Gauging receptiveness to social micro volunteering (2015)

01/09/2016

This report is a valuable resource for any organisation seeking to expand volunteering using social media technology and could be a conversation starter on this topic.

The research investigated the issues with, and effectiveness of, social micro volunteering (“a type of intermediated friend sourcing in which a person can provide access to their friends as potential workers for micro tasks supporting causes that they care about”).

Summary

The researchers created a small Facebook app which allowed the survey volunteers to ask picture based questions to their friends (for example: “which of these knobs controls temperature”). They surveyed 350 participants on the concept of social micro volunteering, and trialled the app with 91 participants, collected 618 high-quality answers to questions asked over 12 days (some useful and some not).

While there are existing apps doing a similar task (e.g. VizWiz) this report examines the users and volunteers, and the effectiveness of the app achieving correct answers.

Reference

Gauging receptiveness to social micro volunteering. Brady, E., Morris, M. R., & Bigham, J. P. (2015, April). In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1055-1064)

Available at

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/gauging-receptiveness-to-social-microvolunteering/