The Extraordinaries

A giant list of moments in a day when people could be using our system

Commuting to Work

People spend 3.12 billion hours each year carpooling to and from work, and 1.2 billion hours riding public transportation to and from work (2000 Census).

Waiting to see a Doctor

The average wait time in an emergency room is 30 minutes (Forbes) and about 155 million people visit the ER each year (New York Times), resulting in 57.5 million hours of waiting around to see a doctor in the ER alone. Granted, many people may be sick and not really interested in volunteering, but this alludes to a larger question, "Just how much time do we spend waiting to see doctors? dentists? or mental health professionals?" The data for emergency room visits is much more widely available then the latter, but I suspect that the overall number of hours that we spend waiting for health-related events is huge.

Watching Television and Surfing the Web

People spend 203.7 Billion hours watching television and 54.9 Billion hours surfing the web each year during leisure time (New York Times).

Getting an Oil Change or a Car Wash

In each community in America, there are dozens of places to get your oil changed, but probably the biggest and most widely know company is Jiffy Lube. Jiffy Lube's corporate website proudly claims 27.5 million annual customers that are in and out in about 20-minutes. That's 9.2 million hours in Jiffy Lubes alone. What about the thousands of car mechanics, car washes, and wax jobs that we get for our cars each year? I would posit that this number reaches into the hundreds of millions of hours each year.

Waiting in Security Lines at the Airport

The average wait time in security lines at domestic airports is 11.5 minutes (USA Today). I can't remember the last time it was that fast, but nevertheless, some smart pollster working with the TSA says so and that's the data I have to work with. Multiply by 665 million domestic air trips (Bureau of Transportation Statistics) and we get 127.4 million hours of waiting in security lines at airports. This however doesn't even begin to account for the millions of hours waiting in a lounge to board, or sitting in the gate waiting for a delayed flight. We're talking about hundreds of millions of hours here.

Waiting in the Checkout Line at the Store

Yeah... not a whole lot of data out there, but I can predict with academic certainty that "it's a lot of time each year."

In all seriousness, hundreds of millions of smartphones are sold each year, and if we can establish an environment, using mobiles to collect peoples aggregate micro-parsed spare time, and channel that energy into social good, we can have an enormous impact on the world around us.

There are billions and billions of hours out there waiting to be collected.

Let's make it happen.

PS - If you have other ideas as to moments when people could be using our system, please post a comment!

Tags: spare, time, nptech, mobile, volunteering, crowdsourcing, hours, millions, billions

Reddit.com, a social news site, is pairing volunteers with nonprofits between now and February 14, 2009 as part of its Feed a Need project.

Nonprofits can submit their organization's name to be considered for volunteer time through the Feed a Need site. The organizations that receive the most votes from the community before December 23, 2008 at 7 PM ET will be the winners of volunteer time.

Individuals who would like to volunteer can fill out a short form on the Feed a Need site to be entered into their, "Database of Awesome." If the volunteer works at least 2 hours on a Feed A Need project before February 14th, 2009, their name will be entered into a drawing to win prizes like an Xbox 360, or a new Dell computer.

I've never seen an online contest where the prize for the nonprofit is volunteer time. I'll be interested to see how reddit coordinates the actual doing of the volunteer work, and what the results are. Kudos to them for finding a way to use our "cognitive surplus" when people have less of a financial surplus to share with nonprofits.

You can find out more about the Feed a Need Project at feedaneed.org, and read more about it on the Reddit blog post, Feedaneed.org - Volunteer to help nonprofits get important things done.

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

Encouraging Volunteerism: An Interview with Ruthanne Feinberg

Ruthanne Feinberg is a busy woman. In addition to being Managing Director, Head of Internal Recruiting and Co-Head of Human Resources Practice for Glocap Search, she also volunteers. She is on the National Advisory Council of DonorsChoose, teaches interview and resume skills to low income individuals with StreetWise and The Opportunity Network, knocked on doors during Hillary Clinton's campaign, and is an Advisor to The Extraordinaries.

Yet, in a recent phone interview, Feinberg said that she doesn't feel like she, or other people, are volunteering enough.  "I'm embarrassed for how little I've done since I've moved to New York, "I think, especially now, there is so much talent out there that is sitting idle.  . . . There is plenty of work that needs to be done in society. Somebody who is a laid off banker has a few hours a week to do something while they're doing a job search."

