Micro-volunteering

A simple change could have resulted in a different outcome. I went through the wizard, picked my interests, identified that I was in good company and tasks needed to be completed -- but without seeing those tasks, I really didn't want to sign up for yet another website. So, present the tasks to me! At least a summary. Then, I could have made the decision if it was something I wanted to continue with. Instead, I exited the site. Probably a lost opportunity for both of us (and the non-profits who needed assistance).

Is there any harm in presenting a summary of the tasks? Then, when I select one, register or logon to contribute. Maybe I stand alone in this hesitation to register - certainly, A/B testing with the very slight modification I describe would be a worthwhile effort.

One other bit of input - everything looks pretty clean up to the registration page. It feels "busy" to me. Also, the input boxes behave inconsistently (the hint text sometimes dims, sometimes disappears on hover state).

Good job though and I think it's a great idea. Just this past week, I wanted to volunteer my time for the holiday's but didn't really know where to start. I actually thought about calling the local chamber of commerce to see who/where/what could use my help.

* I hear you about wanting to see challenges before you commit to signing up. We've got some modifications to the onboarding process in the works that are along these lines. Totally agree with you all.

* Re: business model. We make money by selling the platform to corporations as a way to manage their employee volunteering programs. We are now a certified B-corp, btw.

* Re: "micro" - we consider micro to be anything that you can conveniently fit into your day. So that could be 2 hours or 2 minutes. In all cases, it's less time and less commitment than most other forms of volunteering. We tried very very micro tasks initially (image tagging) - these took about 30 seconds each... but people didn't find these kinds of tasks interesting over time. So, we expanded how we thought about micro.

* Re: Dool: sorry that the page refreshed and you lost your answer. Haven't seen or heard of that happening before, but we're looking into it immediately to see if there's an ajax bug. Definitely not an intended behavior.

-ben rigby cto & co-founder sparked.com

I didn't really care about signing up to see what was available as I was curious and it was very little effort to type in my details, and a pretty quick process.

I can't see how to add my company name which I'd like to do if I'm going to continue to volunteer my time and expertise - especially if Sparked is going to be making money out of it.

One of my primary motivations for doing pro-bono work is as a P.R exercise.

It's cool - there are some very specific types of work that this will be good for and I intend to return and try and do one a week.

My only complaints?

1. The page randomly refreshed while I was typing my post and I had to retype everything (this time I drafted it OUTside the browser!!)

2. The "verify email" doesn't have a valid plain text part so I had to open the email in gmail rather than copying and pasting the link from pine into my browser.

I'm curious how effective this will be for most non-profits. I would love to hear serious feedback after the fact.

Instead of having volunteers copy and paste their answer repeatedly, having a page comparing and contrasting the various online platforms (PayPal, Razoo, Convio, etc) could prevent things from getting lost in the shuffle. These FAQ and Resources pages could be edited wiki-style and non-profits could periodically request reviews and additions to the wikis rather than opening up completely new support tickets.

Any idea how they plan to make money?

There's no facility for attaching files. If your output is anything other than short text in forum format, I don't know how you're expected to proceed.

That said, there are two texts for translation from German, and that's the kind of stuff I'm happy to do. Of course, one of them was 2,390 words, which is about a day's work for most translators. I'm not sure how "micro" that is. It would take me about two hours. If I end up with a couple of hours free this week, I'll consider doing it, but it seems a little disproportionate.

But - a very interesting site overall. I'm going to hang out there and help out from time to time.

Somewhat off-topic: I was a little taken aback at how many people talk about SEO on this site. I've always thought that if you produce interesting content, SEO will take care of itself. Are people being unreasonable, or am I being dismissive? (Check all that apply...)

Its a great idea, but for programming (and I'm not saying anyone claimed differently), micro-volunteering doesn't seem feasible.