Tag Archives: online volunteering

UNV announces Online Volunteering Award 2015

UNLogoToday – 30 November 2015 – the United Nations Volunteers (UNV) program announced winners of the UNV Online Volunteering Award 2015, celebrating both volunteers and volunteer hosting organizations on the UN’s Online Volunteering Service, and launched a global voting campaign for the public’s favorite, to be announced on December 5.

Profiles of the five organizations chosen for the award, and their online volunteers, are here (and this is where you vote as well). The organizations are Association des Agriculteurs Professionels du Cameroun (AGRIPO), Fundación de Comunidades Vulnerables de Colombia (FUNCOVULC), Hunger Reduction International, Seeds Performing Arts Theatre Group in Papua New Guinea, and a digital media campaign run by UN Women. Each effort also has a tag regarding which sustainable development goals it supports.

If you know me, then you know which one of the winners immediately jumped out at me and what I voted for: Seeds Performing Arts Theatre Group in Papua New Guinea. The group uses live theatre performance to raise awareness on issues affecting the local rural population, including violence against women, and to inspire and implement social change. Seeds teamed up with a group of online volunteers via the UN’s Online Volunteering service to develop a screenplay for a video about the specific gender-based violence associated with witch hunting. The traditional belief in sorcery is used to justify violence against women in Papua New Guinea, and inhumane treatment of innocent women accused of sorcery is common in rural parts of the island as sorcery is thought to account for unexplained deaths or misfortunes in a family or village.

After voting, you are encouraged to copy the following message to your profile on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn or whatever social media channel you use:

Just voted for my favourite Online #VolunteeringAward winner. You can, too! https://goo.gl/CTGVfS #ActionCounts #GlobalGoals” and encourage others to recognize the true value and worth of online volunteers!

In 2014, according to UNV, more than 11,000 online volunteers undertook more than 17,000 online volunteering assignments through the service, and 60 percent of these online volunteers come from developing countries. I had the pleasure of directing the service at UNV for four years, from February 2001 to February 2014, successfully moving the platform from NetAid to UNV entirely, engaging in various activities that made the service the first link when searching the term online volunteering on Google (I also made it #1 when searching the term virtual volunteering, but that’s no longer true), vastly increasing the number of online opportunities available for organizations on the platform and authoring materials to support organizations engaging online volunteers that are still used by UNV. I still promote the site to any organizations working in or for regions in the developing world as the best way to recruit online volunteers.

Also see:

The Virtual Volunteering Wiki

The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook

My research on Theater as a Tool for Development/Theatre as a Tool for Development

Supervising online volunteers in court-ordered settings

graphic by Jayne Cravens representing volunteersA comment was submitted on one of the most popular blogs I’ve ever written, What online community service is and is not. That blog called out a company that is selling what it calls online community service hours, but which is, in fact, a ruse: customers pay a fee and receive access to videos, which they are supposed to watch, and in return for claiming to watch them, the company gives the “volunteers” a letter from a nonprofit saying they performed online community service. As someone that has been promoting virtual volunteering since the 1990s – and quality standards in all kinds of volunteer engagement – it continues to have me outraged.

I no longer approve comments on that blog, which has more than two dozen, because, for the last three years, most of the comments I get about this blog are from trolls affiliated with the company, ranting about how I hate hard-working people that don’t have time to do traditional onsite service (a rant that can come only from someone who has not actually read the blog) or name-calling such as this:

fanmail

Yes, really. Welcome to my world.

But a recent comment from Mark Waterson wasn’t either of those. I didn’t want his comment, and my response, to get buried in the sea of comments on that blog, so the blog entry you are reading now is devoted to this comment.

Mark says in his blog comment:

“This article points out online community service options that are legitimate, but really misses the point of why those other organizations exist. If you are doing community service for court, you need an official signed letter of someone in the nonprofit organization who “supervised” you saying you have completed X hours of community service. Your alternatives, while more legitimate, do not offer this, even at a price, and so no one doing court ordered community service can even consider your suggestions as possible alternatives for their purposes.”

