Micro-volunteering

Micro-volunteering is volunteering that you can do in small bits of time - from 5 minutes to 2 hours. It's high-impact and high-efficiency. Jane Austen Festival Australia has been utilising micro-volunteering for a few years now without realising it had a name. Aylwen Gardiner-Garden, Director of Jane Austen Festival Australia, had simply named it "60-minute Volunteers", and it was only when she visited a Volunteering Seminar in Manchester, UK, in September that she discovered the name.

Micro-volunteering is convenient. It fits into your schedule when you have time. In practice, to achieve this level of convenience, there is often no training or vetting necessary by the organisation.

Micro-volunteering is bite-sized. Volunteer tasks are broken into smallish pieces, so that you can complete a task in the time you have available.

Micro-volunteering is crowd-sourced. A community organisation that needs help asks a large-ish group for assistance. Micro-volunteers who have the time, interest, and skills, and who may be previously unknown to the organisation, do the work.

Micro-volunteering is network-managed. The time demands of the community worker are reduced by distributing as much of the project management and quality review as possible to the network of micro-volunteers. This work management method differs from a top-down model of project management.

Jane Austen Festival Australia (18-21 April 2013) invites participants to be part of the micro-volunteering movement. Tickets are priced lower for micro-volunteers who only need to help out for a minimum of 60 minutes during the whole four day festival. A volunteer co-ordinator will be contacting volunteers in early 2013 to ask them to choose where they would like to volunteer and to then write up a roster. Tickets are available now from www.janeaustenfestival.com