Monthly Archives: December 2014

Most popular blog entries of 2014

It’s the end of 2014 – time to review my most popular blogs of the year. Some of my most viewed blogs this year weren’t from 2014…

Three of my most popular blogs, in the top five, are regarding virtual volunteering scams:

Courts being fooled by online community service scams
Online community service company tries to seem legit
What online community service is – and is not

That’s satisfying, as I really do want to get the word out about these unethical companies that are selling fake online volunteering.

Here are the other blogs people viewed most in 2014:

Making certain volunteers feel unwelcomed because of your language

The volunteer as bully = the toxic volunteer

Your flow chart for volunteers

What to do with old/vintage software

Why You SHOULD Separate Your Personal Life & Professional Life Online

It’s real: the unpaid internships & volunteers controversy

Internet-mediated Volunteering in the EU (virtual volunteering)

Jayne in Kiev, Ukraine for all August & Sept.

I’m a Frustrated Volunteer

Virtual Volunteering discussion group on LinkedIn

International Association of Fire Fighters is anti-volunteer

UN innovation events show how far they’ve come re: ICT4D

Advice for hackathons / one-day tech events looking for projects to hack

Too many volunteer matching web sites?

CSOs: submit proposals by 17 Aug. for USAID & SIDA

Now available: The LAST Virtual Volunteering Guidebook!

Research on USA volunteerism excludes virtual volunteering

Me at Work: Photos!

A warning re: Facebook privacy from Nicholas Thompson

NewYorker.com editor Nicholas Thompson was on “CBS This Morning” today, and his comments about Facebook and privacy are worth reading (or listening to):

One of the things that Facebook does is that they’re constantly pushing the line of privacy. They always have, and they always will. They want to take stuff that you want to have private and they want to make it public. What happened with me is my year in review is, of course, pictures of my children, and all sorts of other things. But all of these are things that I’ve marked PRIVATE. I went to share my year in review, and, of course, Facebook defaulted to make it public, so instead of going to just my friends, it goes to 100,000 people. I had to quickly say, oh wait, no, I don’t want it to happen. that’s just the way Facebook operates. It’s always pushing that line. .. Facebook makes money by knowing as much as it possibly can about you, about your friends, about what you talk about because then it can target ads. SO if, for example, it knows, that I have kids, and there are comments about when their birthdays are, it can then have ads selling me stuff to get them for their birthdays or whatever. Facebook just wants as much information about you as it can possibly have in the most public form it can possibly get… Facebook is a business disguised as a service… Assume that Facebook will always be pushing every single possible way it can legally get away with to take everything you do and to make it as public as possible. With that assumption, set your privacy settings more restrictive than you think you might need to do… Facebook’s view, Mark Zuckerberg’s view, has always been that people don’t care about privacy and that over time we will share more and more and become more comfortable with letting more intimate details out into the world. And he is right. Over time we are more comfortable, over time we are giving up more, over time Facebook is shrinking the boundaries of privacy, and people really don’t complain.

Thompson is not saying, “Don’t use Facebook.” Obviously, he still uses Facebook. I use Facebook (I have both a profile and a page). And his comments can be said about so many online social networks – they are businesses, not services, and they make money by gathering information about you and sharing it with businesses that want to sell you stuff.

If you have never looked at your Facebook profile using a profile that is not yours and isn’t among your Facebook friends, you really should – once a year, in fact. Ask a co-worker that you are not friends with on Facebook if he or she would be willing to log into Facebook and then to look at your Facebook profile and timeline while you look over his or her shoulder, to see what really is public and what isn’t. Look for your contact information (phone number, email), your birthday, photos of yourself and, if you have such, your children. Everything you see is visible to ANYONE with a Facebook account, including those people who are not Facebook friends. Are you comfortable with what you can see? If not, change your Facebook privacy settings.

