Why Online Volunteerism?
Over the last few years, our agency has experienced tremendous growth (we currently have approximately 220 full-time employees and about 300 part-time employees). Locating office space has become more difficult with this growth. But by recruiting virtual volunteers, we have opened up numerous virtual offices. Moreover, these volunteers are not limited by our Monday through Friday 8:30 a.m. – 4:30 p.m. schedule or any other difficulties associated with physically accessing our agency. Nor are we limited to the software (or hardware) that we possess as a charity. For example, the last two years our annual report has been designed by a virtual volunteer in Vancouver, Canada, using a high-end layout program called QuarkXpress. At $1500, we (among most charities, I would wager) do not own this layout program. But the virtual volunteer was able to easily convert the Quark file to an Acrobat PDF file and e-mail it to us for revision before uploading it to our FTP site, from which the commerci
