Today I’m live blogging parts of the 2011 Millennial Donor Summit, a virtual conference.

This session is called the Microvolunteering Revolution, presented by Jacob Colker of Sparked.com (@jacobcolker on Twitter)

Most volunteering still happens offline, of course, but there are significant barriers to it. It can be hard to find the right opportunity, you might have to be interviewed, you have to schedule it, get there, etc. Sometime you enjoy it, sometimes you don’t. Nonprofits often have a hard time taking advantage of skills like marketing, or languages, in the offline volunteer model.

73% of Americans don’t volunteer, often because it’s just too time-consuming or the opportunities don’t fit into their overbooked schedules. But the reality is we all have lots of spare time — but it comes in chunks of minutes here and there, not big blocks of time we could schedule to meet in person with a nonprofit. Think of all that time watching YouTube videos, for example. There’s great skilled help out there — writers, translators, designers, marketers, IT, etc. — but the cost of in-person volunteering to skilled professions is too high.

What if you could take 30 minutes on your own schedule though?

That’s the idea behind Jacob’s company, Sparked.com. Nonprofits post “challenges” and microvolunteers accept them. Big companies are partnering with them to offer their skilled employees (e.g. LinkedIn employees will help with social media problems, for example). This is a worldwide service, so you can tap into experts from around the globe. Same goes for nonprofits — you can help nonprofits all over the world too. The service is free for nonprofits; they get paid by corporations who want their employees to be able to participate as experts, and they have a unique experience on the site that the public doesn’t see.

Ronald McDonald House in Cincinnati used Sparked.com to get  documents translated into Arabic. They got about $1500 of translation services for free. One volunteer did the translation, and two others verified it. Surfrider Foundation got their business cards redesigned. The Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest had their website hacked and as a result pulled from Google’s search results. Volunteers helped them figure out why they kept getting hacked and fixed the problem. More examples here.

Jacob says letting employees do microvolunteering on the job helps them feel better about work — it’s almost like a break. The site is very social, with commenting and rewards built in. Multiple volunteers can be working together on the same challenge, much like you have multiple people commenting on a thread in Facebook. It’s interactive and collaborative.

Jacob does wish nonprofits would be a little more engaging with the system. A nonprofit asked for design help, and a volunteer did this great job for them, and the nonprofit didn’t respond. Turns out the staff person posted the challenge and then went on vacation! Be there, and be responsive with your challenges and the volunteers that take it on.

Individual staff members in a nonprofit can post challenges and have those accounts linked, so your development, program, and IT people can all post challenges. They have also just launched a local element, so volunteers can connect with local nonprofits and vice versa if that’s important. They are also partnering with Network for Good, so a fundraising element will be added to the site, but the volunteering is the core.

A few more tips from Jacob . . .

• Don’t post massive requests, like “build us a website,” however.  Break it down into two-hour chunks of work, at most.
• Think creatively about ways to use this kind of talent. Ask them to vet a proposal or design before you pay a consultant big bucks to implement it, for example.
• Use Sparked.com in concert with Twitter and Facebook fans. You have these people who love you already, so let them know about your challenges.
• Don’t share really sensitive login information in challenges.

Some additional blog posts from other MDS11 bloggers . . .

10 Absolutely Essential Truths about Social Media by Katya Andresen

Live blogging from the 2011 Millennial Donor Summit: Successfully Going Mobile by Amy Sample Ward

What I learned about Trust in 10 minutes from @Julien at #MDS11 by Nonprofit Nate

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Volunteering is a significant part of the identity of Generation Y – people in their 20s – because they grew up doing it. Service learning has been fully integrated into many high schools and college-bound teens know that admissions officers love community service.

Volunteering is so well ingrained in the Gen Y culture that a recent Deloitte Volunteer IMPACT survey found that more than half of workers in their 20s prefer employment at companies that provide volunteer opportunities and 70% believe that companies should use volunteering as a professional development tool.

If you are interested in recruiting people in this age group as volunteers for your nonprofit, keep in mind a few tips from Sam Davidson of CoolPeopleCare. Sam will be the guest speaker during the May 7 Nonprofit Marketing Guide webinar on “How to Connect with Generation Y.”

Don’t ask for long-term commitments. For most of Gen Y, life is usually about trying lots of things and then committing to those things that really knock your socks off. “If I want to learn more about your organization and how I can help, and the only option for me is to commit to 8 hours next weekend or an hour a week for the next 12 weeks, I may just skip it,” says Sam. Instead, offer quick but meaningful opportunities to lend a hand.

Let friends volunteer together. Gen Y is a very social set that prefers to shop, eat, date, and hang out in groups of friends. Volunteering is no different. “We’re not afraid to tackle a big project, as long as we can do it together,” say Sam, who notes that his is the first generation to grow up in schools that required working collectively in groups in nearly every subject. (We would have HATED that, wouldn’t we have, my independent Gen X brothers and sisters?)

Spread the word through friends. When reaching out to 20-something volunteers, forget direct mail, and for email to work, it has to be really good. “Tell me quickly why it’s important, because I’ll be scanning/listening to/reading your pitch while I do six other things, so it needs to stick out,” advises Sam. Instead, Sam says to play your local equivalent of the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game: If you want to reach a group of 20-somethings, talk to their friends and friends of friends and have them spread the word.

“If you’re soliciting me directly, let me know the connection to the opportunity, whether it’s because my friend volunteers there or the issue affects me in some way,” says Sam. ” Or, better yet, if you’ve created a low-commitment, team-friendly experience, I’ll hear about it naturally from one of my friends anyway, so by offering something I’ll actually think about coming to, it should market itself.”

Learn more about marketing your nonprofit to people in their 20s during next week’s webinar, How to Connect with Generation Y on May 7, at 2:00 p.m. Eastern, 11:00 a.m. Pacific. Registration is $35 per connection. Get the details.

Love the daily blogging? Great! If not so much, switch to Kivi’s weekly email newsletter with blog highlights and then unsubscribe from the blog’s emails.