microvolunteering

We are definitely a culture of never having enough time. 

VolunteerTO recently posted a TEDx Talk from Ben Rigby about microvolunteering. He talks about the fact that over 70% of Americans say they do not have time to volunteer, likely it is similar in Canada. Many non-profits have processes to volunteer with them and many of them have resources stretched thin, so in my experience sometimes it takes a while to get started. Ben Rigby discusses how much time we spend every on games like solitare or farmville (or more recently, candy crush) and he wanted to find a way that people could help from their phones and on their own time. This would give non-profit the resources they need for smaller tasks and also allows the average person to give back and also give the public an easier way to donate their time to causes that are important to them. This talk really articulated how we can all make a difference, without a huge time commitment. 

KoodoNation is a Canadian microvolunteering site. You simply create a profile about what your skills are and the types of causes that are important to you. It can include your bio, links to your site and your social media. You can then search by challenges, causes and skills. Some of the challenges or tasks can take a few minutes; the first one I did was helping a non-profit develop hashtags they could use to promote their organization. All of the information for challenges I could see were targeted to me based on my profile, changes to your profile will give you different results. KoodoNation also makes an effort to make you feel as if you're part of a community, people and nonprofits can like your suggestions. The site is definitely worth looking around and playing around with; particularly if you want to make a difference but feel overwhelmed by how much time you think you need to make a difference. They say in fundraising "every penny counts", I think the same could be said for microvolunteering "every second counts".