According to Stehle, VolunteerMatch clearly had the potential to revolutionize a basic function of successful nonprofits—volunteer recruitment—by making this essential activity cheaper and easier regardless of location. “We started by identifying trends in the commercial sector that had relevance for nonprofits. A few principles were important to organize around—the end of geographic protection, in this case. Once upon a time, local nonprofits kept track of volunteers with a shoe box full of index cards. Now, as eBay and Craigslist have shown us, if you’re really looking for something, the online marketplace is your best chance. This concept has transformed the volunteer experience.

“At the outset it was hard to get money to build the service as a one-off. But then we brought together a dozen or so funders, echoing the approach of venture capital funding syndicates, and made the business case, which resulted in raising about $8 million,” Stehle remembers. “That was the big chunk of money up front needed to grow from proof-of-concept to full-scale development.” Atlantic Philanthropies had provided the lead investment of $2.5 million in the form of a challenge grant, and AOL Time Warner, and the Ford, William Randolph Hearst, James Irvine, W.K. Kellogg and Omidyar foundations soon joined Carnegie Corporation and the other core group of funders. The Bridgespan Group management consultants helped develop the airtight presentation. This collaborative approach paid off for the VolunteerMatch team, allowing them to deliver one pitch based on their organization’s fundamental strategy. It also benefited the funders, who could make a commitment with confidence knowing that the funding coalition would assemble enough resources to make reaching the organizational goals a real possibility. Over three years VolunteerMatch received $9.4 million in support using this approach, calculating the total social impact of volunteers referred from this round of funding at over $1.2 billion.

Balancing mission and margin has led to VolunteerMatch’s rapid growth and ten-year record of success, making it one of the most efficient and accessible tools available to the country’s nonprofits, particularly small and midsized organizations. Biannual user surveys bear this out, reporting an 86 percent satisfaction rate among nonprofit partners and 87 percent among volunteers (in the 2006 survey). At the same time, research keeps up with evolving needs and challenges, such as nonprofits’ difficulties finding volunteers who can commit enough time or whose schedules match the organization’s needs, leading to refinements in services to meet those challenges.

Nonprofits, like all businesses, are bound to encounter bumps in the road. Backstrand says their first major test came in 1999 when Oprah mentioned VolunteerMatch on her show—more than once! The resulting spike in visitors to the site “brought our poor little servers to their knees,” he recalls. “It was a dream come true, but there were too many people coming in the front door at once. Still, it put us on the map. We just had to build up the system to handle it.” The service was better prepared to handle sudden surges in volume that came on 9/11 and when Katrina struck. These events were real tragedies, but “we were a little organization that got to play a big role,” says Backstrand, “and it feels good to help.”

Recognized by MIT and the Smithsonian (where it was inducted into the permanent technology collection) VolunteerMatch is now widely viewed as an integral part of the nonprofit sector’s capacity-building infrastructure. The service acted as the main link for individuals interested in joining President Bush’s USA Freedom Corps, which was announced in his 2002 State of the Union address, and it was endorsed in President Bill Clinton’s recent book Giving: How Each of Us Can Change the World. It’s also the primary volunteering search engine for the Corporation for National and Community Service and the California Commission on Community Service.