We discussed a few ways to encourage more volunteerism.

1. Volunteer opportunities need to be easier to find

 "I'm a really big believer that more people would volunteer if we made it easy for them to do it. A hundred percent of the time if I call one of my friends and say, 'I'm going to do this, will you do it with me?" if they are available people love to do it.

I don't think many people know how to find volunteer opportunities.  If I said to myself, 'Sometime in the next three months I want to do a resume workshop for somebody,'  I wouldn't even know where to start."

2. Volunteering opportunities need to engage volunteers' skills

"I knew I wanted to work for Hillary Clinton, and it took me some time to figure out what I could do. At the end of the day I think what I did was satisfying, but I would have done a lot more had there had been a channel where I could have done that. I would have done much higher level work.  I would have done more work. I just didn't know who to call, and tell them, 'I'm a resource.'"

3. Volunteer opportunities need to be shorter term, and more flexible to fit busy schedules

"I could never sign up for something like to be a Big Sister, or to tutor a child. My schedule is too unpredictable. I travel. I get called into meetings at the last minute. It's very hard for people to do something like that. However, if someone said, 'Ruthanne, come on Saturday and paint a school, or do a workshop. I'm much more inclined to do that.'

Some of Feinberg's ideas for 20-minute volunteer opportunities that people could do through The Extraordinaries were:

• Give feedback on a resume and cover letter
• Give advice to low income youth about their college applications
• Help with a grant application
• Assist with a PowerPoint presentation
• Talk to seniors who need companionship on the phone
  
• Proofread

In addition to making volunteer opportunities easier to find, more engaging of the volunteer's skill set, and suitable for a busy schedule, Feinberg thinks people are particularly attracted to opportunities that make then feel connected to the people they are helping. "That's one of the reasons I really like DonorsChoose. You see exactly where your money is going." 

Feinberg's most fulfilling volunteer experience was delivering food to people with AIDS through Elipse in San Mateo, CA.  She has difficulty talking about the death of one of the people she delivered food to, "I was with him right before he died. It was a very meaningful, intimate volunteer experience."

When asked how she made time to volunteer for Elipse, Feinberg explains that she was younger then, but quickly adds, "If something is important you make the time."

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

Mobile Phones & Predictive Markets

I just had an idea for our application that could be fairly fruitful. I've been reading Jeff Howe's Crowdsourcing book (which is excellent and I'll post some reading notes when I'm done). He has a chapter about predictive markets - which is a crowdsourcing approach to making predictions by allowing people to bet on almost anything. It turns out that a crowd with some skin in the game can outperform a poll or an expert panel almost every time (predictive markets were made infamous by the market set up to take bets on the next terrorist attack a few years back).

It's evident from a bit of research that predictive markets can be incredibly useful for all kinds of purposes - from government to biz. As a result there are all kinds of software companies that have been created to harvest the excitement around the approach.

It doens't seem, however, that there's any mobile software in the space. As a crowdsourcing application, our Extraordinaries software may be ideally suited to the purpose. Of course, betting for cash creates some problems in the US, but if there was another way to create scarcity of betting chits, the concept may work. For the purposes of The Extraordinaries, the betting areas could be focused all around issues of social good/importance. With a critical mass, we could generate some very valuable data.

What do you think - could this work without an economic incentive? What's up with current laws around betting and predictive markets? I've heard word that the govt. may be considering an exemption for betting on predictive markets b/c of their usefulness. Is there any mobile software for predictive markets? Could the idea apply equally as well within a business or nonprofit? Is it a good way to get around vertical heirarchies?

Extraordinary Points? or Dollar Values?

I had a great conversation today with Ben Rattray from Change.org.

A quick side tangent: I was never a big fan of Change.org. But about a month ago, they redesigned the site, and created a whole new blog strategy. I am a BIG fan of what they have done with the place! I also want to say, that I have had the pleasure of getting to know Ben Rattray, and I am impressed with his vision, quality of character, and what he has done with Change.org in the last month. If you haven't seen the new Change.org - GO CHECK IT OUT! (http://www.Change.org) they are doing great things over there.

