Sparked and Catchafire: volunteerism is heating up online

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Two very different sites are helping people to volunteer in ways that are convenient and rewarding to them. Catchafire [2] and Sparked [3] both provide ways for individual social citizens to find volunteer opportunities online and for nonprofits to find people outside their networks who might be able to help. While the two share the same end goal, they have very different approaches - Catchafire sources concrete, meaningful projects that individuals can complete using their unique skills, while Sparked helps people use their downtime to help nonprofits with microvolunteering opportunities.

The Catchafire Way

Hoping to improve New York City’s low rate of volunteerism, Catchafire is a little like an online dating site for volunteers. Volunteers share information about their experience, skills and interests, and in return, the Catchafire team sends the volunteer a matching list of project options. The volunteer then writes a note to the nonprofit organization expressing interest in the project, and the nonprofit chooses from the interested volunteers. Volunteers can also browse projects and organizations to see what types of projects are available at any given time. The projects are about three months in length, are designed for one person, and must have a concrete deliverable like a logo design, budget design and development, or a press release.

The goal is to connect volunteers with projects that can be completed on flexible schedules and that also exercise and build the volunteer’s skills, which could be attractive to grad students and job-seekers in this economy. Catchafire also helps volunteers quantify their contribution by estimating how much the project would cost the organization. Between now and January 31, Catchafire aims to matched volunteers with more than $1 million in nonprofit projects. So far, Catchafire is only available in New York City, but be sure to check out their website.

If You’re Not Ready to Catchafire, How About a Little Spark

For a volunteering platform where physical location isn't important, see Sparked, by The Extraordinaries. Sparked is built on the idea that people want to volunteer, but they might not have a four-hour block on a Saturday. What they do have is downtime – waiting for a meeting that was pushed back 15 minutes, waiting to board a flight or waiting for their frozen pizza to cook. With Sparked, "waiters" become productive do-gooders and nonprofits get some much-needed help. After signing up, volunteers have personalized home pages that suggest current challenges that might suit their interests and skills, but they can also browse by the nonprofit, the cause or the skill needed. They can see how others have responded to the challenge and add their own answer to the thread. Sparked also allows small businesses and corporations to run their employee volunteer programs through the platform, by making it easy to track volunteer hours but still allowing employees to maintain different interests, skills, schedules and geographic locations.

Sparked asks nonprofits to post challenges that can be done entirely online, can be completed quickly and have a measurable result, and they can post five challenges at once. Some examples of volunteer tasks posted include suggestions on companies a nonprofit should approach for sponsorship, tips on how to effectively use social media for 30-minutes each day, document translation, web redesign and logo design.

It seems the requests with the most responses are ones that essentially employ Sparked as a type of "Yahoo questions" for nonprofits, rather than a volunteering site. If a friend at a nonprofit asked you a question about how to use social media for their nonprofit and you spent a few minutes making suggestions or pointing them to resources, would you consider that volunteering? Probably not. But on Sparked, it is. Is this an expanded definition of volunteering, or is it not quite what the Sparked team intended?

Nonprofits asking for help with a very specific product like translation or graphic design might receive more substantial contributions, but even then, respondents seem to be tempted to tell someone how to do something rather than doing it for them, which may be the price you pay for targeting these tasks at people with only short amounts of time to spare. For example, one nonprofit posted asking someone to design a dolphin graphic. So far, three people have responded, each sharing websites where the nonprofit can find existing dolphin graphics. It's not that these responses aren't helpful, it's just slightly different – well, less, frankly – than what was asked.

Getting Warmer

Managing volunteers to produce something of value to the organization as well as a meaningful experience for the volunteer is kind of the holy grail of nonprofit engagement. Both sites aim to work with individual volunteers’ interests and time constraints, but they are aimed at different people prepared for different levels of engagement and who have different definitions of what makes a meaningful volunteer experience. And both have some of the same types of projects listed, but as nonprofits grow accustomed to using these sites, I expect that will change. They might use Sparked for information, research and brainstorming - small tasks for lots of people with a little time – and Catchafire for more thoughtful, skilled projects, like web or logo design.

As with traditional volunteer management, the key seems to be knowing what tasks make sense for this forum and audience and crafting your request in a way that will receive the most helpful result. Both sites have put thought and effort into steering nonprofits toward posting well-defined, measurable and time-appropriate projects, and that's a great start. These platforms won’t solve a nonprofit’s volunteering woes entirely, but used thoughtfully, they could certainly help nonprofits find the right people for the right tasks by opening them up to different online communities.

Try out one or both of the sites, and let us know your experience!