Microvolunteering: Giving Back for the Frazzled Do-Gooder

I am so excited to share with you all this new site I discovered. It's called Sparked.com and it is a "microvolunteering" website. When I first heard of it I thought, "What in the world is microvolunteering?!" It turns out that it is a way for people all over the world to help others - right from your computer! It only takes a couple of minutes to truly have an impact.

When you sign up for an account, you will be given a very brief questionnaire about your talents and the types of causes you're passionate about. Based on your responses, it matches you up with "challenges" from groups who need some type of help. For instance, I included social media as a talent and that I was interested in programs involving youth. I was matched with an organization called Asian Youth Ministries. This group is just getting started and they needed help finding out who were some top influences on Twitter that might be interested in promoting their cause. All I had to do was check out Twitter, then copy and paste the usernames of the best Tweeters I found onto a response board! That's it!

There are so many ways to get involved: helping choose a logo for a new girls school in Africa, creating a recycling program for the Girl Scouts, being a guest-blogger for an environmental group, or even translating short articles in to Portuguese! If you've got a talent and you've got a few minutes, you can truly make a difference. There are nearly 10,000 "challenges" open and in need of microvolunteers. I encourage everyone to take a look at the Sparked.com website - it's a new frontier in volunteering and an easy, quick way to get involved and make an impact!