Seven characteristics of a successful virtual volunteering platform

Abstract

People volunteer their time and energy to projects for many different reasons. For some people, the reason may be that family members are involved in the project such as parents volunteering at their children's schools or parents becoming Scout leaders. For other people, there may be a religious component where people donate their time and energy to bettering humanity by assisting in soup kitchens and hospices. There is another group of potential volunteers, however, who would like to assist in projects but do not have the time or the means to travel and physically donate their time on location. In such cases, virtual volunteering is a possible way for projects to harness the goodwill of prospective volunteers without the overheads of the travel to locations. This paper describes a project where people could become virtual tutors to assist children with their mathematics homework using a combination of Internet technologies and cell phone technologies. From this virtual tutoring project, seven characteristics were found to be necessary for platforms which support virtual tutoring to retain their volunteers. It is believed that these seven characteristics apply in general to virtual volunteering and would assist any virtual volunteer organisation in retaining their volunteers.