Tag Archives: innovation

Volunteer turnover isn’t always a bad thing

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graphic by Jayne Cravens representing volunteers

High turnover of volunteers at a nonprofit, NGO, community program, etc., usually is not a good thing. But I hear nonprofits often talk about how they don’t want to lose any volunteers, or how they see a large number of volunteers leaving as an automatically negative thing.

No volunteer is forever. People’s lives change: they get married, get divorced, have babies, get new jobs, move, have a change in their health, have new caregiving responsibilities, develop new interests and on and on. Their interests also change: they may decide they want to do something that your organization doesn’t offer – work with animals, develop web sites, mentor young people, do outdoor service projects – and all of those changes are fine and normal.

Absolutely, you should do exit interviews when a volunteer formally quits, and surveys of former volunteers that stopped signing up to help, to find out if there is an issue you need to address. And if you see a problem – complaints about a toxic work environment, or volunteers being asked to do too much, or volunteer burnout – you need to address those.

But some volunteering turnover should not only be expected, it should often be welcomed. Volunteer cliques don’t welcome new members and exclude volunteers that are different than the clique’s status quo – so if you have a lot of long-term volunteers, is it really a sign that you do a great job of supporting and engaging volunteers or is it that you’ve created or enabled an unwelcoming clique of volunteers? How volunteers do what they do needs to evolve with the times: there are approaches that worked previously that don’t now, and new approaches that need to be considered and explored – is your lack of turnover really a sign of stagnation of ideas and methods?

I saw this message posted to social media from someone talking about an event that is staffed primarily by volunteers.

Longtime volunteers feel pride & ownership in what they do (which is generally great). But because they feel ownership, they dismiss any suggestion to change anything they do, even when that would help the event & the organization.

I’ve heard this complaint by managers of volunteers for many nonprofit initiatives, especially animal shelters, thrift stores and rural firehouses. Volunteer ownership is a blessing for the commitment and responsibility it can inspire, but it also can be a curse, for the inflexibility and unwelcomeness it can cultivate.

Maybe it’s not such a bad thing if you lose some volunteers because you introduced more thorough safety policies, or because the volunteers wanted to rally around a volunteer who was dismissed for sexually-harassing clients or other volunteers. Maybe it’s not such a bad thing if you lose some volunteers because you now require them to go through a training to better protect and serve clients. Maybe it’s not such a bad things to lose some volunteers who don’t like your new focus on inclusion and diversity. Maybe it’s not such a bad thing if you lose some volunteers who are opposed to all change and like to say, “But we’ve always done it THIS way…”

Do you think some annual turnover of volunteers at a nonprofit might actually be a good thing? Comment below.

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Most popular blogs of 2021

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It’s the end of a calendar year, and that means it’s time to look at what were my most popular blogs of 2021 – and to try to figure out why. It’s an exercise I do not so much for YOU, my readers, but for me. It’s the kind of self-analysis every nonprofit, NGO, government agency, or consultant for such should do.

One seismic shift this year: not one blog I published this year made it to the list of top 11 blogs of all time. Usually, I knock off at least one blog from the top 11 spot – but not this year.

My top 11 blogs for 2021 – the ones that got the most clicks:

cover of Virtual Volunteering book with hands raising up various Internet connected devices

It was also another good year for The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook – lots of sales (though not as many as in 2020). If you want to learn how to avoid the common pitfalls in virtual volunteering and to dig far deeper into the factors for success in creating assignments for online volunteers, supporting online volunteers, and keeping virtual volunteering a worthwhile endeavor for everyone involved, you will not find a more detailed guide anywhere than The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook. It’s available both as a traditional print publication and as a digital book. And if you buy it directly from me, the last two boxes in my closet will soon go away! I also get a bit more money than if you buy it from Amazon (and it’s slightly cheaper to buy from me as well).

Also see Reflections on Virtual Volunteering in 2020 (& My Most Popular Blogs for the Year).

Here’s to 2022!