Why should you care about your privacy? Because:

  • Your employer nor your co-workers should not see what you did on vacation, or what you do outside of work hours; it’s none of their business, and they could use it to fire you. In this economy, most people can’t afford to lose their jobs over something you do outside of work that has nothing to do with your on-the-job performance.
  • It makes it easier to steal your identify. Knowing your birthday and mother’s maiden name can help a thief gather all the information he or she needs to use your identify to buy things.
  • Your life needs boundaries. Your life will feel full of creepy people if you share everything online. I’ve had a few people at my workshops say some things about my personal life that they found out because of what I’d posted online. Back when I shared it on Facebook, I didn’t think it was a big deal, but having it brought up at a workshop… it felt creepy.

YOU DO HAVE CONTROL. Be deliberate in what you post, and keep in mind that ANYTHING you post online, even if you set it to private, could become public, accidentally, maliciously and deliberately, or through a legal loophole.

Note: I transcribed Mr. Thompson’s comments myself. I apologize if I’ve made any mistakes.

Also see:

Terrific resources you’re missing from Twitter

I share a LOT of information on Twitter: info on effective nonprofit communications, management or engagement of volunteers, job leads with leading nonprofit and humanitarian organizations, funding leads, updates on UN initiatives in Afghanistan, Ukraine, or anywhere else I care about (and I care about a LOT of places), and more. Often, it’s information I don’t share anywhere else.

I hear a lot of people say they don’t use Twitter because they “don’t want all the text messages.” They don’t realize that you do NOT have to receive tweets via text messaging – that hasn’t been true for many years. I read Twitter via my lap top or my smart phone, primarily – most people do. Also, you don’t have to follow everyone you find interesting – you can add people to different lists and view content when YOU want to (here are my Twitter lists, to give you an idea of how it can work).

Here are my tweets and retweets of the last three days:

Using SMS to improve communication between UNHCR, partner NGOs, & urban refugees:

Job: Fellows Coordinator (p2). 12 months in Budapest! Apply here:

We’re looking for someone to join our team as our Fellows Coordinator. Interested? Apply today:

German translation of the W3C document “CSS Style Attributes”

Nice video by about how to speak up safely against in :

Watch the most offensive international charity video of the year – Humanosphere

Short film asks “What did you pay for when you bought illegal ivory?” Answer: terrorism on African Continent

A university center that says it cultivates “innovative thinking” & “entrepreneurship”, etc., has no social media accounts? Harumph

Job: in Forest Grove, seeks a Director of Finance and Operations

opened an office in to work with civilians in the conflict zone, the USG Jeffrey Feltman said:

Almost 10% of Sierra Leone’s 120 doctors have died of . “Why Sierra Leone Literally Had to Cancel Christmas”

Groups may receive up to 5 stays a hostel for each day members 2+ hours in surrounding community

Just did a little virtual volunteering over on the online forum. How about you?

International Conference on Social Media for Good May 14-16, 2015, Istanbul. Abstracts due Dec 29, 2014

I have said this for YEARS: “Successful Tech Requires An Old-Fashioned Skill: Organizing People”

We’re Hiring! Quality Assurance Analyst -contract position with the possibility of extension and/or conversion.

We’re also hiring a Sr. Project Manager. full time – exempt  To apply:   (plz RT!)

Fantastic option: 6-12 months in Ghana with . Expenses paid, excellent projects

Which languages influence wikipedia – & each other (visualization)

How languages influence Twitter – & each other (visualization)

. mobilizes corporate volunteers to support post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals:

Online mentors helping entrepreneurs in developing countries: and ?

Core humanitarian standard launched last week. Check it out

How I keep up re: virtual volunteering: this ework/evolunteer list (also re: telework, telecommuting, virtual teams)

What I hope future USA volunteering reports by will focus on, to be more helpful:

Yet again Volunteering & Civic Life in America report focuses on $ value of

I consider “Anonymous” a virtual volunteering example, & def. worthy of study:

Virtual volunteering in the EU: history, prevalence, approaches, how it relates to employability, social inclusion

CNCS continues its old-fashioned measurement of volunteer value

logoIt’s happened again: an official government body touting the value of volunteers as coming primarily because of the amount of money nonprofits and others save in not having to pay staff.

Here are the first and second highlights in an email I received today from a Corporation for National and Community Service distribution list I’m on, regarding the Volunteering and Civic Life in America 2014 (which actually is a report on stats from 2013, and only for the USA):

  • Nearly 63 million Americans volunteered nearly 8 billion hours last year
  • This service has an estimated value of $173 billion (based on the Independent Sector’s estimate of the average value of a volunteer hour)

These stats are the very first highlight on their web site as well.