Anyways, I was talking to Ben today about the dollar valuation of a volunteer hour (from my last blog post) which comes to approximately $19.51 (or a little over $20 when the new numbers come out in the spring). We were also talking about "Extraordinary Points" (the reward points associated with the completion of each task) and how to use those points. At the intersection of those two topics in conversation, Ben had a GREAT idea!

WHY NOT RACK UP THEORETICAL DOLLARS INSTEAD OF POINTS? It's brilliant! It's much more direct and to the point. For each task you accomplish, you are awarded the dollar value of your time (you don't actually get paid, but you do get a sense of your volunteer time as value). Over time, instead of racking up an arbitrary number of 26,450 points, you would rack up $9,450 in donated time. To the subconscious, it has much more weight than an arbitrary set of points.

There are two downsides:

1) The idea of being able to later trade-in those points at Best Buy, becomes moot. But how many people will that actually be an incentive to participation? I'm not convinced that "merchandise credits" is going to be a selling point for 98% of our future users.

2) You would also not be able to "give" those points to a nonprofit for a matching donation. We had tossed around this idea as well.

There is one upside:

1) Nonprofits already account for a dollar value in their financial reports using the same measurement formula! Wouldn't it be great to make it so easy for them, that all they had to do was print out a report?!

WHAT DO YOU THINK?

Tags: dollar, value, volunteer, time, hour, change.org, ben, rattray, benrattray, www.change.org, extraordinaries, extraordinary, nptech

In-Kind Time Contribution for Professional Services as a Tax Write-Off?

I've been thinking a lot lately about how we can increase incentives to engage with our system, and I've hit upon something worth blogging about.

Can we write-off volunteer time as a tax deduction? All the signs pointed towards "NO", until I came across this post from Independent Sector:

"According to the Financial Accounting Standards Board, the value of volunteer services can also be used on financial statements – including statements for internal and external purposes, grant proposals, and annual reports – only if a volunteer is performing a specialized skill for a nonprofit. The general rule to follow when determining if contributed services meet the FASB criteria for financial forms is to determine whether the organization would have purchased the services if they had not been donated."

It appears that, for moving boxes and hanging out at the local soup kitchen, you are out of luck. But when there is a clear transfer of knowledge, for PROFESSIONAL services, it's a whole different ball game, and I may very well have stumbled upon a BIG selling point by exploring this path.

So what's it all worth?

In 2007, the average dollar value of a volunteer hour was $19.51. This is a widely cited number across the Internet and academic research. That dollar value will likely increase to something around $20.25 when the BLS numbers are released for 2008, in the spring of 2009. That brings the value to 34 cents per minute!

Our system is highly suitable for professional people with high-expertise. Even better, we can accurately track to-the-minute, the amount of time that someone spends volunteering, and provide an itemized report of what they did in addition to feedback from the person they helped. 

At an hour per week ($20.25/hr), we're talking over $1,000 each year in potential tax write-offs, and that number will only increase as people increase their engagement with our system. Better yet, people could potentially be earning more value from our system than just a warm-fuzzy feeling, although, at the end of the day this entire project is about Social Good. Period.

Any tax-attorneys (particularly from New Mexico which seems to have some law allowing this) out there who can offer any insight?

Tags: tax, write, off, offs, nptech, dollar, value, volunteer, hour, $19.51, professional, services,

Microvolunteering on Twitter

Wanna help someone out in 140 characters or less?  Check out @microvolunteer on Twitter.

According to the project's home page, www.microvolunteerism.org, "The Microvolunteerism Project is an initiative to facilitate effective distributed volunteer work.
We aim to build a community of both not-for-profit projects and volunteers, that can mutually support each other."

Microvolunteer "tweets" questions from nonprofits, and asks the Twitter community to answer them.  The project appears to be based in the Netherlands.  Two questions were asked last week:

"What online volunteerism portals are you aware of?" asked by the Microvolunteerism Project itself.

"Do you know someone who can give a presentation / workshop about Web 2.0 to a group of ~35 non-technical business people on the evening of Dec 19. The original presenter had to cancel due to family issues. Any suggestions?" asked by the Amsterdam chapter of the European Professional Women's Network.

Sadly, the updates seem to have stopped after that.You can see some of the "top tweeters on the Microvolunteer Project thank you page.

It's an interesting idea though.  Seems like a good tool for individual organizations to set up within their own communities, a Twitter account, or another online tool, to specifically facilitate its supporters quickly sharing their expertise with the organization, and with each other.