If you have benefited from this blog, my other blogs, or other parts of my web site and would like to support the time that went into researching information, developing material, preparing articles, updating pages, etc. (I receive no funding for this work), here is how you can help. 

What’s New Regarding Virtual Volunteering

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Despite lack of funding, I do my best to keep tabs on what’s going on regarding virtual volunteering: initiatives using the Internet to support and involve volunteers. What I’m particularly interested in are virtual volunteering activities that are new to me, are particularly innovative or particularly successful. I have a series of Google Alerts I use to keep tabs on news stories, press releases and blogs that use certain words and phrases that are good leads on virtual volunteering – remember, most initiatives that involve online volunteers never use the phrase virtual volunteering, and maybe not even the word volunteer.  That makes finding stories quite difficult.

I keep a list of news regarding virtual volunteering on the Virtual Volunteering Wiki. I did an analysis of this by year and found that 2014 and 2015 were prolific years regarding news related to virtual volunteering, but that after that, the number of stories I’ve found drops each year. Why the drop in stories about virtual volunteering each year for the last five years? I think it’s because there’s not that much that seems newsworthy about virtual volunteering anymore – after all, virtual volunteering is more than 35 years old.

I also use my news searches to update this web page that lists Virtual Volunteering initiatives, to help those looking for online volunteering. While my book with Susan J. Ellis, The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook, is focused on helping organizations engage and support volunteers using the Internet, this page is meant to help people that want to be online volunteers. It lists more than 100 places to find virtual volunteering opportunities, and some of the sites I link to, in turn, list dozens, even hundreds, of organizations recruiting online volunteers.

In maintaining this list and in searching for virtual volunteering news, I’ve seen that, in the last five years, there has been a proliferation of opportunities for online volunteers to transcribe scanned historical documents or to tag photos. Examples:

The Old Weather project, where online volunteers transcribe hand-written weather observations made by Royal Navy ships around the time of World War I; using old weather observations can help predict our climate’s future.

Decoding World War I Punchcards, to help tag digitized punch cards that represent soldiers in World War I served by the YMCA, housed at the Kautz Family YMCA Archives, University of Minnesota Libraries. 25,926 men and women are represented by these cards. By digitizing these cards and having them properly tagged, this project seeks to shed light on these individuals and make freely available the biographical and demographic information contained within these cards.

The Freedom on the Move (FOTM) public database project at Cornell University mobilizes online volunteers to add data tags and transcribe scans of newspaper advertisements offering rewards for the capture of fugitive slaves – enslaved Americans seeking freedom and, often, their families. The resulting database will allow users to examine spatial patterns and compare trends over time.

These virtual volunteering transcription and tagging programs used to be few and, therefore,  newsworthy. One of the things that made them newsworthy is that they are microvolunteering or microtasks: a volunteer can spend just a few minutes accomplishing something, or spend hours transcribing and tagging. Now, there’s well more than 100 such programs – Zooniverse alone provides links to more than 80 such projects. There’s just nothing really new or innovative anymore about microvolunteering. But it is addictive: I lost a lot of time trying out one of these programs and one project turns into 20 – it’s better than CandyCrush!

What innovation is needed regarding virtual volunteering? A way for online volunteers to participate in these microvolunteering tasks in a way that the time they spend on them and their accomplishments could be automatically tracked, resulting in a report the volunteer could show as he or she wants to: on social media, to a high school administrator who wants to see the number of volunteering hours a student has undertaken or to a probation officer or other officer of the court who wants to see the number of community service hours a person has completed. If some aspiring hackathon or socially-responsible company or whatever wants to create this tool, just give me credit for the inspiration, please?

If you have benefited from this blog or other parts of my web site and would like to support the time that went into researching information, developing material, preparing articles, updating pages, etc. (I receive no funding for this work), here is how you can help.

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Susan Ellis Matters

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In the winter of 1996, I started a new job, directing The Virtual Volunteering Project. I was based in Austin, Texas, and I flew to Washington, DC to meet one of the advisors of the project, Susan J. Ellis.

She terrified me.

