Community
VolunteerMatch: The Quiet Network That's Linked Millions of People to Causes
For more than 25 years VolunteerMatch has been the digital infrastructure behind American volunteering — and in 2025 it became part of Idealist.
By The Pennygood team · Jun 2026 · 3 min read
Most people who have ever gone looking for a way to help — tutoring kids, sorting food-bank donations, walking shelter dogs — have probably brushed up against VolunteerMatch without thinking much about it. For more than 25 years it has been the quiet infrastructure behind American volunteering: the place where someone who wants to give a few hours and an organization that needs those hours actually find each other.
Two web startups that became one switchboard
VolunteerMatch launched on April 25, 1998, when two early internet nonprofits joined forces — Impact Online, Inc., started by a group of MBAs named Mark Benning, Joanne Ernst, Steve Glikbarg, and Cindy Shove, and a project called Volunteer America. From a base in Oakland, California, the combined organization (still legally Impact Online, doing business as VolunteerMatch) set out to do one unglamorous thing well: build national digital plumbing to connect volunteers with the nonprofits that need them.
Free for the volunteer, by design
The model has stayed refreshingly simple. For individuals, VolunteerMatch is free. You search by location and cause — everything from animal welfare to disaster relief to literacy — and the site surfaces real openings near you. Nonprofits can post opportunities on a free basic account, or pay for sturdier recruiting tools as VolunteerMatch members. Over the years the network grew to span more than 200,000 organizations and over 100,000 ways to volunteer across 56 cause areas, and it pushed those listings out through its own site, an API, and syndication partners — so a single posting could surface in many places at once.
Counting to nineteen million
What makes the scale legible is that VolunteerMatch has long tracked its "connections" — each time a volunteer signs up for an opportunity. It crossed one million on January 9, 2003, reached four million by March 2009, and seven million by July 2013. By 2023, its 25th year, the count had passed 18 million; by late 2024 the organization reported more than 19 million volunteers engaged. Behind each number is one person who decided to show up somewhere.
Joining forces with Idealist in 2025
In January 2025, VolunteerMatch announced it was merging with Idealist, the social-impact platform founded in 1995. The transition wrapped up later that year, and the two now run as one network reachable at idealist.org. Together they describe themselves as the largest network connecting nonprofits with both individual and corporate volunteers, and over their combined histories they have linked more than 250,000 organizations with over 40 million people looking for a way to pitch in.
The most useful way to support this kind of work is simply to use it. If you have a few hours, you can search opportunities by cause and place on the platform; if you run a nonprofit, you can list your volunteer needs for free; and companies can set up team volunteering through its business tools. It all runs through the organization's own channels.
A network like this only works because of the people on the other end of every match — volunteers who give their time without being paid for it. Pennygood is built for those individuals: a way for a community to send a little steady support, a few dollars a month, to someone who keeps showing up for others. If that describes someone you know, they can start a page at pennygood.me.