Not long ago, I found myself next to a lawyer painting a fence. We had both volunteered to help a local church. During the conversation, three insights were undeniable:

1. Each of our labor rates were significantly higher than fence painters.
2. After an hour, we were quite bored.
3. With zero experience, we were crappy fence painters.

Our conclusion was that the system that brought us together to help the church was inefficient in terms of leveraging our capabilities, unlikely to contribute to our well-being beyond the vague satisfaction of helping a good cause, and would produce a work product of inferior quality. If each of us had contributed the money earned working one hour in our profession, the church could have hired a capable crew of fence painters.

While slopping paint all over ourselves, we realized the only barrier to implementing a system whereby we could contribute our overpriced labor hours was some automated way to organize it. Starting with a blank slate, we designed the system that would accomplish the goal, and it turned out to be an eTaskBoard with all its features, and one important additional capability.

Employers could open an account and propose tasks the same as with a regular eTaskBoard, but the skillsets would not be specialized. They would reflect the skillsets available from across the volunteers who supported the non-profit using their particular eTaskBoard to raise funds. There may be an attorney available for a task to review a contract, for example. His regular labor rate would apply, but the employer would know that every dollar paid for legal services would go toward the charitable cause behind that eTaskBoard.

Such an attorney could sign up as a worker, provide his labor rate, and agree to a maximum number of hours he would work there for free, donating all his earnings to the designated non-profit. Because it is internet based, he could work his donated time when he wished, typically outside his regular business hours.

From a tax standpoint, cash is generated and that cash is donated. Unlike in-kind labor which is hard to quantify, such a charitable eTaskBoard would be able to report exactly how many dollars each volunteer generated, and that would be their cash donation — documented and verifiable.

This is in addition to whatever use the non-profit made of an eTaskBoard implementation to provide job income to the wards of the non-profit, for example, the disabled who are unable to work or the poor whom the non-profit is transitioning to employment. That would be within the original design of eTaskBoard to support the virtual workforce.

Supporting an efficient way to raise funds from the high labor rates of donors is an accidental alternate application of eTaskBoard.