She seemed to know absolutely everything there is to know about volunteerism. She had thought about virtual volunteering far, far more than I ever had. She was absolutely sure of the impact online volunteers could have on the world and had already envisioned specific examples of possibilities. She wasn’t surprised at all by anything I told her regarding what I knew about working with online volunteers or what I knew about organizations engaged in virtual volunteering. She was five steps ahead of me no matter what I was saying or thinking. It was one of the most intimidating meetings I’ve ever had.

I have remained in awe of Susan’s expertise and ways of thinking and strategizing every day since that meeting, but I also am so happy that, since then, Susan became a frequent collaborator and good friend. Back in those early days, we would do workshops together at various volunteer management and volunteerism conferences and ask the room, “How many of you have an email address?” Maybe a quarter of the room would raise their hands. I wanted to be tentative and gentle about introducing virtual volunteering – she didn’t, and would challenge the room with statements about how they had better get ahead of this because, if they didn’t, tech-savvy volunteers would create their own efforts and leave them behind. Over the four years I directed the Virtual Volunteering Project, I became far bolder in my statements and advice as well, and it was because of her. She never officially consulted on the United Nation’s Online Volunteering Service when I directed the project at UNV, but so much of what I did in managing that service was because of what she taught me, and any success regarding that service is, in part, because of her. 

Her book From the Top Down: The Executive Role in Successful Volunteer Involvement changed everything I had been thinking about volunteerism, and I still refer to it regularly when trying to create a presentation or a research paper or write a blog post. When she told me she had suggested the authors writing the book What We Learned (the Hard Way) about Supervising Volunteers to contact me for a contribution, I was floored – what did I know?!? She had so much more faith in me than I ever did in myself. I read her oh-so-provocative Hot Topics, her monthly blog series, and was inspired for months to come with new questions and comments for colleagues – and always checked it whenever I had what I thought was a new idea because, very often, Susan had the same questions or comments months or even years before me.  

The first time I visited the Energize, Inc. office in Philadelphia in 1998, we were both active participants on CyberVPM, a then very popular and pioneering online group to discuss volunteer management. Sitting in her office, we decided to author a joint post and propose a discussion that the President Bill Clinton intern/sex scandal was, in fact, a volunteer management issue, since the intern was unpaid and, therefore, a volunteer. Many on the group balked at the idea of discussing “politics”, but Susan didn’t back down: she asked point blank how these organizations would handle the same situation in their own organizations, what policies they had in place to address it, etc. 

Susan was disruptive long before it became fashionable to be such.  

Let’s be clear: there is no person on Earth who has done as much to promote volunteerism and the best practices for engaging and support volunteers than Susan J. Ellis. Her contributions cannot be overstated. That any academic paper regarding any aspect of volunteerim can be written without quoting Susan at some point is beyond me. I have not done a presentation on volunteer engagement in the last 22 years that I did not reference Susan Ellis. 

Susan wasn’t just a pioneer regarding the identification and promotion of volunteer management best practices and innovations, she wasn’t just a guru regarding all things volunteerism: Susan J. Ellis was a pioneer geek fan girl. Her company, Energize, Inc., was named for the term “energize” in Star Trek, and she had fantastic stories about being a Trekker in the earliest days of the show. She also was a huge fan of David McCallum and The Man From U.N.C.L.E. and a few years ago, over a huge sandwich at a Schlesinger’s, a legendary traditional Jewish deli in Philadelphia, she told me a wonderful story of waiting outside a stage door as a starry-eyed young fan girl so she could show McCallum, who was appearing in a stage production, the scrapbook she’d put together for years watching his show. She did, indeed, meet him and show him her work, and he had seemed quite impressed. Many years later, she decided to wait outside another stage door for him in a different show, just to get another autograph, and he said upon seeing her, “You’re the girl with the scrapbook.” She beamed at that story, as any fangirl does, to be remembered by someone whose career you have followed and promoted with such passion.

