solution for time-strapped people, so when I stumbled upon The Extraodinaries, I was fascinated. This American initiative delivers micro-volunteer opportunities to mobile phones, from translating a charity’s website into a foreign language to identifying craters for NASA or birds for the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. The theory is simple: everyone has moments of spare time, so what if everyone used these moments for the common good?
The Extraordinaries blog claims: “Thus far, no-one has brought crowdsourcing to mobile phones… the device that’s always on-hand when people have spare time. And while there have been one-off efforts to turn crowdsourcing to social good, no-one has built an organization dedicated to the purpose. With The Extraordinaries, we’re pioneering a promising new field.”
The service is currently in Beta testing, and is only available on the iPhone. I’d be really interested to hear from anyone involved in the Beta testing. If you’d like to find out more about how the service works for voluntary organisations, watch the interview with co-founder Jacob Colker on Volunteer Match’s Engaging Volunteers blog.
5 comments on “On-demand volunteerism by mobile phone”
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I’m involved in the beta testing — and it’s exciting!
Thanks for blogging about us.
Jacob Colker
Co-Founder
The Extraordinaries
Ah, hello, good to hear from you. As I say, I’m really interested in this project - and especially intrigued to see whether micro-volunteering can really help to hook people into bigger volunteering commitments.
We’re experimenting with using favours and random acts of kindness to try to show young people that it feels good to do nice things for other people, so we can suggest volunteering opportunities they might be interested in.
And we’re about to find out if it works, because we’re launching this today:
https://www.favourfarm.co.uk
Stay in touch and let us know how your beta tests go.
Hannah x
That’s fascinating - what a great idea!
Can you think how this might help in your work, Ann?
This philosophy moves the library deeper into the realms of openness, transparency, and participation. ,