Here we go again: the primary value of volunteers is the dollar (or Euro or whatever) value of each hour they donate – that means the value of their donated service is the money organizations didn’t have to spend on paying staff.

Yes, CNCS looks at some other benefits – about volunteers becoming financial donors, and about how increased volunteering rates may lead to lower unemployment – though, in fact, the same researchers whose study CNCS is using to say this have noted that they did not establish a causal link between volunteering and employment (page 2) . But at the top of every graphic or document about this report is always the same thing: the primary value of volunteer service in the USA was $173 billion. And that’s what we should be celebrating.

What are the consequences of CNCS, as well as other organizations, touting the volunteer-value-based-on-monetary-value as the primary value of engaging with volunteers?:

  • Governments can be justified in saying, “Let’s cut funding for such-and-such programs and, instead, get some volunteers to do it, because volunteers are free labor – they save money!”
  • Corporations can be justified in saying, “We’re cutting our funding programs because these nonprofits should just find some people to do the work and not be paid for it! That will save money. And nonprofits can, instead, create a half day for our staff to come onsite and have a feel-good volunteering experience – it won’t be any extra work for the nonprofits because, you know, volunteers are unpaid, and that makes them free!”
  • Unions can be justified in saying, “We are against volunteering. Because volunteers take paid jobs away.” That’s what the union of firefighters in the USA says – and the CNCS’s use of a monetary value as the primary value of volunteers says it’s right.
  • Economically-disadvantaged people that are being asked to volunteer are justified in saying, “How can you volunteer if you have no income, no money and are concerned about the means to provide your kids with something on their plates every night? With all due respect…I say, ‘Please be serious!’” (yes, that’s a real quote)

All of those scenarios are happening right now in response to calls for more volunteers, as I note in the links above and the links at the end of this blog. And there will more of them as a result of this continued approach by the CNCS and other organizations to always make monetary value as the primary value of volunteer engagement.

How to talk about the value of volunteers? Instead of looking only or primarily at the money value of the hours contributed, CNCS and other organizations could also look at:

  • Are there certain tasks that are best done by volunteers, rather than paid staff? Why?
  • Do increased levels of volunteer engagement lead to or relate to less violence in a community? Why?
  • Do high levels of volunteer engagement lead to or relate to healthier, more sustainable NGOs and civil society? Why?
  • Do high levels of volunteer engagement lead or relate to more voters, more awareness of what is happening in a community or more awareness of how community decisions are made?
  • Does increased volunteer engagement by women contribute to increased empowerment of under-served people and communities?
  • Does volunteer engagement by youth contribute to youth’s education levels or safety?
  • Are there certain kinds of volunteering that have particularly types of impact beyond number of hours given? What is the value of family volunteering, employee group volunteering, tech group volunteering (hackathons), teen volunteering, micro volunteering (micro tasks), virtual volunteering (online service), and other forms of volunteering that are enhanced or reduced in relation to traditional volunteering?

What an important, powerful study that would be that could help volunteers, the organizations that involve such, and the funders that finance the involvement of volunteers (because, of course, we all know that volunteers are never free, right?)!

Also see Initiatives opposed to some or all volunteering (unpaid work), & online & print articles about or addressing controversies regarding volunteers replacing paid staff, a list of organizations and initiatives opposed to some kinds of volunteering (unpaid work), or ALL kinds of volunteering, including unpaid internships at nonprofit organizations / charities. It is also a list of online and print articles about or addressing controversies regarding volunteers replacing paid staff. Most of the links are to initiatives or actions in Europe or the USA.

My other rants on this subject:

Judging volunteers by their # of hours? No thanks.

Research on USA volunteerism excludes virtual volunteering

Do NOT say “Need to Cut Costs? Involve Volunteers!”

UN Volunteers, IFRC, ILO & others make HUGE misstep

Value of Volunteers – Still Beating the Drum

pro vs. volunteer firefighters

Volunteers: still not free

Fight against unpaid internships will hurt volunteering

Advice for unpaid interns to sue for back pay

Should the NFL involve volunteers for the Super Bowl?

