Sparked: Micro Volunteer Opportunities

I am looking for ways to develop serving opportunities for those who worship with Resurrection Online. An intriguing model that may be helpful in this effort is from Sparked. I cannot do a better job of explaining the concept than their About Page, so here is an excerpt from their website. What are your thoughts, feelings or opinions about this possibility?

Sparked is the world’s first micro-volunteering network.

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?

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 when it’s convenient. We call it micro-volunteering. Through the convenience of the Internet, and with the collaboration of others, micro-volunteers use their professional skills to help causes they care about. Get started!

Nonprofits use Sparked to get work done for free.

Sometimes the best 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 more. No hoops, no handholding, no interviews, no overhead.Start getting work done!

How it works.

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.

The innovation.

Sparked brings crowdsourcing technology home to everyday nonprofits. Successful crowdsourcing examples such as Wikipedia, 99-Designs, Galaxy Zoo, The U.S. Patent & Trademark Office‘s Peer to Patent, and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, have proven that with the right technology, millions of people can come together online to share their skills and complete complex tasks.