Micro-volunteering

I just signed up and did an accessibility review for the Cancer Council, South Australia :)

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 waiting for a real OpenID login, not the Facebook monstrosity.

I went ahead and signed up, although having to sit through a presentation to get that far was somewhat onerous. (The presentation was fun, though, so it wasn't that bad.) I agree with other posters that at least a sampling of tasks available should be visible right at the outset for interested experts.

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...)

Wanted to quote from the Founder's answer above:

"Re: business model. We make money by selling the platform to corporations as a way to manage their employee volunteering programs."

Non-profits do not pay to use the platform or for any tasks completed. Large companies pay an annual fee to enable access for their employees and related reporting metrics.

It seems like a number of requests are very similar to other existing requests. For example, many organizations are asking 'How do we improve our donation process?'. Rather than have volunteers answer the same question numerous times, it would be helpful to have a resources page that is shown to the nonprofit before they post their question. I am reminded of systems like Digg/reddit that alert you a story has already been submitted or systems like the Stack Exchange family that show duplicates and similar questions.

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.