Digital platform for social purposes: the changing landscape of volunteering

This study aims to better understand how social technologies contribute to the societal transformation by boosting the development of new social innovation practices. To this end, it adopts a qualitative research approach and an empirical contextualization strategy. The study illustrates the case RomAltruista: an Italian volunteer organization that was founded in 2011 to make volunteering opportunities more flexible and easier. This paper contributes to scientific and practice debates on social innovation with implications for scholars, managers and policy makers. It provides some evidences of how digital platforms foster the development of scalable and recursive social innovation practices to inspire people to take action in their communities. Furthermore, it extends the scope and the concept of the digital volunteering phenomenon to the broad perspective of the engagement of citizens in the management of social daily activities. To this end, this study frames flexible volunteering as a new social innovation practice that is specifically designed to address common societal challenges.