Susan also wrote a Master’s thesis on the history of scrapple, a traditional and not-at-all kosher food of Pennsylvania, and I not only read it when I last stayed at her house, I also delighted in playing for her the scrapple song by one of my favorite performers, Robbie Fulks. I had intended to get him to autograph something for her in March when i see him perform, to honor her scrapple research. 

In 2005, Susan and I were at yet another volunteerism conference together – I had been living in Germany for four years. And we sat at a table and had a conversation in German. She was so delighted to hear me stumble through the language of her parents and to be able to have a bit of back and forth in it. It’s one of MANY moments I cherish with her. 

The blanket on my couch is the one Susan gave me as a wedding present. One of my favorite outfits is one I bought when I met up with her in London to tell her I had started a completely revising our book on virtual volunteering. And, of course, so many of the books she wrote and published are on my bookshelves. 

You have probably noticed by now that I’m talking about Susan in the past tense. Susan passed away yesterday morning, Sunday, February 25. I wanted to wait a day before posting my tribute online because I wanted to make sure that those who were closest to her would know this news by now and wouldn’t learn it by reading this blog or any social media posts I made.

Seven years ago, Susan was diagnosed with cancer. She made a remarkable recovery from that initial diagnosis and the toll the initial treatment took on her, but never quite a full one: the cancer kept showing up in other places and the treatments greatly affected her health in a myriad of ways. She handled her health challenges with remarkable grace and humor, even coming back from the brink in late 2017 – her friends, of course, dubbed her Susan Ellis: hard to kill. But ultimately, the fight became too much. I’m so glad that her final days were peaceful and surrounded by friends. 

Please check the Energize, Inc. web site for details about Susan’s funeral and burial, which will be happening quite quickly, as well as the memorial in Philadelphia next weekend. Any other plans for remembering Susan will be posted there as well. 

I made a Flickr group of photos of and “to” Susan you can see here.

SO many of us are having trouble thinking about a world without Susan. I’m so grateful to have been mentored by her – and to have been able to call her my friend. 

Update: her official obituary from her company. Also, the newly formed Susan J. Ellis Foundation will, in the coming months, “provide grants or support programs that will expand volunteer administration and support education and research activities in volunteerism” and contributions are being accepted for it. 

Susan’s obituary in the Philadelphia Inquirer. 

can volunteer engagement cultivate innovation?

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Can volunteer engagement cultivate innovation within an organization where volunteers serve? And what conditions are necessary for such innovation by volunteers to happen? This paper explores that question: Beyond Service Production: Volunteering for Social Innovation by Arjen de Wit of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Wouter Mensink of The Netherlands Institute for Social Research, The Hague, The Netherlands, Torbjörn Einarsson of Stockholm School of Economics, Sweden, and René Bekkers of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

It was first published online on October 12, 2017 and was published on paper in the Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly by ARNOVA.

Abstract:

Building on theories from different fields, we discuss the roles that volunteers can play in the generation, implementation, and diffusion of social innovations. We present a study relying on 26 interviews with volunteer managers, other professionals, volunteers, and one former volunteer in 17 (branches of) third sector organizations in eight European countries. We identify organizational factors that help and hinder volunteer contributions to social innovation… This rich, explorative study makes it a fruitful start for further research on the relationship between volunteering and social innovation.

In short, their research question was: Which organizational factors help and hinder volunteers to contribute to social innovations in third sector organizations?

You can download the paper for free.

I found the paper because I’m quoted in it. And if you are a manager of volunteers, this is one of those rare academic papers on volunteerism that is actually worth your time to read (sorry, academics, but so often, your papers aren’t what practioners need).

By social innovation, the paper’s authors mean new solutions – products, markets, services, methods, models, processes – that lead to new or improved capabilities and better use of assets and resources by a nonprofit, NGO or other volunteer hosting organization that address its mission and serve its cause, directly. I define social innovation as something that is transformative for the organization and those it serves. Certainly volunteers that introduced mission-based organizations to the Internet were social innovators. Volunteers connecting an organization to new communities and people very different from those the nonprofit usually works with can be seen as social innovators as well.