Thanks @engagejoe for the tip!

The New Volunteer Workforce: Reading Notes

This blog post is a part of our "Reading Notes" series - where we read an article, post a summary, and our comments on it.

Article Title: The New Volunteer Workforce
Url: http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/the_new_volunteer_workforce/
Date: 12/02/08

Notes:
A tremendous read about volunteering, packed full with stats and research tidbits. The article makes the case that volunteering is severely undervalued by nonprofits, corporations, and the laity in general. The result is that nonprofits are leaving billions (that's billions) of dollars on the table.

Despite Hillary Clinton's claim that 'words don't matter,' the authors make the case that part of the problem may lay in the term "volunteer" itself. The term implies "free" which connotes something that is not valuable (see quote below). You know who's already figured this out?

Coders.

What is the most efficient and value producing volunteer workforce in existence today? It's the open source movement. And being an "open source coder" is a synonym for "software development volunteer." So there's one condor-sized feather in the cap of the authors' hypothesis.

I've blogged about volunteer terminology before (http://blog.mobilevoter.org/2008/07/new-name-for-vo.html) - it's the reason that we changed the name of our endeavor from "Volunteer Now" to "The Extraordinaries." I'm convinced that volunteerism of the 2010s will look nothing like we've ever seen and that it will go by a different name. And you won't think of it as "donating your time." You'll think of it as something fun, social, and good for you. You may even think of it as entertainment for a cause.

This article calls for a more structured and dedicated approach to volunteer program management. The result of which will be taking some of that $36billion off the table and into the pockets of nonprofits. But can we do better? Can we envision that which does not go by the name "volunteerism." Because, frankly, even if nonprofits do a much better job at recruiting, retaining, and managing talent, there's still a lot of value left on the table. And its value that's not even being measured right now. We're looking at one specific table, but there's a whole range of Arizonian mesas in the distance.

To see them, we need only look to the example of the open source software movement. It shifted not only the terminology, but the business model. For one, it shows us that volunteerism doesn't necessarily have to be focused around the (nonprofit) corporation. Social good *and* economic value can be generated by loosely organized communities of individuals. For two, the product that results from this group may actually be of higher quality than that produced by any given corporation. And if you're wondering where that leaves nonprofits, well, they gain too because software is cheaper, better, and more widely available than ever before - and in our information economy, software is how nonprofits do business.

But software production is only one area of expertise. How do we apply this business-model-busting approach to the rest of that which should not be called "volunteerism?"

Pithy Quotes:
* "most nonprofits do not view their volunteers as strategic assets"

* "most nonprofits are losing staggering numbers of volunteers every year. Of the 61.2 million people who volunteered in 2006, 21.7 million—more than one-third—did not donate any time to a charitable cause the following year.3 Because these volunteers gave about 1.9 billion hours in 2006, and the value of their donated time was about $20 per hour4—that calculates to about $38 billion in lost volunteer time in one year."

* "A few nonprofits have grasped this concept [that volunteers can generate a tremendous amount of value] and are taking what we call a talent management approach—investing in the infrastructure to recruit, develop, place, recognize, and retain volunteer talent."

* "Five of the main reasons why more than 1 in 3 volunteers don't re-volunteer
1. Not Matching Volunteers’ Skills with Assignments. Volunteers with valuable and specialized skills are often dispatched to do manual labor rather than tasks that use their professional talents."

2. "Failing to Recognize Volunteers’ Contributions"

3. "Not Measuring the Value of Volunteers. "

4. "Failing to Train and Invest in Volunteers and Staff."

5. "Failing to Provide Strong Leadership."

* "Why isn’t volunteering more respected? Why aren’t more organizations investing in volunteering? One problem may lie with the term itself. The word “volunteer” doesn’t say anything about the nature of the service provided, except implying that it is free. It is often assumed that something free is not valuable. Maybe we should use different words—like fundraiser, project manager, or legal counsel—that describe the work performed and help erode outdated ideas about the value of the volunteer workforce."

* "If nonprofit leaders want highly skilled volunteers to come and stay, they need to expand their vision of volunteering by creating an experience that is meaningful for the volunteer, develops skills, demonstrates impact, and taps into volunteers’ abilities and interests."

