Most of us live incredibly busy lives. With 60 hour work-weeks, kids, running errands, and the stress of everything else, it's difficult to take an entire day off to volunteer. But, we do have spare time. Every single day, we spend nearly 400 million hours on Facebook and we watch over two billion Youtube videos. What if we could complete a useful volunteer activity in that same time?
Great News! You can! Check out Sparked...busy people use Sparked to give back when it's convenient. Sparked makes it easy for people with busy lives to help nonprofits get valuable work done in their spare time. Spark calls it microvolunteering. Through the convenience of the Internet, and with the collaboration of others, micro-volunteers use their professional skills to help causes they care about.
Nonprofits use Sparked to get work done for free. Sometimes a great way to fundraise is simply to save money. Sparked helps nonprofits increase their capacity by giving them a low-maintenance way to get free work done from a huge pool of talented professionals; including creative design, job description review, new product brainstorms, new website focus-grouping, media relations strategies, and so much more. No hoops, no handholding, no interviews, no overhead. Start getting work done! Start making a difference!
It is so simple, all you have to do is create an account or access using your Facebook account. Once you register you will be asked to choose skillsets such as accounting, brainstorming or social media (there are many more you can choose from) then you will choose those causes that interest you such as animals, homelessness or disaster relief.
Nonprofits post challenges to the network. Volunteers post one or more answers to each challenge. A challenge could be anything from, "Can you critique these logo designs?" to "How can we raise funds to drill a well in Kenya?" When volunteers have a free moment, they find a challenge that's interesting to them and that matches their skills. When they've found a challenge that suits them, they post an answer.
Sparked brings crowdsourcing technology home to everyday nonprofits allowing multitudes of people to come together online and share their skills and complete complex tasks.
Here is a recent example of how a Sparked microvolunteer was able to make a difference:
The nonprofit: Ronald McDonald House Charities of Greater Cincinnati provides a supportive "home away from home" for families and their children receiving medical treatment at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, regardless of their ability to pay.
The challenge: Translate our welcome letter into Arabic.
The result: The Ronald McDonald House of Greater Cincinnati hosts families from all over the world -- many of whom do not speak English. Because of this, says Lisa, Meals and Activities Coordinator for the facility, "we try to have our forms and documents translated into multiple languages so everyone can be properly informed of our policies and procedures." But professional document translation is expensive, and for some languages, the results of an automated translation generator can be unreliable.
So when Lisa needed the organization's welcome letter (and house rules) translated into Arabic, she posted a challenge on Sparked asking for help from microvolunteers. And she got it: Eyad S. took the document, and in his spare time, translated it from English into his native Arabic. Thanks to his efforts, RMHC of Cincinnati can now welcome families from Arabic-speaking countries in their native language, further fulfilling the organization's mission of creating a "home away from home."
So, how about it? Are you ready to make a difference in your spare time?
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Source: http://www./sparked.com
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