International Microvolunteering Day Date in the current year: April 15, 2024

Microvolunteering (or micro-volunteering) describes a volunteer, or team of volunteers, completing small tasks that make up a larger project. Unlike “traditional” volunteering, microvolunteering takes minutes instead of hours and does not require a long-term commitment. The tasks are usually completed online on special platforms; examples include transcribing manuscripts or tagging photos.

The idea behind microvolunteering is to make the world a better place through bite-sized, on-demand actions that don’t take much time but add up to make an impact. You can do micro-volunteering anytime, anywhere: during a break at work, while being stuck in a traffic jam, or even in the comfort of your bed.

The term microvolunteering was first used in 2006 in a response to a blog post on mySociety, a UK-based charity focused on making online democracy tools. Two years later, the first publicly accessible microvolunteering platform, Microvoluntarios, was launched in Spain. Around the same time The Extraordinaires, a San Francisco-based social enterprise, began to popularize the concept through its project Skills for Change.

International Microvolunteering Day was launched in 2014 to educate the general public about the concept of microvolunteering, encourage non-profit organizations to support and promote the idea of microvolunteering, and empower people around the globe to spend five minutes of their time doing something good to support worthwhile causes.

How can you get involved with International Microvolunteering Day? Here are a few ideas provided by Q4 Collective, a united front of activists and campaigners that runs the microvolunteering platform Help From Home:

• Pick a task you can do in 5 minutes or less on a microvolunteering platform.
• Write an uplifting message to a patient of your local children’s hospital or ward undergoing treatment for a serious disease or to an elderly person in a nursing home.
• Give a shout out to charities whose causes are close to your hear on social media.
• Share the link to a petition or a GoFundMe campaign that can change someone’s life.
• Order supplies for your local animal shelter from their wishlist.
• Symbolically adopt an animal to support wildlife conservation and habitat restoration.
• Install and play a charity mobile game such as Freerice by the World Food Program, a free trivia game in which a group of sponsors donates the dollar equivalent of 10 grains of rice for every correct answer to a trivia question.
• If you’re not a fan of games, install and use some other charity app; there free mobile apps that let you raise money by walking your dog, exercising, etc.

And don’t forget to spread the word about the observance on social media with the hashtags #InternationalMicrovolunteeringDay and #MicrovolunteeringDay to get others interested in microvolunteering and make this world a better place together, five minutes at a time.