Mark is incorrect, however, on this issue. Many of the online volunteering options I recommend on this page DO provide an official signed letter by the nonprofit organization who was assisted by the volunteer, stating how many hours the person gave as an online volunteer. And I have been one of those nonprofit representatives that wrote and signed such a letter for someone doing court-ordered community service through virtual volunteering. As I state on many of my pages for volunteers, a person needs to ask the nonprofit he or she wants to help – whether that nonprofit is down the street or across the country – BEFORE volunteering if staff would be willing to write and sign such a letter. Indeed, many will say no – even for onsite, face-to-face volunteers – but you will find some that will say yes if you keep looking, as I suggest on my pages.

As volunteerism expert Susan Ellis frequently points out, there are very few onsite, traditional volunteering activities where a volunteer is supervised the entire time he or she is performing service. Instead, the volunteers is trained, then given a desk, or a work space and materials, or a phone, or a garbage bag and some gloves, and then they do MOST of their volunteering largely unsupervised. As someone who has been fooled more than a few times by a volunteer sitting at a desk, looking at a computer screen for hours, and pretending to work – and after a day or two, I find out nothing is getting done – I’ve realized that volunteer supervision is much more than eyes-on-the-volunteer, or sign-in sheets at the door.

vvbooklittleAs Susan and I discuss in The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook, there are many ways to supervise online volunteers, to ensure the work is getting done, that the quality of the work is up-to-snuff, and that the volunteer is getting the support he or she needs, such as regular Skype calls, regular emails back and forth, shared work spaces, regular reviews of work to date, etc. In taking those steps, you are going to know very quickly if you are talking to the person actually doing the work.

Could someone fake online volunteering service? Sure, just as people can fake onsite service: hand the volunteer the plastic bag and the gloves, send them down the road to pick up trash, and when they are out-of-sight, a friend brings them a full bag of trash to return to you. Ta da! Or put three volunteers at your information booth, walk away for five hours, and return, not knowing that one of the volunteers paid the others to lie about her time at the table.

Let’s imagine a volunteering scenario: a father gets a DUI and has to do a certain number of hours of community service. He finds a nonprofit that needs 400 photos on Flickr that each need to be tagged with a unique set of keywords, and because each set of keywords is different, it has to be done manually. He signs up to do the work, is accepted to do the work, but his son actually does the work. But here’s the thing: he could also do that as an onsite volunteer: he could go onsite, sit at a desk, and play Tetris until someone passes by, then switch to the Flickr screen and pretend to work until they are gone; meanwhile, his son back at home is actually doing all the work. Here’s a similar scenario: a mom gets assigned court-ordered community service and she signs up to help a nonprofit translate brochures and speeches into Spanish from English. She comes into the nonprofit, sits at a desk, but she plays Scrabble whilst her daughter back home does all the translating.

I think that any volunteer manager of quality would sniff out these scams quickly, through their discussions with the volunteer, review of work, etc. And that would be true of onsite or online volunteers.  TMZ implied that Lindsay Lohan faked her virtual volunteering to fulfill court-ordered community service (be sure to scroll down to the comments – yes, I commented) – it would have been so easy for the nonprofit to know if she did the work or not, through basic volunteer management 101 principles.

Does the tiny possibility that a volunteer can fake work done on a computer mean volunteers fulfilling online community service shouldn’t be allowed to do any online work even if it’s supposed to be done onsite at the organization, rather than via their own computer? No more volunteer web site designers, database data inputters, app designers, translators, editors, podcast producers, photo taggers, and on and on, if they are assigned service by the courts? Of course not. Whether this kind of work is being done onsite or online from the volunteers’ home or a nearby library, the likelihood that a volunteer is pretending to do the work while it’s actually a relative or roommate is so tiny, and so easy to sniff out. Fear of what might happen, in this case, isn’t at all justification of not allowing people assigned court-ordered community service to engage in virtual volunteering.

The biggest challenge to court-ordered folks finding virtual volunteering isn’t fear that they will fake their service by having someone else do it; rather, it’s finding virtual volunteering at all. And many nonprofits refuse to work with court-ordered community service folks period, onsite or online. They just don’t love ’em like I love ’em.