Here are “a few illustrative examples” the paper identifies as social innovations introduced to nonprofits by volunteers:

a telephone service in a nonnative language (Swedish Red Cross), a School of Civic Initiative where people are educated to make them more active in public life (Hnutí Duha, Czech Republic), first aid education for partially sighted and blind people (German Red Cross), a bicycle campaign (Greenpeace Denmark), and a shelter for illegal male immigrants (Salvation Army Netherlands).

Examples of innovations occurring on a larger scale and introducing system-level changes that the paper cites are:

the lobby for new government policies (Czech branch of the Salvation Army) and a network to connect entrepreneurs in the field of environment with investors, publish their innovative work, and promote a financing network (Fundación Biodiversidad, Spain).

The paper delivers on identifying organizational factors that help and hinder volunteer contributions to social innovation. From the paper’s conclusion:

Organizational factors that may enhance volunteer contributions to social innovations include a decentralized organizational structure, the “scaling up” of ideas, providing training and giving volunteers a sense of ownership. Factors that may hinder volunteer contributions to innovations include a lack of resources and a reluctant attitude within the organization, for example, when a new project does not fit within the organization’s strategy. By identifying and exploring these mechanisms, this article adds insights on a new perspective for third sector research and offers useful tools for volunteer managers to improve the innovative capacity of their organization.

Terrific stuff. Kudos to the authors. This paper is worth your time.

Also see:

Innovation without replication is a waste of time.

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Excerpt from a terrific blog in the Stanford Social Innovation Review by Kevin Starr, director of the Mulago Foundation and the Rainer Arnhold Fellows Program.

I hate to be the skunk at the party, but look: The most urgent challenge in the social sector is not innovation, but replication. No idea will drive big impact at scale unless organizations—a lot of them—replicate it. And there are plenty of high-impact ideas awaiting high-quality replication…

Here’s the thing, though: High-fidelity replication is hard… You must be committed to and obsessive about the details.

Here’s an example of a replicator putting in what it takes: Living Goods is a well-known social venture that fields an Avon Lady-like network of dynamic village community health promoters. These promotors sell health products (including malaria and pneumonia treatments) door-to-door, doing health education and making clinic referrals all the while. The Living Goods model went through many iterations, working through core issues like supply chain logistical systems and the right basket of goods. It turned out that the most important they learned was how to hire and train great salespeople as health promoters…

Living Goods has grown to a respectable size, with 3,538 health promotors in Uganda and Kenya. However, for the model to achieve impact at real scale, others will have to join as replicators… The Living Goods model is complicated. Its systems, talent, and overall management are world class. If you want to get the same results, you need to be serious about it. You need to invest what it takes to do it right.

The entire blog by Kevin Starr is worth your time. And when a funder asks you why you can’t “just do what they are doing at such-and-such agency”, use this blog to help show why replication has real costs – real money, real time, real resources.

Also see:

Learning From The ‘Not-So-Nice’ Volunteers

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graphic by Jayne Cravens representing volunteersI am trying to find and revive some of the most popular articles and commentaries I’ve written over the years that were hosted on other people’s web sites, many of which are now only available on archive.org, and then only if you can remember the URL of the defunct site.

In 2004, I was invited by Mary Merrill to write a column for her December Topic of the Month. My topic was:

Learning From The ‘Not-So-Nice’ Volunteers

The premise: we have a lot to learn from the “not-so-nice volunteers”, the people who are putting their time and energy into defending human rights, addressing social ills, and battling institutions who they feel are attacking their quality of life or an element of their community that they treasure. And we have a lot to learn from the people who manage such volunteers.

I’ve reposted that article on my own site.

 

Tech & communications jargon versus reality

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The Guardian, a media organization based in the UK, has a wonderful online program called the Global Professionals Network, “a space for NGOs, aid workers and development professionals to share knowledge and expertise”. They also have an occasional feature called “The Secret Aidworker,” a column written by anonymous aid workers, talking about the not-so-great parts of humanitarian work.

