Sparked Blog

Microvolunteering doesn’t lead to macrovolunteering.
If it does or doesn’t – this critique is a red herring. It’s not a critique of microvolunteering as a model. It’s a critique of the statement that “microvolunteering leads to macrovolunteering.” So, go ahead and level the critique at anyone making a categorical claim that micro leads to macro, but not at microvolunteering as a model.

In our experience at Sparked, we’ve seen behaviors that are all over the map. We see people who only microvolunteer, because they don’t have time for anything more than a quick online task for a nonprofit. We’ve seen long-time macrovolunteers volunteer on Sparked because it offers them something new (such as global reach and skills-targeted tasks). And we’ve seen microvolunteers connect offline with nonprofits, going on to become macrovolunteers for these organizations. As with any dynamic ecosystem, there’s going to be a wide range of behaviors.

So, micro will absolutely lead to macro. It also won’t. And macro will lead to micro. But any way you slice it, micro shouldn’t be critiqued as a function of how many macrovolunteers it converts. Just as macro shouldn’t be critiqued if it fails to generate micros. Think how silly it would sound to reverse the logic by saying: “traditional volunteering is failing because so few people go on to become microvolunteers.”

Microvolunteering is slacktivism… and slacktivism is bull*#it.
My definition of slacktivism is where you kind of veg out in front of your computer and click around doing nothing much and feel like you’ve contributed something worthwhile. You feel good about yourself because you were told by some website that you’re awesome for just clicking around.

Agreed, slacktivism is bull*#it.

But this syllogism is flawed. Microvolunteering is not slacktivsm. Creating a logo for a nonprofit, translating a document, or brainstorming fundraising ideas is not slacktivism. It’s honest to goodness volunteering.

I think the problem – and the valid critique here – occurs when microvolunteerism is defined too broadly. If you apply the label “microvolunteering” to anything that takes little time and that’s vaguely (and often questionably) philanthropic, well then, the critique is deserved. Click-to-donate, for example, is slacktivism. And it’s not microvolunteering. Please see my separate post on why Free Rice is not Microvolunteering. Those of us working in the field of microvolunteering should be more careful about what we categorize as microvolunteering. Otherwise, it’ll become just a buzzword and will fairly deserve the slacktivist label. It really does matter how microvolunteering is defined.

Microvolunteering doesn’t tackle the real problem, which is that people *perceive* that they don’t have enough time to volunteer (when they actually do).
I think this is exactly the problem that microvolunteering solves. Since inception, our pitch has been that microvolunteering will help you’ll discover that you can give back at almost any moment throughout your day. You may think you’re too busy, but there’s a lot you can do in the same time that you’re spending on Facebook or watching YouTube videos. See the first three minutes of my TEDxNASA talk to hear this pitch live. Microvolunteering doesn’t have an exclusive lock on changing perception about when/where you can volunteer, but it’s a big contributor to the shift.

Microvolunteering doesn’t guarantee social impact.
True, true. There’s no way to guarantee the impact of any given microvolunteer task. And the identical claim can be made about traditional volunteering. The reason is that as a volunteer, you’re working for an organization that is, ostensibly, making impact. Is that organization doing a good job? Sometimes yes and sometimes no.

At the end of the day, you’re helping an organization do it’s work. You’re increasing the capacity of that organization by donating your labor. If you want an impact guarantee, you’re not going to find it in volunteering. And you’ll have trouble finding it at most nonprofits too. As you all know, measuring social impact is a tremendous challenge for the sector – and few organizations do it well (many do work in fields where it’s extremely challenging to measure impact well). I spent several years helping the Women’s Funding Network develop its nonprofit impact measurement system, so I got to see inside the workings of what is probably one of the most sophisticated tools/systems out there… and it’s tough going. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t try to measure impact. We should. But there are no guarantees.

Instead of focusing on the on-the-ground impact (which is twice removed), howabout focusing on impact at the nonprofit capacity level? Does microvolunteering increase nonprofit capacity? Now that’s a question with some good meat on it.

I think the answer is a clear “yes” – with the caveat that it’s still early days and it’s sometimes hit or miss. There’s a lot more work that can be done here to both document and explore this terrific question.

It’s ludicrous to think that microvolunteering will replace macrovolunteering and is the “savior” of volunteering.
Agreed. It’s a ludicrous notion.
Microvolunteering is an “expand the pie” kind of thing. More pie for all of us who think that giving back to our communities is important. There’s no saving, no replacing, no battle for dominance. There’s just pie. And more of it.

You can’t accomplish anything worthwhile in a little bit of time (i.e. by microvolunteering).
We’ve got over 2000 nonprofits and over 15,000 volunteers on Sparked who will tell you otherwise. Read up on some recent successes, here on our blog. Or login and browse through some of the recently closed challenges (you’ll see them along the bottom of your home page). Or just login and take on a nonprofit challenge yourself. Really, please do it. We hear this critique most often from people who have never logged into Sparked to give it a try.

There’s a tremendous range and diversity of work that nonprofits are getting done on Sparked. From graphic design, to Web design, to fundraising advice, to translation and transcription, you’ll find almost every kind of online work taking place. If you have been on Sparked and have contributed to a few challenges and still hold this point of view, please comment and let me know why.

We’re not sitting on our laurels though. While there’s certainly been a great deal of value created by microvolunteers, there’s still a lot of room for improvement.

For example, there are some challenges that expire without a quality result. The reasons for this unfortunate reality are varying and include:

• temporary surges in the number of challenges, which outstrips the ability of microvolunteers to answer them in time
• highly specific challenges that don’t match the expertise of a volunteer on the system
• challenges that are written such that there’s no identifiable way for a volunteer to spend a convenient amount of time on it (such as editing a feature length video).

All of these areas, however, can be fixed. They’re problems only because we’re working with limited time and resources. The problems are not inherent to the microvolunteering model.

Note also, that this critique may also conflate the nature of the volunteer experience with the nonprofit task. Remember that it’s only the volunteer’s experience that is “micro.” The nonprofit task does not have to be similarly micro. The nonprofit may seek results that are macro – such as a new Web site, new logo, or a new social media strategy. Microvolunteers do work in small-ish time periods, but when their effort is combined, the result can be macro. It’s not always macro, but the point is that it can be.