As you may or may not know, USA TODAY and Gannett have been diving into the philanthropy space for a couple years now. Wrote a version of this text for a colleague last winter, with the intention of eventually posting it here. Over the holiday weekend, finally got around to edits and WordPress.

So… about volunteer search engines. An issue for them is how generic the results appear in your search.  How might we help engagement?

Consider this item marked August '09 into February '10 in All for Good data. "Volunteer or a group of volunteers would prepare and freeze breakfast casseroles that later will be used in our program to feed homeless clients," it says. "This can be done as a one time only event or a great opportunity for groups." Generic, right? But when you dig into the Salvation Army site, you find the opportunity has a specific recipe and a regular result. And it's easy to do, not a big commitment.

Each Tuesday and Friday morning The Salvation Army's mobile food canteen follows a route of the inner city of Des Moines offering a hot breakfast to the homeless and near homeless. An average of nearly 700 men, women and children are fed each morning. The hot breakfast includes a hot quiche-like egg casserole, cold cereal, pastries, fruit, milk, juice and coffee.

The egg casseroles are prepared, baked and frozen by volunteer individuals and groups. The Salvation Army provides the 9"x11" aluminum baking pans and the volunteers provide the ingredients which cost about $6.00 per casserole.

In a way, the item reveals a sequence of conflicts worth exploring:

1. An ongoing nature makes this opportunity appear generic. But this nature is what so many causes need to operate sustainably. Events help and bring publicity, but ongoing interactions are their lifeblood.

2. It would be painful to input each instance of ongoing opportunities. But even if nonprofit event sites could automatically split these periods into daily events, making them appear specific and upcoming, you face management issues. In this Salvation Army case, too little or too much food on one day is a problem. Same with going off-recipe, being a bad cook or people needing back their baking pans. The Salvation Army is managing the process and looking past the day-to-day for a reason.

3. The nonprofit world talks about finding equilibrium behind volunteer supply and demand. But when you get down to it, I think this example shows how they're often only set to handle volunteer supply. Maybe what the industry needs more is a way of handling volunteer demand.

4. To be sustainable, the Salvation Army casserole chief must establish relationships quickly, work in specifics, manage needs transparently, and compensate for issues over time. Which sure sounds like what we talk about news audiences wanting. To be attractive, the first couple aspects here — if you can convey them to audiences — go a long way with audience in the short term, and the last couple help long-term.

So, how do you convey these aspects?

Not standard volunteer search, it would seem. It feels more like you need task management… workflow care… but distributed in process… consistently pitched toward a broad, sometimes unfamiliar audience.

Volunteers = the crowd

I don't know if the content world presents an effective model here. We all take on tasks at work, but then we go home to a search world, an opt-in world. When do we take on tasks in Facebook or Google? Other than accept or ignore? Even great collaborative tools in Google Docs leave collaboration without a basis in results. How do we measure?

A work model seems to present more opportunities. It's opt-in but with a transparent, parallel needs track encouraging action. Collaboration is needed for results. Facebook can force this for events (1,000,000 to make John Mellencamp quit smoking) but doesn't try in the everyday.

Who does open, collaborative task management? Maybe this exists. I think what the space needs is a Google Wave-like thing that manages to results. Wave right now doesn't do that and is the wrong tool. Even if you use Wave, you still need project management outside of it. And at the other end, something like Basecamp fails because it's a closed environment, and the needs disappear in its communications storm.

What nonprofits need is Wave-like item refreshing, in a Facebook-like stream, with an Outlook-like task management… on the social graph.

Managing modern demand has a "if you build, they will come" quality. B2B today plays out B2C because audience controls everything now. Each interaction between businesses or organizations needs to keep the crowd — increasingly not more than steps away — in mind. With nonprofits, that's true, but the opposite's also true. B2C is the legacy, but the velocity of the 21st century requires volunteer operations to have a B2B level of professionalism. Every one and every thing are both a B and a C, and volunteers from the crowd are no exception.

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