I agree with this anti-crowdsource campaign

Research Fellow re: in Civil Society Organisations and research, Centre for Computing and Social Responsibility

Closing date: 14-Jan-2015

De Montfort University”s Centre for Computing and Social Responsibility is offering the position of a Research Fellow to work across a number of European and national research projects, including:
GREAT (www.great-project.eu)
RESPONSIBILITY (http://responsibility-rri.eu/?lang=en)
Responsible-Industry (www.responsible-industry.eu)
CONISDER (www.consider-project.eu)
Network Analysis and Simulation of Civil Society Organisations in Research
Human Brain Project (http://www.humanbrainproject.eu/)
DREAM (http://dream2020.eu/)
SATORI (http://satoriproject.eu/)

The CCSR contributions to these projects share the focus on responsible research and innovation (RRI). As research fellow you will be expected to work on specific aspects of these projects and also create synergies between them. You will conduct high quality research, shape the work and take initiatives, and publish the results of the work in high quality outlets and publications. Working closely with leading scholars from a range of disciplines, you will also contribute to the initiation of new research initiatives of the Centre.

Job Details

Here’s

How to apologize to the world

A followup to my earlier post this week, about the PR disaster generated by a PR company, the one formerly known as Strange Fruit PR (ugh!).

In that blog, I quoted their non-apology for the fiasco, and then wrote what their apology should have looked like.

By contrast to that non-apology is the REAL apology from GreenPeace.

GreenPeace did something really horrible: to get the attention of delegates and the press attending the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Peru, Greenpeace activists went to site of the historic Nazca lines in Peru and laid out massive yellow letters reading “Time for Change: The Future is Renewable.” The area around the lines is strictly prohibited, and anyone who gets a permit to walk in the area must wear special footwear, because foot prints could ruin the area. Greenpeace trampled ancient, undisturbed grounds – they harmed something environmentally. Deputy Culture Minister Luis Jaime Castillo of Peru said, “They are black rocks on a white background. You walk there and the footprint is going to last hundreds or thousands of years. And the line that they have destroyed is the most visible and most recognized of all.”

Bad. VERY BAD. This is the apology Greenpeace offered:

We take personal responsibility for actions, willing to face consequences.

Without reservation Greenpeace apologises to the people of Peru for the offence caused by our recent activity laying a message of hope at the site of the historic Nazca Lines. We are deeply sorry for this.

We fully understand that this looks bad. Rather than relay an urgent message of hope and possibility to the leaders gathering at the Lima UN climate talks, we came across as careless and crass.

We have now met with the Peruvian Culture Ministry responsible for the site to offer an apology. We welcome any independent review of the consequences of our activity. We will cooperate fully with any investigation.

We take personal responsibility for actions, and are committed to nonviolence. Greenpeace is accountable for its activities and willing to face fair and reasonable consequences.

I will travel to Lima, this week, to personally apologise for the offence caused by the activity and represent the organisation in any on going discussions with the Peruvian authorities.

Greenpeace will immediately stop any further use of the offending images.

THAT is an apology. It takes full responsibility, it never makes excuses. Well done. Staff at a certain PR company in Austin, and many politicians: take notice.

Also see:

Handling a social media faux pax/ (kudos the American Red Cross)

A PR disaster that has me outraged

Which is worse: founding a company and giving it a name without doing any check on the name or phrase, and then finding out later that the name is associated with a horrible time in history and is deeply hurtful to many people, OR, knowing the name is associated with a horrible time in history and is deeply hurtful to many people and using it anyway?

I really can’t decide.

I know I’m late to the outcry over the reprehensible public relations firm founders in Austin, Texas who decided to call their company Strange Fruit PR – they recently changed the name to something else, after the outcry over the last 48 hours. But I only just found out about it today, and I have to comment. I have to.