The most recent blog is an aid worker talking about the “dark side” of humanitarian / development communications. Like me, she trained as a journalist, and it affects both her approach and her ethics regarding public relations and marketing. I was so struck by these two paragraphs from her blog:

The international community is too focused on using gimmicks in outreach campaigns rather than considering who their audience is and what they want. I was recently asked to design an outreach campaign to educate the local community we work in about the work we do. So keeping in mind the low literacy rate of our audience and the limited access they have to online and print media, I designed a communications campaign accordingly. However, that was considered old and outdated.

For my organisation, the use of new technology such as apps and social media held priority over the local regional media, even though I explained much of these were inaccessible to the people we were trying to reach. Too often people think that if a country has access to the internet and mobile phones, every one has access. They don’t consider the cost of mobile data, the literacy rate, or if the locals would even use their devices the same way as in the US and Europe.

Oh, I SO hear this! Not just in humanitarian work, but in all communications work for nonprofits, governments and other mission-based organizations, anywhere. I hear from nonprofits wanting to explore using SnapChat that haven’t updated their web site in months.They want to host a hackathon to develop an app while their manager of volunteers is refused money for posters for a volunteer recruitment campaign. They want to know the best engagement analytics software to purchase while their online community is quiet for weeks, with no staff posting questions, no volunteers sharing information, etc. They want a crowdsourced fundraising campaign but haven’t sent thank you’s to donors this year. They want a viral online marketing campaign to promote something but balk at the idea of a staff person visiting area communities of faith and civic clubs to build personal relationships with local people, especially groups that represent minorities that are under-represented within the organization’s volunteer, client and donor base.

Anyone who knows me knows that I have long been a promoter and advocate of ICT4D. I wrote one of the first papers – back in 2001 – about handheld devices, what were then called PDAs (personal digital assistants), in health and human services, citizens’ reporting, advocacy, etc. I am a pioneer regarding virtual volunteering. I use, and advise on the use of, social media to promote a variety of information and network with others. I regularly post to TechSoup’s Public Computing, ICT4D, and Tech4Good community forum branch about apps4good – smart phone applications meant to educate people about maternal health, help women leave abusive relationships, connect people with emergency housing and more. So I certainly cannot be accused of being a Luddite. But with all that said, I also still see the value of, and know how to leverage, printed flyers, printed posters, paper newsletters, lawn signs, newspaper ads, radio ads, radio interviews, TV interviews, TV ads, onsite speaking engagements, display tables, display booths and other “old fashioned” ways of communicating.

This aid workers blog reminds me of the early days of the World Wide Web, when I would hear an executive director of a nonprofit or the director of a government program talk about how great the agency’s new web site was, but as they talked, I realized they’d never looked at it themselves, and weren’t really fully aware of what the Internet was.

wizardToo many senior staff are bedazzled by buzzwords and jargon they’ve heard from consultants, giving their employees orders to do something based only on what they think is “hip” now. I am just as frustrated by organizations that overly-focus on the latest social media fads for communications as I am by organizations that ignore all things Internet and smart phone-related.

What should you do if you face this in the work place? Use small words and lots of data with your senior staff, and stay tenacious. Remember that a list of potential expenses and budgets for time can make a case for you to do a comprehensive, realistic communications plan. And be explicit and detailed on how your communications efforts will be evaluated for effectiveness.

My other blogs that relate to this:

Firsts… or almost

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logoI didn’t invent virtual volunteering. I started involving online volunteers in 1995, and did a workshop that same year about it for what was then the Nonprofit Center of San Francisco (now Compasspoint), but I didn’t know it was called virtual volunteering, a term coined by Steve Glikbarg at what was then Impact Online (now VolunteerMatch), until more than a year later. I know, and frequently remind people, that online volunteers have been providing services to various causes since the Internet was invented, long before I got online in the 90s. But I was the first to try to identify elements of successful engagement of online volunteers, via the Virtual Volunteering Project, I think I was the first to do a workshop on the subject, even if I didn’t call it that, and I’m very proud of that.

