Examples of Virtual Volunteering Activities

As noted in The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook, people engaged in virtual volunteering undertake a variety of activities, long and short (micro volunteering) and everything in between, from locations remote to the organization or people they are assisting, via a computer or other Internet-connected device. And they're having a big impact. It's impossible to come up with absolutely everything a volunteer can do online, but tasks and roles for online volunteers include the following (which is now even longer than what's available in the book):

translating documents (and proofreading translations by others).
researching topics and gathering information for a newsletter article, a new web site section, a grant application, an upcoming software purchase, a program or project, and on and on.
designing web pages and developing entire web sites.
editing or writing proposals, press releases, newsletter articles, video scripts, web pages, etc.
designing any publication, for print or for online.
developing material for a curriculum.
transcribing scanned documents.
designing a database.
adapting a purchased database software to meet the needs of a nonprofit, charity, community program, etc.
designing graphics.
providing legal, business, medical, agricultural, financial or any other donated professional expertise (answering questions, creating a strategy, commenting on a strategy, reviewing or evaluating data, evaluating a policy, etc.).
serving on a committee or advisory board. An example is the Wikipedia Arbitration Committee, a panel of online volunteer editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. But it could also be a citizens committee - an arts commission, a public safety advisory group, and on and on.
having video chats with home bound people. Or eels.
counseling people.
tutoring or mentoring students, young or adult, regarding homework, writing assignments, online safety, professional development.
training people.
moderating or facilitating online discussion groups or live online events, to answer questions, to refer people to FAQs, to facilitate disagreements, to address harassment and cyber bullying, to counter fake news/misinformation, offer technical assistance, etc., or to provide technical support during live events.
writing songs.
performing songs.
writing and performing original theater pieces, even musicals, something done as early as the 1990s (Theatre as Digital Activity - TADA) and a recently as 2020 with Ratatouille, the musical.
finding or creating recipes to share (for instance, sharing healthy recipes that utilize specific ingredients for a food pantry that serves low-income individuals affected by HIV and AIDS; the recipes are distributed at the pantry with those items. Online volunteers' efforts provide ideas for healthy and diverse ways to use the groceries clients receive)
populating a database with information, such as recipes for people with diabetes, or recycling ideas, or information about access points into a mass transit system accessible for people with mobility issues, or wheelchair-accessible music venues, and on and on. A database can be used for mapping, such as via Open Street Map.
helping with with sight-impairments organize their record or CD collection, pick out an outfit, tell them what store they are standing outside of, etc., via Be My Eyes.
interviewing and recording clients or community members for a history or art project.
interviewing people for a survey.
interviewing new candidates for a program, class, volunteering, employment...
creating a podcast (writing the script, editing the audio, adding in intro and exit music, reading text, etc.).
creating a video - either recording it from home or creating such from video clips, photos, etc.
editing a video.
captioning a video.
transcribing a podcast so that people can read it (not everyone can listen to such - some prefer to read it as well).
putting in short descriptions of images on a web site or community, or transcribe images of text that is on a web site or online community, so that people that rely on text-to-speech or other assistive software (mostly these are people with disabilities) can access the information as well. This makes a web site or online community more accessible. An example is this Reddit initiative.
getting rid of all "read more" and "click here" links on a web site, replacing them with descriptive links, so that the web site is more accessible for people with disabilities.
adding alt texts to all images and graphics on a web site, so that the web site is more accessible for people with disabilities.
making all PDFs on a web site accessible for different screen readers (and therefore for people with disabilities), or converting key information in PDF files to HTML to be shared as web pages.
evaluating a web site and offering advice on text changes that can improve its search engine optimization or improve its accessibility.
monitoring the news to look for specific subjects or mentions of a person or organization.
monitoring Quora, Reddit or other popular online communities, to answer questions on a particular subject or about a particular organization, to refer people to a web site that will answer their questions, to counter fake news/misinformation on a particular subject, etc.
answering questions as part of an Ask Me Anything session, to help build staff expertise on a subject, to be on call as needed, etc.
tagging photos and files with keywords (so that they can be more easily found by internal staff, search engines, the press, etc.).
screening new applicants who want to volunteer (asking them questions, checking references, reviewing their qualifications, etc.).
managing other online volunteers in projects.
staffing an organization or program's incoming email box, answering simple questions, referring emails to appropriate staff, as appropriate, making sure inquiries from the press, complaints, comments from funders, questions from government officials and other important emails get attended to by senior staff immediately.

You can see what online volunteers did in 2000, in 1999 and in 1998 and 1997 for the Virtual Volunteering Project, the first initiative to research and promote virtual volunteering. You can also see a list of the original Impact Online online volunteers.

Ideas for High Impact Virtual Volunteering Activities
This resource is for people seeking ideas for an online project that will mobilize online volunteers in activities that lead to a sustainable, lasting benefit to a community or cause, particularly for a community or audience that is at-risk or under-served. It was created especially for programs looking for ways to engage online volunteers in high-responsibility, high-impact tasks focused on communities in the developing world, because onsite volunteering abroad is not an option - which is the reality in 2020, and probably 2021, because of Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), an infectious disease caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). These ideas - more than 30 - can be adapted for remote volunteering within the same country where the online volunteers live as well - "remote" could mean across town rather than around the world.

Note that online assignments come in a variety of forms: some require a particular expertise, some don't; some require screening and a long-term commitment, while others could be done just once, in a few minutes or hours, by a volunteer who may or may not ever help again (micro volunteering). The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook offers detailed information on how to identify and create various virtual volunteering opportunities, including micro volunteering. The wiki supplements and compliments the book, providing a space for ongoing discussions and for updates about new tech tools and new developments related to virtual volunteering. However, the wiki is NOT a substitute for reading the The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook, which has hundreds of pages of information that are not on this wiki.

It's worth noting that online micro-volunteering was originally called "byte-sized volunteering" by the Virtual Volunteering Project, and has always been a part of the more than 30-year-old practice of online volunteering. An early example of both micro-volunteering and crowdsourcing is ClickWorkers, a small NASA project begun in 2001 that engaged online volunteers in scientific-related tasks that required just a person's perception and common sense, but not scientific training, such as identifying craters on Mars in photos the project posted online; volunteers were not trained or screened before participating. The phrase micro-volunteering is usually credited to a San Francisco-based nonprofit called The Extraordinaries.

If you an online volunteer, you are encouraged to submit a photo of yourself to this Flickr group for online volunteers.

Detailed information about how to use the Internet to support and involve volunteers - virtual volunteering - can be found in The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook. This wiki is a supplement to the book - but no substitution for it.

Join our virtual volunteering LinkedIn group (you must be a member of LinkedIn to join this group; membership is free) to know when the Virtual Volunteering Wiki is updated.

If you tweet about The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook please use the tag #vvbook

Please note: this wiki project is entirely unfunded - and I'm struggling to keep it going. If you would like to see this page continue to be updated, support my work

here's how to support this work.

Want to know more about using the Internet to engage and support volunteers? See:

The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook
by Jayne Cravens and Susan J. Ellis

The most comprehensive guide available on virtual volunteering, including online mentoring, micro-volunteeirng, virtual teams, high-responsibility roles, crowd sourcing to benefit nonprofits and other mission-based organizations, and much more.

Published January 2014, based on more than 30 years of research. Available as both a print book and an ebook.