* Their research showed that the primary difference between volunteers and non volunteers is the amount of TV watched! Back to quote: "People do not volunteer because nonprofits do not provide them with volunteer opportunities that interest them enough to pull them away from their television sets."

* need to rethink the role of volunteer and make it more hybrid with "worker"

CAPITALIZING ON VOLUNTEER TALENT

* Rethinking Work Roles.

* Assigning Appropriate Tasks.
"CNCS research found that volunteers who engage in less challenging activities tend to be less likely to continue volunteering the following year. Only 53 percent of volunteers who did “general labor” activities or supplied transportation continued volunteering the following year. By contrast, 74 percent of volunteers performing professional or management activities continued volunteering."

* "Creating Bonding Experiences. "

* "Supporting and Training Volunteers"

* "Using New Technology"

* "Developing Strategic Plans"

* "America’s young people are increasingly interested in making a difference. One recent study revealed that 68 percent of people between the ages of 18 and 26 prefer to work for a company that provides professional volunteer opportunities....The UCLA Higher Education Research Institute reported in 2005 a 25-year high in first-year students’ belief that it is “essential or important to help others.”

* "Nonprofits can also use religious organizations to expand their reach into the African-American, Hispanic, and Asian communities. Each group does more than one-third of all their volunteering with religious groups."

* A "surge in professional people interested in putting their skills to good use creates a tremendous opportunity for nonprofits."

The Extraordinaries, open source or not?

I was about to pose this question to my partners in the Extraordinaries, but thought what better use than a blog to invite commentary, thoughts, ideas from the community of readers (small though they may be at this early stage).

In the comments to this post, I'd love to discuss the merits and pitfalls of making this particular project open source.

It seems fitting that this project, which is predicated on the power of crowdsourcing would use the open source model to develop its software. But of course, I've got traditional concerns about business model and also about management overhead required to make an open source project successful. With such limited resources (3 people working part time and a handful of volunteers), will we be spending all of our time trying to ensure that the open source community is humming instead of focusing on our (nonprofit) business objectives?

And then what about business model? Given freely available software, how do we make a living and create a sustainable organization. I've read a lot about how other orgs (IBM for instance) are doing it, but how would we do it with The Extraordinaries in particular.

Love to hear thoughts back on this one.

-ben

Volunteering 2.0: Community Building

When I do presentations about nonprofits and the social web, I often explain Web 1.0 vs. Web 2.0 like this:

Web 1.0 is a one way conversation.

Web 2.0 is a two way conversation.

Web 1.0 is about listening to me. Web 2.0 is about listening to each other.

In her recent article, From Organizing Charity to Community Building, Susan Ellis of Energize Inc. uses a similar framework to talk about the future of volunteering. Ellis reflects,

"The problem, for me, is that the charity model is one-way. It centers on givers, 'those who have so much,' providing aid to recipients, 'those who have so little.' . . .

What would happen if we stopped asking 'what new people can we find out there to give us help?' and instead talked to our members, audience, visitors, clients – whomever our focus is – and found out what they wanted and were willing to help create?"

Ellis recommends that volunteer managers focus on building community among the populations they serve, and describes the best volunteering as an "exchange." She writes about a program that connects elementary school children and seniors as an example of a beneficial volunteer exchange:

"A nursing home near an elementary school was asked to open its dining room from 3:00 to 5:00 as a safe place for 'latchkey' children who otherwise had no adult supervision in the late afternoon to do homework. Older residents who were able were encouraged to greet the youngsters, give milk and cookies, and help with the homework. As you can imagine, the kids responded and pretty soon it was very hard to tell who was giving or receiving more. The seniors suddenly had young visitors and the students suddenly had tutors."

Most people want to contribute to making the world a better place, in one way or another. Whether they are creating a YouTube video for a cause, or helping to create an urban garden, it's not just the giving that makes them feel good, it's also the feeling that they are part of a community that is working together for a better world.

The next time your organization creates a program, or campaign to recruit more volunteers, don't just ask yourself, "How can I facilitate them doing something for us?" Also ask yourself, "How can I facilitate our doing something together?"

Flickr photo credit: One Way uploaded by Jef Poskanzer. Elephants uploaded by wwarby.
Britt Bravo also blogs at Have Fun * Do Good and BlogHer.