Even though I disagree with Mark, I thank him for writing – I’ve been wanting to expand on this issue for a while now.

Also see:

July 6, 2016 update: the web site of the company Community Service Help went away sometime in January 2016, and all posts to its Facebook page are now GONE. More info at this July 2016 blog: Selling community service leads to arrest, conviction

What online community service is – and is not – the very first blog I wrote exposing this company, back in January 2011, that resulted in the founder of the company calling me at home to beg me to take the blog down.

Haters gonna hate, the latest update on Community Service Help and other similar, unethical companies

Community Service Help Cons Another Person, a first-person account by someone who paid for online community service and had it rejected by the court.

Update on a virtual volunteering scam, from November 2012.

Courts being fooled by online community service scams

Online community service company tries to seem legit.

Online volunteer scam goes global

I’m in Poland & Spain/Catalunya in mid-November

I’ll be flying to Warsaw, Poland, arriving November 12, to present workshops on November 13th and 14th regarding virtual volunteering and meet with various NGOs from Eastern Europe, including representatives from Ukraine (HURRAH!!), for e-wolontariat.pl, a Polish-based NGO that is at the forefront of promoting digital volunteering in Europe. Participants will include finalists of the Discover e-volunteering competition – NGO representatives who are finalists to win a grant for the implementation of their ideas for e-volunteering projects.

This came about for two reasons: because of the publication of The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook, and per my role in my research for the ICT4EMPL Future Work project undertaken by the Information Society Unit of the Institute for Prospective Technological Studies at the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (I explored Internet-mediated Volunteering in the EU:  Its history, prevalence, and approaches and how it relates to employability and social inclusion).

For information about either the Discover e-volunteering competitione-wolontariat.pl, or the events I will be attending, please contact the event organizers through the e-wolontariat.pl web site.

I’ll also be in Barcelona, Catalunya/Spain, all day on November 17, 18 and 19, for a personal visit, but would be happy to meet with any NGO, university or government representative who might like to have lunch or coffee and a chat about anything related to volunteering, NGOs, and/or tech4good. Please contact me at jc @ coyotecommunications.com if you would like to meet whilst I’m in Catalunya/Spain.

Now available: The LAST Virtual Volunteering Guidebook!

vvbooklittleThe Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook is now available for purchase as a paperback and an ebook, published by Energize, Inc

The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook reflects all that has changed — and remained the same — since the first book was published online more than 10 years ago. Again co-authored with Susan Ellis and published by Energize, Inc.The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook still includes the basics for getting started with involving and supporting volunteers online, but it goes much farther, offering detailed information to help organizations that are already engaged in virtual volunteering with improving and expanding their programs. It also offers more international perspectives. The first book was focused on people who had never heard of virtual volunteering; this revised book still serves as the most comprehensive introduction to the subject available, but provides much more in-depth information and guidance for organizations already engaging online volunteers, who want to improve or expand their virtual volunteering activities.

New and advanced information includes:

  • More detailed advice on virtual volunteering assignment, including one-time “Byte-Sized” tasks (micro-volunteering), longer-term, higher-responsibilities and virtual team assignments.
  • A thorough look at various practices for screening and matching volunteers to assignments, with an eye to getting the most capable volunteers into your volunteering ranks and preventing incomplete assignments or burdensome management tasks
  • How to make online volunteer roles accessible and diverse
  • More details about how to work successfully with online volunteers, so that they are successful, your organization benefits and volunteer managers aren’t overwhelmed
  • Balancing safety with program goals
  • Respecting privacy of both the organization and online volunteers themselves
  • Online mentoring
  • Blogging by, for and about volunteers
  • Online activism
  • Spontaneous online volunteers
  • Live online events with volunteers
  • The future of virtual volunteering and how to start planning for oncoming trends

There’s also a new chapter just for online volunteers themselves, which organizations can also use in creating their own materials for online volunteers.

I’ve worked hard over the years to make this book worth the purchase price, and to be a resource you can turn to any time for support in your engagement with volunteers online.

