GuideStar International's Blog

The nature of volunteering is adapting as technology changes.  People are volunteering via the internet and their mobiles now, but what are the implications of this for the charitable sector?  Who will be the volunteers, what will they volunteer, what countries will they come from and what, if any will be the labour and tax law implications? Those are questions that have complicated answers.  However, mobile and internet volunteering will require CSOs to make their aims more transparent to potential, current and future volunteers. Failure to do so will jeopardise the extent to which this type of volunteering is seen as legitimately for public benefit and can negatively affect the way the sector is perceived. CSOs must reveal why the service is needed and to what end.

On the other hand, while the way in which this technology is used by CSOs is important for the sector, so is the way in which it is used by governments, not only for law enforcement, but also for tasks like the identification of civil society activists. It is worth having a look at a presentation called Minds for Sale: A review and critique of crowdsourced labor markets, which discusses the implications of this for nonprofits, businesses and government. It looks at the usefulness of crowdsourced labour markets but also gives a valuable critique.

Today there are more and more examples of the use of microtasking and microvolunteering. The Extraordinaries (now known as Sparked.com) is one organisation that creates opportunities for people to microvolunteer for organisations, causes or people they’re passionate about via a mobile phone or web browser, in a few minutes of spare time.  Furthermore, Samasource is a nonprofit organisation that is using the internet in a great way to encourage volunteering and create work for marginalised people. This organisation sources data, testing, transcripting and research tasks for people in developing countries.