We just got the word back from Jacob in NYC who is representing Sparked in Mashable’s Startups for Good Challenge -where we’re one of 8 startups selected for the finals. And the winner is …SunSaluter – an amazing company with a product developed by a 19-year old Wunderkind… it’s a solar powered coil system that adjusts the direction of solar panels to increase efficiency by up to 40%. So, hooray for SunSaluter! And thanks so much to Mashable for selecting us to be a part.
September 23, 2011
A big Salute to Winner of Mashable’s Startups for Good Challenge
September 8, 2011
Talk about Amazing Microvolunteers!
WOW! Just this week, we at Sparked happened upon another fellow “employee” on our LinkedIn: Jerry Bishop. His current job listing is as a Volunteer at Sparked.com! His past? LOADS of I.T. Management and Consulting experience. We were SUPER intrigued…
True to his LinkedIn profile, he is one committed volunteer! He’s answered around 148 challenges to date, received 133 thumbs up (that’s about 90% of his answers!), and 28 awards of excellence. Talk about serious dedication.
We’re blown away Jerry. Thank you for being amazing.
August 25, 2011
Microvolunteers to the rescue: Logo Development
This post is part of an ongoing series that features real results from Sparked, the microvolunteering network. Learn more about Sparked here.
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The Nonprofit: Ravenswood Family Health Center is a federally qualified health clinic that operates in East Palo Alto. The clinic aims to provide the best quality, culturally competent primary and preventive health care that it can to their patients, irrespective of ability to pay.
The Challenge: Design a logo for the Ravenswood Garden Project!
The Result: What makes this challenge particularly awesome and blog-worthy is the microvolunteer’s persistence in giving the nonprofit exactly what they wanted. Katherine S. goes way way WAY out of her way to deliver. Just take a look at all the subtle variations she tried out for Ravenswood below.
Final Design
THIS is exactly what those awards of excellence are for! Those contributions that go beyond the necessary. Not to mention that the challenge itself was quite active, with other enthusiastic volunteers plugging in a total of 8 more designs for Ravenswood to choose from. While Katherine came up with the final look, the extent to which she goes to satisfy the nonprofit is admirable. We love having such dedicated microvolunteers. We love Katherine S.
August 25, 2011
Sparked named one of Mashable’s 8 Startups Changing the World!
This is fantastic!
We were selected as a finalist in Mashable’s Startups For Good Challenge. Now onto NYC for the final finals. And we’re in great company. Can’t wait to meet everyone there.
August 11, 2011
Microvolunteers to the rescue: Web Analytics
This post is part of an ongoing series that features real results from Sparked, the microvolunteering network. Learn more about Sparked here.
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The Nonprofit: Women Aloud Videoblogging for Empowerment a.k.a WAVE India, a videoblogging platform for the voices of socially aware young women in India. Its founders began the nonprofit out of a need to encourage young Indian women to analyze the problems of their communities so that they can become more effective leaders in society.
The Challenge: We need help analyzing our video views and website analytics!
The Result: For any online activist initiative that focuses on being heard, understanding your web statistics ranks as a top priority. For WAVE, with its collection of around 200 videos, these analytics were crucial to strategizing improvements to their project and planning its future. While they had access to various tools such as Tubemogul, Google and Cpanel Analytics, they had none of the professional expertise needed to interpret the data. Enter microvolunteer Irina I. from Barclays-Clearlybusiness. She not only elaborately outlines how to understand an important metric known as the bounce rate, but also provides her own insights into the collected data. Realizing the value of continuing this data interpretation, WAVE then sought to find someone to fulfill this purpose. Here Irina assisted further by explaining the type of position that fits the bill, and what to look for in potential candidates.
The expertise that microvolunteers are able to offer continually impresses me, and the nonprofits no doubt! Thank you Irina I. for your wonderful advice.
August 10, 2011
Lovely New ThumbsUp Emails
It’s like Hanukkah today – another new feature just rolled out thanks to the late night work of Jordan S… and a few weeks of work from Audrey and Doug. We’ve got a brand new ThumbsUp email that goes out when you get ThumbsUp. It feels better than ever to appreciate someone else’s volunteer work… and to be appreciated right back. Awesome.
August 10, 2011
Akoha. R.I.P.
This is a real bummer. The social enterprise, Akoha, is shuttering. I received this email a few days ago… saying that their revenue model wasn’t working and they are pulling the plug after 3 years. I bought my cards on their first day of operations… but apparently that didn’t help this noble effort to game-ify doing good in real-life. Nice job team Akoha. We’ll miss you.
August 10, 2011
Awesome new volunteer profile page.
After a several week development process, the Sparked team has wrapped up one of the most exciting feature releases in a while. It’s a brand new Volunteer Profile page… and it’s one that you can attach to your resume to showcase all of your great online volunteering work.
It features a nice big profile photo, a comprehensive list of all of your work…along with thumbsup and awards that you’ve received. One of the most fun features is what we’re calling the “Awesome Box” – which shows a grid of people and organizations that think you’ve done great work. Enjoy!
August 1, 2011
Captain’s Report: Nonprofit Happiness, part 2.
This post is by Jenny Li, summer intern at Sparked hailing from UMich. Jenny spent the summer improving Sparked’s nonprofit experience. This is her last report.
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As Captain of Nonprofit Happiness, I’ve spent the summer figuring out what makes nonprofits happy. As discussed earlier, we found that successful challenges make nonprofits happy, and that there are controllable factors for challenge success. Looking back at all the challenges from the beginning of Sparked to February of this year, historically, 47% of nonprofits are happy (have closed a challenge and marked it successful) while 15% are unhappy (marked their challenge as unsuccessful), and 37% don’t close their challenges, which means that we don’t know much about their state of mind.
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Armed with this knowledge, I came up with tactics to increase nonprofit happiness, and tested them on challenges that came in during a two-week period. If successful challenges are instrumental to nonprofit happiness, then I would guide all challenges so that they would have all the factors for challenge success. As reported in my initial post, the reasons for failure usually have to do with poorly written challenges.
I began by emailing nonprofits suggestions for changes, such as uploading resources for design challenges, clarifying information, and adding links to information. Moving on from email, I also commented on challenges, sending in suggestions to add more information. I also directly manually edited some of the challenges–small things like correcting hyperlinking and spacing, adding links, changing formatting, improving challenge titles. So did monitoring 241 challenges improve happiness?
The numbers definitely look better–though the percentage of expired challenges are higher than historic (nonprofits tend to take a while to close challenges – I’ve seen challenges get closed quite a while after expiration). The percentage of closed challenges marked successful are also higher than historic, and even better, the percentage of closed challenges marked unsuccessful is much lower. This is great! Even though 50% of the challenges in the two-week period are still open, these numbers are looking pretty good. So which tactics should the Captain of Nonprofit happiness continue to do and which ones didn’t work?
Emailing the nonprofits was not very successful. Nonprofits responded best to comments posted directly on their challenge pages… this tactic resulted in edits to the challenge title and brief that resulted in better responses by volunteers and better overall results.
July 29, 2011
New Sparked Email Template. Lookin’ Hot!
We just rolled out a new email template for our “Challenge of the Week” system… where you get a skills/interests matched challenge in your email inbox. Check out the snazzy new design. Thanks to Doug, Audrey, Boris, and Jordan for bringing it all together.