I didn’t write the first paper on using handheld computer tech as a part of humanitarian, environmental or advocacy efforts – I wrote the second. At least I think it was second. It was published in October 2001 as a series of web pages when I worked at the UN, at a time when handheld tech was called personal digital assistants, or PDAs. People are shocked that the predecessor to the smartphone and cellphone was used to help address a variety of community, environmental and social issues before the turn of the century, that apps4good isn’t all that novel of an idea.

And I probably didn’t write the first papers on fan-based communities that come together because of a love of a particular movie, TV show, comic, actor, book or genre and, amid their socializing, also engage in volunteering. Those kinds of communities played a huge role in my learning how to communicate online with various age groups and people of very different backgrounds, which in turn greatly influenced how I worked with online volunteers. In fact, I can still see some influences of that experience in The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook. But I stopped researching them in 1999. So I was quite thrilled to recently to find this paper, “The media festival volunteer: Connecting online and on-ground fan labor,” in my research to update a page on the Virtual Volunteering wiki that tracks research that’s been done regarding virtual volunteering. It’s a 2014 paper by Robert Moses Peaslee, Jessica El-Khoury, and Ashley Liles, and uses data gathered at Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas, in September 2012. It is published on Transformative Works and Cultures, an online journal launched in 2009 that looks at various aspects of fan fiction (fan-created fiction inspired by their favorite movies, TV shows and books), comic book fandom, movie fandom, video game fandom, comic and fan conventions, and more.

It’s nice being a pioneer… though I don’t think my early contributions are much to brag about. But I do enjoy seeing things I thought were interesting back in the 90s finally getting the attention they deserve.

Also see

Early History of Nonprofits & the Internet.

Apps4Good movement is more than 15 years old

vvbooklittleThe Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook, a book decades in the making, by Susan J. Ellis and myself. Tools come and go, but certain community engagement principles never change, and our book can be used with the very latest digital engagement initiatives and “hot” new technologies meant to help people volunteer, advocate for causes they care about, connect with communities and make a difference.

Fewer Pilots, More Scale: Making Digital Development Work

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Back in September 2014, I starting whining about the lack of anything sustainable coming from most of the hackathons / hacks4good / apps4good I was seeing popping up all over in support of nonprofit organizations, government initiatives and various communities, in the USA and abroad. My whining culminated in this blog, where are the evaluations of hacksforgood / appsforgood?

I’m so pleased to see this outstanding blog (IMO) by Ann Mei Chang, Executive Director at U.S. Global Development Lab at USAID, which says, in part:

“despite the potential impact, distorted incentives encourage one-off, flashy pilots (many sourced through hackathons, contests, and PR opportunities), undermining the potential for sustainable and scalable digital solutions. In fact, the proliferation of duplicative and uncoordinated mobile health applications caused an overwhelmed Uganda Ministry of Health to call a moratorium on further efforts in 2012, to ensure a focus on interoperable and sustainable systems… (in developing countries, there is) a lack of relevant platforms and infrastructure (that) means that developers end up spending the vast majority of their time rebuilding similar components from scratch, ending up with less time and money to truly innovate. Too much time and effort is wasted on duplicative work like beneficiary registration and tracking, negotiating and integrating with mobile operators, and promotion and distribution. The result is one-off systems that are fragile, unintegrated, not designed to scale, and unsustainable.

“This cannot continue. The development community needs to invest in reusable systems and the collaboration necessary to build and use these systems. This will mean smarter solutions designed for scale and sustainability.”

Right on, Ann Mei Chang & USAID!

In addition, Ben Ramalingam’s recent Institute of Development Studies blog points out that responsible digital development must also consider the risks of unintended consequences, exaggerating existing inequities, security, and repression.

USAID helped draft the Principles for Digital Development, a set of best practices for building technology-enabled programs, starting with the user. The Principles have been endorsed by over 50 development organizations, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Sida, UNICEF, WFP, and USAID. In February, USAID launched a report based on conversations with donors, implementing partners, and development practitioners to better understand how the Principles work in real-world contexts and how we can best integrate them into our organizations.

Also see: