Online hub connects volunteers with non-profits

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This article was published 16/01/2012 (5320 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

TORONTO — Toronto’s Operation Springboard needs volunteers with ideas to build its website. Muscular Dystrophy Canada requires someone to help with its database.

Neither non-profit is looking for a long-term commitment, just a few minutes to a couple of hours of that valuable commodity: time.

Both have posted their requests on koodonation.com, a new Canadian online hub that connects volunteers with non-profits through microvolunteering — quick and easy tasks that can be done online.

Organizations post requests, called “challenges,” such as help with writing, graphic design, social media, translation or brainstorming. The challenges are answered by microvolunteers.

Koodonation.com is based on the idea that a community of heads is better than one, a model created by San Francisco-based sparked.com in 2007.

Koodo is a Canadian mobile-phone company owned by Telus. It got together with Sparked to build a Canadian venue, says Jennifer Robertson, the director of marketing.

“Koodo was looking to give back to the community,” says Robertson. “We looked at several concepts; microvolunteering was an easy initiative.”

Here’s how it works: Non-profit groups and charities register on the site. It typically takes 24 to 48 hours to confirm a group’s legitimacy, after which the group can post challenges.

Volunteers sign up and apply their skills (for example, writing, blogging, design or data entry) and interests (say, wildlife, the environment or social media) to challenges.

Sharon Bradwell got help for her non-profit Sian Bradwell Fund for Children with Cancer, an organization that has raised $1 million for cancer equipment at Montreal Children’s Hospital and Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children through softball tournaments and basketball and bowling fundraisers. She needed someone to help translate documents into French and create a slide show for her organization, which honours her daughter and only child, who died from a rare cancer in 1985 at 17 months.

“It’s like having whole bunches of resources that I have never had before,” says Bradwell, 60, a retired Royal Bank of Canada systems analyst and disaster-recovery specialist in Burlington, Ont.

“Most people are really busy. Their availability doesn’t always fit with the opportunity of volunteering in the local area,” Robertson says.

“If you want to volunteer in your PJs at 3 a.m. you can go online. What attracted us the most is that it’s a form of volunteering that complements traditional volunteering.”

Koodo — which created the website and does what it can to populate it — held workshops in Toronto to teach non-profits how to get the most out of this resource.

Workshops are planned across Canada in the next few months. Eventually they hope to see the community work on its own, with minimal support. Right now, three to four employees are supporting the site, she says.

It’s a perfect fit for volunteer Will O’Neill, who has a back injury and can’t do physical volunteer work. The associate creative director at a Toronto communication and marketing firm came across koodonation.ca on a Facebook ad and is one of more than 2,000 microvolunteers who have registered since the Oct. 13 launch.

He recently completed his 14th challenge.

“There are so many projects going on, so you can always pick and choose something to contribute with time that you have,” he says, adding that he has designed logos, written a few witty phrases and brainstormed ideas for such organizations as Camp Awakening, The Natural Step Canada, Abbotsford Community Foundation and others.

— The Canadian Press