The Extraordinaries: A New Way of Thinking About the Volunteer Economy

I used to manage volunteers for a nonprofit. Some of the tasks I recruited people for were done in person (working with young people in the classroom), while others could be done virtually (editing 6th graders' autobiographical stories). Either way, I followed a pretty standard volunteer management process:

1. Recruit
2. Screen (application and interview)
3. Train
4. Manage (scheduling and support)
5. Thank
6. Evaluate (the volunteer's performance by the manager and the organization's performance by the volunteer)
7. Recruit again

I asked The Extraordinaries' co-Founders (and fellow bloggers), Jacob Colker and Ben Rigby, to explain how The Extraordinaries fits into the traditional standard volunteer management model.

Here's how Jacob described it to me:

Recruit: "Recruitment can be done by emailing your list with a direct link to the opportunity within our system. They get an email that says, 'help us do this now.' They click the link, and it opens the system."

Screen, train, and manage: "Our system really caters to two types of people: People with high-expertise and everyone else. Tasks like reCAPTCHA, NASA Clickworkers, and other crowdsourcing activities that can help accomplish a gargantuan task with a lot of people who don't need much training is best suited for the 'everyone else' category. Tasks like language translation, IT support, or other high-expertise tasks are for the 'high-expertise' category. Training can be delivered via a text box explaining the task, an audio recording, or a video clip.

Screening is a service that will come down the road when we introduce feedback, where people will be able to sort by volunteers with 5 stars (etc). The tasks are so short that management is almost not necessary. Also, tasks like a German American who has a conversation with a German immigrant to help them learn English don't require lengthy training or managing."

Thank and evaluate: "Thanking will come in the form of positive feedback (think eBay). We will also have a little comment box where people can leave notes."

Recruit again: "We will have a 'bookmark' option for volunteers to save tasks that they enjoyed."

Ben responded with an analogy that made me realize, The Extraordinaries is a whole new way of thinking about volunteering as a "volunteer economy":

"For many years, newspapers created a price barrier for people who wanted to list classified ads. Craigslist dis-intermediated newspapers from classified ads. The result was an explosion of people listing classified ads. Without the price barrier, people with needs could connect directly with people with wants. It was suddenly possible to sell a $5 popcorn maker, or to ask for a ride down to LA. When the price was $75/listing in the newspaper, this kind of person-to-person economy was simply not possible.

We're not trying to dis-intermediate non-profits from volunteers. Far from it. We hope that there will always be people who are willing to go through the vetting process, and who can spend 1/2 day on-site doing a volunteer activity. But for most people, this barrier to entry is too high. In this case, the cost is time, and it's akin to $75 to place a classified ad.

Our big idea is to reduce the price of volunteering to almost nothing by fitting volunteer activities into ad-hoc spare time. We're envisioning a Craigslist-like explosion of people who will need help, and people who can give help. Before Craigslist, we couldn't have imagined 99% of the things that people would want to list in a classified ad. The volunteer economy may hold similar promise.

In the end, the questions that we're asking are not about how an organization (ie: a non-profit) can be helped by volunteers. It's about how one person can help another person. One of these people may be a marketing manager at a non-profit who needs help reviewing a new Web site design, but it may just as easily be your neighbor who can't figure out how to add columns in a spreadsheet."

What do you think? Would you be excited to be a part of this volunteer economy by using a tool like The Extraordinaries? If you work for a nonprofit, how could you see using The Extraordinaries for your work?

Britt Bravo also blogs at Have Fun * Do Good and BlogHer.

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