Micro-volunteering: Fast food for the Big Society?

By Leonie Shanks

While doing some research recently into the barriers and incentives to civic participation, I stumbled across a section of Vinspired’s website advertising the possibilities of micro-volunteering: ‘Make a real impact from the comfort of your own home with these quick and easy opportunities that only take a couple of minutes!’ Do you notice anything remarkable about this phrase? No? Neither did I – but a few days later, scanning my empty kitchen in the rather fruitless search for some culinary inspiration, my eyes fell on an almost identical phrase emblazoned across the front of a leaflet for the local pizza delivery service. It promised ‘tasty food delivered in minutes!’, and instructed me to ‘order food online for fast, convenient meals brought straight to your front door!’  

I was too busy that night enjoying my Vegetable Delight pizza with extra fries to worry too much about what the advent of the micro-volunteering phenomenon has in common with takeaway deliveries. But the recent flurry of media interest in the potential of technological innovations such as Orange’s Mobile Volunteering application to inspire and enable ‘social good’ by allowing people to donate their time in bite-sized chunks, anytime and anywhere, has subsequently given me (for want of a better phrase) considerable food for thought. Will our 21^st century gadgetry equip us with the necessary means to overcome the most common barriers to meaningful civic engagement, enabling us – as one Guardian article suggested in February – to build a Big Society ‘app by app’? My hunch is that it will not. In fact, I fear that it will do quite the opposite.

Let me be clear – I am not trying to suggest that all micro-volunteering is useless. There are plenty of activities – such as signing petitions, raising awareness of charities, and sharing information and expertise – that can be carried out swiftly and efficiently through the use of digital tools. KnowHow NonProfit, for example, is an impressive new Wiki platform that allows volunteers to share best practice in charity work by uploading How To guides that can be used by people working right across the third sector. It would be difficult to argue with the value of this kind of knowledge exchange and online community building: ‘snapshot volunteering’ does have its role to play in the arena of civic participation.

But I do think that we need to tread carefully. If you take a look at the Vinspired website, you will notice that ‘emailing a terminally sick child’ is listed as one of the micro-volunteering options, accompanied by the same cheery encouragement that comes with the invitation to fill out a trivia quiz: ‘it only takes a few minutes and can make a massive difference!’ Um, let’s take a second here – if, that is, you have a second – to think about this. A child is dying, and the message here is that two, five, ten minutes of our time is sufficient to make a ‘massive difference’ to the remainder of his or her life. Regardless of whether or not this is true (and, let’s face it, most volunteer messengers will never know, given that this child will remain for them little more than an idea floating around somewhere in the virtual ether), does this not miss the point of volunteering entirely? Shouldn’t we volunteer in a spirit of giving and generosity, rather than constantly thinking about how we can stretch, squeeze and prod volunteering to slot neatly and conveniently into our lives?

I believe that the phenomenon of micro-volunteering not only reflects but also risks feeding into a broader, deeper problem that has for a long time been implicit in the question of how and in what ways to engage more people in social action – the concept of volunteering is becoming increasingly wrapped up in the culture of consumerism, converting the idea of ‘social good’ into a commodity, a box to be ticked or an accessory to adorn a CV. The government and the media consistently bombard people with the message that there is a clear link between volunteering and employability (‘Volunteer to Help Yourself’ was the title of one Guardian article in July last year). But worryingly, a series of interviews that I recently conduced with the leaders of volunteer organisations indicated that this ‘carrot on a stick’ method of getting people to participate means that people – particularly young people – often sign up to formal volunteering opportunities with a sense of entitlement. As one Volunteer Co-ordinator told me, ‘they join us with the expectation that they we will help them to advance in their careers or contribute in some way to their professional and personal development. Of course we accept that we have to value our volunteers’ time and try to offer something back – but the reality is that we often don’t have the capacity to devote as much time or resources to this as people would like. And when they realise this, commitment becomes flaky…we see this time and time again.’ In other words, we are breeding a generation of young people who confuse the give and take of volunteering with the buy and sell of consumerism; that is, they assume or even demand that, if investing their time in something is not likely to reap a financial or tangible reward, then it must be as quick and painless as possible. 

Volunteering: the fine line between flexible and facile

As someone who has volunteered throughout my life, I recognise the importance of making volunteering accessible and flexible for everyone. We should, for example, offer people more support to find volunteering opportunities that are close to their homes and places of work. We should make efforts to match them up with positions that make use of their particular skill sets, and allow them to choose the frequency with which and dates on which they volunteer. But I do not believe that volunteering should be easy. We need instead to encourage the perception that the rewards of volunteering are inherent in its very challenges. Whether we have to find the time, somewhere in our busy schedules, to visit the local school or care home once a fortnight, interact with people that we might not ordinarily come across, or overcome the emotional difficulties involved in dealing with the sick, the weak, the lonely and the dispossessed, it is in thus stepping outside of our comfort zones that we experience some of the trials – but also many of the tribulations – of enriching voluntary experiences. After all, if people are not prepared to be resourceful and creative in overcoming these minor hurdles, how will volunteering ever be really effective in driving real, positive social change?

The rise of technology has meant that we do not merely want everything to be easy, comfortable, convenient and quick; we expect it to  be so. Let us not allow this expectation to invade our thoughts and debates about volunteering. After all (and at the risk of stretching this fast food analogy a little too far), as anyone who has ordered one too many a takeaway will tell you, it may fill a hole for a little while, but it won’t be long before you are hankering for something a little more…well…satisfying. We don’t want to encourage the perception that volunteering opportunities should literally be dropped into people’s laps with a cherry on top. So the really interesting question is this: how can we harness technology to satisfy people’s appetite for civic engagement in a useful, healthy, fulfilling and sustainable way? Answers in 140 characters, please.