The world will get safer as more people get vaccinated against SARS-CoV-2, the infectious disease which causes Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), but health officials are saying over and over that our world is going to stay the way it is for most of 2021, and probably well into 2022: face masks will continue to be needed in order not to spread this or other viruses, even if you aren’t sick from such. We will need to continue to avoid groups of people, including large crowds. We will need to socially distance. People vulnerable to the illness will need to continue to be protected.
And while lots of precautions will, I hope, continue to be taken to ensure onsite volunteering can be done safely amid the ongoing threat from COVID-19, it also means that virtual volunteering – using the Internet to support and engage volunteers – is going to still be necessary, even for organizations that avoided the practice for decades. And the reality is that virtual volunteering – a practice that’s more than 35 years old and that thousands of organizations were leveraging long before the global pandemic – is a tool that creates an avenue to involve volunteers that could not be involved otherwise and is an avenue of volunteering that many people actively seek out even when there isn’t a dangerous virus lurking about.
High Impact virtual volunteering has always been something many volunteers have sought. While many consultants, especially from the private sector, say the trend for volunteers is towards micro-tasks, I disagree: I hear people saying they want to make a real impact in volunteering, an investment of time that makes a real difference, that isn’t just about minutes or hours done, and isn’t about a check box of tasks completed. I’ve been talking about the desire of volunteers for this kind of deeper-investment virtual volunteering since 2015, including in this blog, the future of virtual volunteering? Deeper relationships, higher impact. In that blog, I said:
When volunteers interact with clients directly, it’s a highly personal activity, no matter the mission of the organization. These volunteer roles involve building and maintaining trust and cultivating relationships – not just getting a task done. It takes many hours and a real commitment – it can’t be done just when the volunteer might have some extra time. And altogether, that means that, unlike microvolunteering, these direct service virtual volunteering roles aren’t available to absolutely anyone with a networked device, Internet access and a good heart. These roles discriminate: if you don’t have the skills and the time, you don’t get to do them. And, believe it or not, the very high bar for participation is very appealing to a growing number of people that want to volunteer.
I always have to remind people at this point that I’m not opposed to microvolunteering – online tasks that take just a few minutes or hours for a volunteer to complete, require little or not training of the online volunteer, and require no ongoing commitment. I’ve been writing about microvolunteering before it was called that – I gave it the name byte-sized volunteering back in the 1990s, but the name didn’t stick. If you want to give lots of people a taste of your program, with an eye to cultivating those people into longer-term volunteers, and/or donors, and you have the time to create and support microvolunteering assignments, great, go for it!
But I continue to hear and see a growing number of comments, especially young people, saying they want more than just a “quickie” volunteering experience. They want more than number-of-hours volunteering and a list of tasks that need done. They want something high-impact. They want to feel like they have really made a difference. They want to make a real connection with the organization and those, or the mission, it serves. And not just for virtual volunteering! They also want it for onsite volunteering.
I’ve talked about the factors for success in what I’ve called direct-contact or direct-support online volunteers since the 1990s, first via the Virtual Volunteering Project. I have continued to try to highlight those kinds of virtual volunteering roles and tasks specifically via the news section of the Virtual Volunteering Wiki and this list of online mentoring programs (all of which I maintain with no support and no funding to do so). And it was very satisfying to hear directly from programs involving online volunteers recently and to hear them confirm the best practices I’ve promoted for years.
When a university contacted me this year about what their student volunteering abroad program could look like online instead, a program where students provided medical help with medical and public health professionals in other countries, I put together a quick list of what this could look like, based on these resources I’d continued to maintain, and I’ve been adding to it ever since. This list of what high-impact virtual volunteering looks like, with links to examples, is for people seeking ideas for an online project that will mobilize online volunteers in activities that lead to a sustainable, lasting benefit to a community or cause, particularly for a community or audience that is at-risk or under-served. It was created especially for programs looking for ways to engage online volunteers in high-responsibility, high-impact tasks focused on communities in the developing world. Note that these ideas absolutely can be adapted for remote volunteering within the same country where the online volunteers live as well – “remote” could mean across town rather than around the world.
Also see:
Hearing Directly from Programs Involving Online Volunteers
How will SARS-CoV-2 & COVID-19 affect volunteering abroad?
Safety in Virtual Volunteering
Also see:
- How to Immediately Introduce Virtual Volunteering at Your Program: roles & activities a nonprofit, charity or other program could launch immediately to involve online volunteers.
Also, the Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook: Fully Integrating Online Service Into Volunteer Involvement can help you better work with people online – specifically volunteers. These can be volunteers in short-term, “microvolunteering” tasks or longer-term, more high-responsibility roles, like what is highlighted here in the blog you are reading now. These can be volunteers who do some or most of their service onsite, at your organization, or volunteers who do most or all of their service remotely, rarely or ever onsite and in-person with you. This book was helpful long before the global pandemic spurred so many organizations to, at last, embrace virtual volunteering. This is the most comprehensive resource anywhere on working with online volunteers, and on using the Internet to support ALL volunteers, including those you might not think of as “online” volunteers.
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