8 Virtual Volunteering Ideas & Events to Engage Your Employees

In today’s hybrid and remote workplaces, it’s more important than ever to give employees meaningful, flexible ways to volunteer. Virtual volunteering offers exactly that—opportunities to give back without being bound by geography or in-person logistics. Below are virtual volunteering ideas and opportunities you can plan using Groundswell, so your remote or deskless employees can contribute in ways that suit them.

Table of Contents:

• What Is Virtual Volunteering?
• 8 Virtual Volunteer Ideas & Events
• How to Host a Virtual Volunteer Activity
• Tips for Tracking Virtual Volunteer Hours
• Manage All Volunteering Hours & Activity in One Place with Groundswell
• Ready to Launch Virtual Volunteer Efforts?

What Is Virtual Volunteering?

Virtual volunteering (also called e-volunteering or remote volunteering) refers to volunteer activities that can be carried out online or off-site—no physical presence required. With the right structure, virtual volunteer opportunities allow people to lend their time, skills, and passion in ways that transcend location.

Some advantages of virtual volunteering include:

• Accessibility: employees anywhere (or on different schedules) can contribute
• Diversity: leveraging different skills (writing, design, mentoring, translation)
• Flexibility: projects can be asynchronous or synchronous
• Scalability: many people can participate without geographic constraints

When you offer virtual volunteer opportunities for teams, you make it easier for distributed workforces or employees who can’t get away from their desks to take part in your organization’s social impact.

8 Virtual Volunteer Ideas & Events

In-person volunteering and community service can make a real impact, but volunteers can be just as effective at a distance! Here are virtual volunteer ideas and virtual volunteer events your organization can host, along with examples of how to set them up using Groundswell.

1. Virtual Mentoring or Tutoring

Pair employees with students, job seekers, or community members who need support. This could include:

• Academic tutoring (math, reading, writing)
• Career mentoring (resume help, interview prep)
• Skill development coaching (coding, digital literacy)

You can use Groundswell to create mentor events, schedule sessions or shifts, and track volunteer hours.

2. Online Pro Bono Service

Employees can offer their professional skills to nonprofits needing help. Examples include:

• Designing websites or marketing materials
• Social media strategy or content creation
• Financial planning, grant writing, or legal advice

With Groundswell, you can partner with nonprofits and let employees sign up for events they feel equipped to do.

3. Virtual Translation or Content Localization

If your organization is multilingual or serves global communities, employees can volunteer by translating documents, websites, or newsletters. This is a high‐impact way to unlock access across languages.

Groundswell can help manage events across a team.

4. Digital Advocacy & Awareness Campaigns

Volunteers can help raise awareness for causes through:

• Social media content creation or sharing
• Writing blog posts, op-eds, or newsletters
• Organizing virtual events (webinars, online panels)

Groundswell can host spotlight pages where employees contribute content or track shares and engagement.

5. Remote Fundraising & Crowdfunding Support

Employees can help raise funds for nonprofits by:

• Running peer-to-peer virtual fundraisers
• Coordinating micro-fundraisers (e.g., “donate a cup of coffee”)
• Setting up virtual fundraising challenges

Using Groundswell, you can build campaign pages, create fundraisers, enable donation collection, and monitor contributions.

6. Virtual Volunteer Events / Challenges

Organize group volunteer events entirely online. For example:

• A “virtual hackathon for good” (solve challenges for nonprofits)
• A “coding sprint” to build a tool for a mission-driven organization
• A challenge (e.g., “30 days of kindness online”) where everyone does a small act or task

You can schedule and manage these through Groundswell, letting participants sign up, get assignment sheets, and log hours.

7. Content & Resource Creation for Nonprofits

Employees can produce helpful materials that nonprofits often lack the capacity for, such as:

• Toolkits, guides, training modules
• Infographics, reports, or case studies
• Video editing, photo curation, or social content packages

Groundswell enables you to allocate tasks, track progress, and show impact back to the org.

8. Data Entry, Research & Back-Office Support

Many nonprofit organizations could use support with back-end work, like:

• Data cleaning or management
• Research and fact‐finding
• Survey analysis or compiling reports

You can publish these tasks on Groundswell and offer them as virtual volunteer opportunities for teams to complete in small chunks.

How to Host a Virtual Volunteer Activity

Here’s a step-by-step process to get your virtual volunteer event off the ground (with Groundswell as your backbone):

1. Identify a cause or need. Speak with nonprofit partners (or internal CSR leads) to understand what remote support is helpful.
2. Define the scope and deliverables. Be clear: What’s the output (e.g., 10 translated web pages, 30 mentorship hours)? What’s the timeline?
3. Post the opportunity. Use Groundswell to list the virtual volunteer task with description, skills required, deadline, and capacity.
4. Invite participation. Promote among employees via email, Slack, and your intranet. Encourage teams, departments, and remote staff to join.
5. Provide onboarding materials. Offer guides, templates, video orientation, or a kickoff meeting to set expectations.
6. Run check-ins & support. Schedule syncs or feedback loops. Use digital tools (e.g., Zoom, Slack) to answer questions.
7. Collect outputs & feedback. Once tasks are complete, collect deliverables, review quality, and share with the nonprofit partner.
8. Record volunteer hours & recognize participants. Use Groundswell’s hour tracking, send thank-you badges or acknowledgement, and celebrate impact.

Tips for Tracking Virtual Volunteer Hours

Tracking remote volunteer contributions can be trickier than in-person ones, but these tips help:

• Ask volunteers to log start and end times (or task time estimates).
• Tie hours to specific subtasks (e.g., “translated three pages = 2 hours”).
• Use weekly or monthly batch logging if immediate logging is burdensome.
• Include validation or review to confirm volunteer work was completed.
• Recognize and celebrate cumulative volunteer time in dashboards or leaderboards.

Groundswell’s built-in volunteer-hour tracking simplifies this. Employees can log hours, and administrators can verify and approve them in a single central platform.

Manage All Volunteering Hours & Activity in One Place with Groundswell

One of Groundswell’s strengths is unifying virtual volunteering, in-person volunteering, and philanthropic giving in a single platform. Through Groundswell, you can:

• Post and manage virtual and in-person volunteer opportunities
• Let employees browse, sign up, and log volunteer hours
• Approve and verify volunteer time
• Aggregate and report total hours across the organization
• Tie volunteer activity to impact metrics and showcase social ROI

By centralizing everything, you give your CSR team clarity, your employees transparency, and your nonprofit partners a seamless experience.

Ready to Launch Virtual Volunteer Efforts?

If you’re looking to engage remote, hybrid, or deskless employees in meaningful volunteer work, virtual volunteer opportunities are a powerful tool. From mentoring and content creation to back-end data support and advocacy, the ideas above show the range of options you can enable.

With Groundswell as your platform, launching, tracking, and celebrating these virtual volunteer events becomes much easier—no scattered spreadsheets or patchwork systems.

Let your employees know that distance doesn’t mean disconnection. Use virtual volunteering ideas to build inclusive, high-impact programs everyone can join. Request a demo today to get started.