When I thought this was a case of people naming a company without doing any background check, I was nonetheless outraged. Trembling with outrage, in fact. One of the things any public relations person knows is that, before you name any project, initiative, program, company, WHATEVER, you research what the name, phrase and any acronyms might already mean. You type it into Google and Bing and Wikipedia. Then you type in the name again along with words like racist and sexist and criminal and scam, just to see what comes up. You get a group of employees or volunteers or clients together and ask them their reaction to the name. If these two people hadn’t done all of the aforementioned, how in the WORLD were they in the public relations business?!

But it turns out the founders of Strange Fruit PR knew exactly what the name meant – and still used it for TWO years. They dismissed the people that brought up the inappropriateness of the name to them. It was only after a recent and widespread outcry online that they decided to change their name.

Here’s what the founders of this PR firm learned when they looked up the name online, and they still chose the name for their company: Strange Fruit means lynched Black Americans hanging from trees. It’s the title of a song made famous after it was recorded by Billie Holiday.

They knew that, and still chose to name their company “Strange Fruit PR.”

And then there is this non-apology from the founders of this PR company – note that they are not apologizing for their mistake but, rather, that you might have been offended.

We sincerely apologize to those offended by the former name of our firm. As of today, we have renamed our firm to Perennial Public Relations. We have always prided ourselves as open-minded individuals and we remain committed to serving our clientele and community. In no way did we ever intend for the name of our firm to offend nor infer any implication of racism. We are grateful for and appreciate the ongoing support of our clients and community.

Cringe-worthy, I know. I shuddered the first time I read it.

I’m a PR consultant. Here’s the apology that this firm should have written:

We sincerely apologize for the profoundly inappropriate name we have been using for our firm. There is no excuse for our choosing that name, let alone using it for as long as we did. It should not have taken this national outcry for us to change our name – we should never have named it that in the first place. While we can assure everyone that we did not choose the name to imply any support of racism or for one of the darkest periods of our nation’s history, to offer any explanation as to why we chose that name would contribute to the perception so many people now have of us: that we are thoughtless and uncaring. And that perception is, at this point, justified.

We have a great deal of work to do: to continue to provide quality services to our clients, to repair our reputation, and most importantly, to educate ourselves about racial and historical sensitivities and to demonstrate that we have learned, and that we do care, deeply, about all people. We welcome your contributions to help us on this journey.

We are so grateful for and appreciate the ongoing support of our clientele and community. Thank you.

And then this agency should call every organization in Austin, Texas that addresses racial inequalities or black American culture, apologize, and ask each if they would be willing to meet and help this agency start its journey to reconciliation, realization and forgiveness. And it should regularly blog about that journey.

Followup: an example of how to apologize.

Also see:

guide to social media emergency management analytics

Need a guide to social media emergency management analyticsHumanity Road just published one.

“Emergency Management is a mature field of study but Social Media Analytics is still in its infancy and navigating this field requires an understanding of the opportunities it presents. We are publishing this guide as a helpful tool for emergency managers and decision makers to help them identify and discuss relevant questions in planning their SMEM response. One example of key lessons to include in your own SMEM plan is establishing a baseline for communications activity in your area of operation.”

“We outline two types of application of social media analytics: one as postdisaster assessment and research which aggregates and analyzes data for statistical trending and strategic planning purposes, and the other conducted at the onset, during disaster response, and during recovery phases for rapid assessment and response focused on tactical execution. In general, this guidebook is meant for the latter, although the principles apply to both.”

I’ve been reviewing this for the last few minutes, and it seems absolutely RIGHT ON. Great stuff here – real-world advice, not just theory.

coyote1Have you read this report? Have a comment about this report or about using social media in community emergencies? Comment below!

How many virtual volunteering projects are there?

I get these questions frequently:

How many virtual volunteering / digital volunteering or microvolunteering projects are there?

How many people are engaged in virtual volunteering?

The answer: NO ONE KNOWS.

vvbooklittleI can say that there are at least thousands of virtual volunteering projects in the world, and MANY thousands of people engaged in virtual volunteering, but I cannot tell you exactly how many.

No one can.

