Current State of The Practice
Virtual volunteering has been adopted by thousands of nonprofit organizations and other initiatives. There is no organization currently tracking best practices in online volunteering in the USA or worldwide, how many people are engaged in online volunteering, or how many organizations are involving online volunteers, and studies regarding volunteering, such as reports on volunteering trends in the USA, rarely include information about online volunteering (for example, a search of the term virtual volunteering on the Corporation for National Service's "Volunteering in America" yields no results.)
The United Nations runs an online volunteering service, formerly a part of NetAid, that allows organizations working in or for the developing world to recruit online volunteers, and does have statistics available regarding numbers of online volunteers and organizations involving such through its service. Several other matching services, such as VolunteerMatch and Idealist, also offer virtual volunteering positions with nonprofit organizations in addition to traditional, on-site volunteering opportunities. VolunteerMatch currently reports that about 5 percent of its active volunteer listings are virtual in nature. As of June 2010, its directory included more than 2,770 such listings including roles in interactive marketing, fundraising, accounting, social media, and business mentoring. The percentage of virtual listings has dropped since 2006, when it peaked at close to 8 percent of overall volunteer opportunities in the VolunteerMatch system.
Wikipedia and other Wikimedia endeavors are examples of online volunteering, in the form of crowdsourcing or micro-volunteering; the majority of Wikipedia contributing volunteers aren't required to undergo any screening or training by the nonprofit for their role as researchers, writers or editors, and do not have to make a specific time commitment to the organization in order to contribute service.
Many organizations involved in virtual volunteering might never mention the term, or the words "online volunteer," on their web sites or in organizational literature. For example, the nonprofit organization Business Council for Peace (Bpeace) recruits business professionals to donate their time mentoring entrepreneurs in conflict-affected countries, including Afghanistan and Rwanda, but the majority of these volunteers interact with BPEACE staff and entrepreneurs online rather than face-to-face; yet, the term virtual volunteering is not mentioned on the web site. BPEACE also engages in online micro-volunteering, asking for information leads from its supporters, such as where to find online communities of particular professionals in the USA, but the organization never mentions the term micro-volunteering on its web site. Another example is the Electronic Emissary, one of the first K-12 online mentoring programs, launched in 1992; the web site does not use the phrase virtual volunteering and prefers to call online volunteers online subject matter experts.
Read more about this topic: Virtual Volunteering
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