Solving the mystery of the Loch Ness Monster would constitute a good deed, right? Well on that basis a webcam has been set up overlooking the Scottish loch for anyone to tune in and try to catch a glimpse of the elusive creature. If you see something that looks suspiciously serpentine, you simply click the “Snapshot” button to submit a picture for further analysis by researchers. It’s free, easy, and you can do it for as little or as long as you like with no login or signup required. What you’re doing is microvolunteering.

Microvolunteering takes a simple idea – that people are more likely to volunteer their time in short and convenient, bite-sized chunks – and turns it into a new approach to community action. It offers volunteers a series of easy tasks that can be done anytime, anywhere, on your own terms.

Microvolunteering could involve anything from signing a petition or retweeting a message to taking part in a flashmob or counting birds in your garden. The only requirements are that volunteers don’t need to go through an application or training process, the tasks take only minutes to complete, and it doesn’t require any ongoing commitment.

The vast majority of micro-volunteering takes place online – more than 80% in 2016 – but it doesn’t have to; weeding a garden in a local community centre or going to visit a lonely neighbour for half an hour or so counts just as much.

The concept isn’t new and has appeared before under various different titles: byte-sized volunteering, virtual volunteering, speed volunteering, micro-actions. It tends to be done mostly by young people and mostly in the UK, where more than half of all micro-volunteering actions took place in 2015. But it is a growing trend: Australia (33%) saw the next highest interest in microvolunteering in 2015, while the US is growing from a meagre 3%.

What are the advantages?

The key benefit is flexibility. People frequently cite the biggest barrier to volunteering as lack of time and while microvolunteering isn’t the only answer, it’s a useful reminder that people worry charities will ask for a long-term regular commitment as soon as they start volunteering.

It also enables people who might be excluded from traditional volunteering to participate. And micro-volunteering really does make a difference. Galaxy Zoo, which asks volunteers to study photographs of space, reports that as of January 2015, 53 scientific papers have been published as a result of the work of hundreds of thousands of volunteers.

How can I find opportunities?

There are a number of websites that host microvolunteering opportunities. Help from Home has the largest database of opportunities – more than 800 – most of which don’t require any specific prior skills. And the advantage of these is you can do them all at home in your pyjamas.

Skills for Change focuses on microvolunteering actions which put professional skills to good use. Volunteers are invited to answer a series of one-off mini challenges, such as designing an email template or suggesting backgrounds for a YouTube channel.

And there are many more, such as CauseCorps, Crowdcrafting, Elbi. A Danish platform, Be My Eyes, connects volunteers from around the world to visually impaired people, who request help for things such as checking the expiry date on labels.

How charities can use microvolunteering

Micro-volunteering get lots done quickly and efficiently, and can save charities time and money – but only if it is carefully planned and implemented.

Make sure it’s right for your charity

Micro-volunteering tends to involve volunteers from across a wide geographical area and requires opportunities that can be delivered in a short period of time. If your work relies on contact in person, lots of specialised knowledge or tasks being completed regularly at a fixed time, microvolunteering won’t work.

If you do decide that microvolunteering has a place in your charity, think through what resources you’ll need to set it up and keep it running. That could involve how long it will run for, how much supervision is required and how you’ll verify the quality of voluntary work done, especially if it will be running 24/7 or at times when your volunteer co-ordinator isn’t working.

Make the assignments useful but fun

Make sure the assignments are short – usually no more than 30 minutes – and not location-specific. If you’re promoting them online, they might be completed from anywhere in the world.

Microvolunteering assignments should not be time-consuming, but the actual tasks can and should be interesting and meaningful. Micro-volunteers are not interns, so don’t give them boring or administrative tasks; make them engaging, interactive and clearly making a difference. Help from Home offers a range of action suggestions so you can see what works, and consider how you might adapt existing volunteer opportunities by breaking them up into smaller tasks.

Support your microvolunteers

The biggest challenge is to meet volunteer demands for quick and convenient tasks at the same time as providing them with an appropriate level of direction and support.

This can be solved as easily as providing simple instructions along with your task: while people love the freedom to get on with things, there still needs to be a clear set of engagement rules.

When the task is complete, ask volunteers whether they want to stay in touch. If they do, make sure it’s easy for them to find out about new opportunities with your charity – and that it’s also easy to opt out of communications. This gives people a feeling of some control over how much contact they have with your organisation. And even if 99% of them don’t commit to further volunteering, you’ve still increased the reach of your charity.

Create a sense of community

Think about how you could encourage communication and feedback amongst your microvolunteers. There can be little interaction or communication with other volunteers or staff members, especially online, and that can make it harder for microvolunteers to see the bigger impact that their contributions are making. This can be a particular issue for people who are used to more traditional volunteering activities. Forums and networks where people can share their stories about volunteering is one option, as are microvolunteering meetups.

Measure impact

Charities who are reluctant to invest in evaluating the impact of short-term activities should remember that even microvolunteers want to be sure that what they’re doing is making a difference. According to a Help from Home survey, one in five felt they had made no impact, which contributed to their decision to stop microvolunteering.

It’s easy to sort. Zooniverse, which hosts citizen science microvolunteering projects, collects impact statistics for each project and displays them on the volunteering page. Postpals, which asks volunteers to write cheerful letters to sick children, provide a photo gallery of the children who have been helped. Free Rice is a free vocabulary game where each correct definition of a word donates 10 grains of rice to the World Food Programme. It’s quick, straightforward and has a clear impact.

Don’t just think about success in terms of numbers, however: whether that’s of volunteers, completed projects, amount of funding raised or media exposure gained. Microvolunteering is a crowdfunding approach that aims to help lots of people come together to make a difference. It may take a while to really see the impact of lots of small actions accumulating over time.

Be realistic

Research has shown that 65% of people who microvolunteer were still actively doing so one year later, but only on an “as and when” basis. They can’t be relied on for regular contributions.

Microvolunteering complements traditional volunteering roles, but it is not a replacement for long term commitment.

Micro-volunteering Day is 15 April

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