Why can’t those questions be answered? Because no one is tracking the number of projects nor the number of volunteers engaged in such. Why is no one tracking such? Because IT’S IMPOSSIBLE. Why is it impossible? Because:

  • Most volunteering tasks – virtual or not – aren’t officially registered anywhere, maybe not even in the organization where they are happening. Individual organizations struggle to count how many volunteers actively engaged with them in any one year! You can’t even rely on web sites where organizations recruit volunteers, since not every organization use such sites – nonprofits and NGOs often use their own web sites and social media channels to recruit volunteers for online tasks, in addition to offline means – announcing the availability of online tasks at an onsite meeting, for instance. I can’t count how many times an organization tells me they aren’t involving online volunteers, and after I explain to them what virtual volunteering is, they realize, in fact, they ARE involving digital volunteers.
  • Many, and maybe most, organizations involving volunteers virtually don’t think of themselves as involving online volunteers, and most people that become volunteers online don’t think of themselves as online volunteers or digital volunteers. People volunteer, period. Organizations involve volunteers, period. Many, and maybe most, organizations don’t distinguish when a person is an onsite volunteer versus an online volunteer.
  • No one can say how many group volunteering events have happened in any given area. Or family volunteering. Or teen volunteering. Or pro bono service. Again – none of these are officially, regularly registered anywhere, and are often not even tracked and recorded within the agency or department that organized such!
  • The terms volunteer and volunteering are contested terms, in any language (not just English); there is not universal agreement on their definitions and they are not uniformly used the same way – if they are used at all by organizations (they often are not). There’s also not agreement on terms like virtual volunteering, micro volunteering, digital volunteering or cyber volunteering. When we aren’t all using the same words regarding online volunteers, how can we even begin to try to count such?

It was a huge challenge for me to do a research paper in 2013 regarding Internet-mediated Volunteering in the EU (virtual volunteering). I made it clear to the EU agency that hired me that I would NOT be finding every organization in Europe engaged in virtual volunteering – I wouldn’t even come close – because it would be impossible, for all the reasons I have already mentioned, plus because of the multitude of languages in Europe. In several weeks reviewing just online materials, with my limited language abilities and Google Translate, I found 60 organizations involving online volunteers – but imagine how many I would have found if I could have visited ever NGO umbrella organization in every country and explained what is meant by virtual volunteering – like so many people that attend my workshops, they would realize that they have been working with online volunteers for YEARS and didn’t know it.

It’s the same with hackathons. Knowbility, in Austin, Texas, has been doing hackathons since the 1990s, but they never called them that – the term didn’t become widely known and used until fairly recently. How many other nonprofits have been doing hackathons for years and haven’t known it?

So here’s what we can say:

  • Virtual volunteering is happening on every country on Earth that has Internet access – both organizations engaging with volunteers online and people volunteering their time online.
  • In fully-developed countries (the USA, Canada, Western Europe, etc.), transitional countries (such as those that were a part of the Soviet Union), and developing countries with a sizable population with Internet access (South Africa, India, Pakistan, Nigeria, etc.), there are more online volunteers / digital volunteers, and more projects that are involving volunteers, than can be counted. There are not dozens, not hundreds-there are thousands of digital volunteering projects, collectively, in all these countries.
  • Virtual volunteering is a practice that’s more than 30 years old.
  • The USA probably has the largest number of virtual volunteering-related projects and the largest number of online volunteers – but other virtual volunteering hot spots include Canada, Mexico, Spain, Poland, Ukraine, Brazil and India. In Africa, Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Uganda and South Africa are worthy of attention as well.

Also see:

How many organizations involve online volunteers?

Research on USA volunteerism excludes virtual volunteering

When words get in the way (like “Virtual Volunteering”)

Volunteerism research should include virtual volunteering!

Finding out how many orgs are involving online volunteers

Spontaneous online volunteering/crowdsourcing in response to Eric Gardner grand jury decision

Have you seen the remarkable, spontaneous online volunteering / crowdsourcing that’s happening in response to grand jury decision about the death of Eric Gardner in New York City? There are thousands of tweets with the tag , with various people identifying as white in the USA posting about times they have committed crimes and come in contact with police as a result, and even been confrontational with the police at those times, and how they were not arrested as a result. It’s meant to refute the justifications for police use-of-force regarding the killing of Eric Gardner.

Powerful stuff.

More about spontaneous online volunteers.