Volunteer option lets workers donate time

Star Tribune (Minneapolis)

MINNEAPOLIS

Dianna Hamilton has five children and works as a data analyst for UnitedHealth Group, so she doesn’t have much time to volunteer.

Now she doesn’t need much.

Last year she was asked to take part in a pilot program in which the Minnetonka-based company’s employees become “micro-volunteers.” Working online in intervals as short as 15 minutes, they use their job skills to help nonprofits brainstorm marketing ideas, design logos, proofread brochures, build databases and much more.

“It’s a great idea,” Hamilton said. “I love the idea of doing these small, short-burst projects, especially if you can do them online and at work.”

Micro-volunteerism is a relatively new workplace trend but already is becoming a powerful “employee engagement” tool, some human-resources managers say.

Target, Kraft Foods, IBM, Microsoft, Deloitte and scores of other corporations are climbing on board by tapping online micro-volunteer catalysts such as Sparked.com, Catchafire.com and The Points of Light Institute’s A Billion + Change campaign.

UnitedHealth, the nation’s largest health- insurance company, piloted the idea internally last year and had 230 employees sign up to donate $50,000 worth of time.

“This platform is so cool. It’s so smart,” said Kate Rubin, vice president of social responsibility and president of the UnitedHealth Foundation.

The company sees the pilot program as a logical extension of its efforts to encourage workers to volunteer, with more than 5,000 employees donating 169,000 hours of time last year. Last month, 200 employees got together in Minneapolis to build bikes for poor children.

That project took two hours — time that Hamilton says she doesn’t have.

Today, Hamilton is United Health Group’s leading participant in the micro-volunteering pilot. She’s done projects worth $4,000 in 15- to 30-minute intervals. She proofread marketing brochures for a nonprofit; crafted a pet-walk fundraiser for a pets-of-deployed-vets program, and created a database of children’s cancer facilities in Denver and New Mexico for another nonprofit.

Before the pilot program, Hamilton said, volunteering “took a boat load of time. That’s very hard when you have kids. But this was easy and fun and didn’t take me a lot of time. I love it.”

Kraft launched its micro- volunteering program a year ago. Company spokeswoman Julia Fernandez found employees were happy to help others without stressing out over traffic, scheduling or time.

Sparked.com and Catchafire.com link corporate employees with budget-strained nonprofits. Billion Plus gets pledges from companies looking to boost their number of employee volunteers.

They let the involved companies take it from there, but keep tabs on their hours of volunteer projects. Micro-volunteering started in fits and starts in 2008, and has since fanned from coast to coast and beyond.

United Health employees use Sparked.com to sign up for quick, online projects that have helped groups that trained seeing-eye-dogs, counseled victims of violence, coached people with autism and fed the poor.