In conjunction with the revised guidebook is the Virtual Volunteering Wiki, a free online resource and collaborative space for sharing resources regarding virtual volunteering. We are seeking a partner university or college that could recruit an intern from among students studying in its post-graduate program to keep this wiki updated.

If you read the book, I would so appreciate it if you could write and post a review of it on the Amazon and Barnes and Noble web sites (you can write the same review on both sites).

A new “cyber” volunteering platform for small NGOs

The Cibervoluntarios Foundation is looking “to develop a cybervolunteering platform, made for little organizations worldwide.” They have a fundraising campaign at GlobalGiving to raise money for the platform, which includes a link to an 11-page document that provides a bit more information. Neither volunteers nor host organizations would be charged to use the platform.

I’ve tweeted the organization to find out how this proposed platform will be different from the United Nations’ existing Online Volunteering service, the world’s largest virtual volunteering platform for NGOs to recruit online volunteers. They tweeted back that cyber volunteering is different than online volunteering – but didn’t say how. I don’t yet see a difference. Cyber volunteering, in English, has been used since the 1990s as another word for virtual volunteering. 

Not that I don’t think  there’s room for new approaches to online volunteering – but given the over-abundance of platforms allowing organizations to recruit traditional volunteers, and how that has made it harder to recruit volunteers, not easier, I would hate to see the same thing happen with virtual volunteering.

According to the web site, “Cibervoluntarios” are:

agentes de cambio social que contribuyen, de forma desinteresada, a fomentar el uso y conocimiento de herramientas tecnológicas entre la población con menores oportunidades de acceso y/o formación… los Cibervoluntarios usan la tecnología desde una perspectiva social y contribuyen a eliminar brechas sociales mediante la sensibilización, información y formación de forma presencial, online y a medida para satisfacer las necesidades de cada persona o colectivo social con el que trabajamos. Los cibervoluntarios dan conocer las posibilidades que ofrece el uso de las Nuevas Tecnologías de una forma útil, sencilla, bien a través de la red, bien en persona, de tú a tú, mediante cursos, charlas, conferencias, talleres, eventos, seminarios, entre otros.

My translation:

social change agents who contribute selflessly to promote the use of technological tools and knowledge among people with fewer opportunities to access and / or training… Cibervoluntarios use technology from a social perspective and help eliminate social gaps through advocacy, information and training in person, online and customized to meet the needs of each person or social group with which we work. The Cybervolunteer knows the possibilities offered by the use of new technologies in a useful, simple, either through the network, either in person, face to face, through courses, lectures, conferences, workshops, events, seminars, among others.

So, perhaps for this organization, cibervoluntarios or cyber volunteers are what are called, in English, circuit riders or ICT volunteers – volunteers that help both individuals as well as staff at nonprofits regarding using computer and Internet-related tools, and such volunteers can be both onsite and online. Examples of this would include all volunteers that help teach people computer skills at initiatives like Austin FreeNet (Austin, Texas), FreeGeek (Portland, Oregon), EmpowerUp (Southwest Washington state, Vancouver area), and World Computer Exchange – and even PeaceCorps and VSO. HandsOn also has several IT volunteer tech initiatives, which they brand as skilled-based volunteer engagement:

HandsOn Tech Pittsburgh, Pennsylvannia. Follow on Twitter at @HandsOnTechPGH,
HandsOn Tech Atlanta, Georgia. Follow on Twitter at @HandsOnTechATL
HandsOn Tech Boston, Massachusetts. Follow on Twitter at @HandsOnTechBOS
HandsOn Tech Chicago, Illinois. Follow on Twitter at @HandsOnTechChi
HandsOn Tech New York City, New York. Follow on Twitter at @NYCHandsOnTech
HandsOn Tech Detroit, Michigan. Follow on Twitter at @HandsOnTechDET

One of the first such ICT volunteering initiatives was through what was called CompuMentor, now TechSoup (that part of TechSoup’s programming has moved entirely online, via the TechSoup forum, and the nonprofit still publishes Working with Technical Volunteers: A Manual for NPOs free online). The United Nations Information Technology Service (UNITeS) tried to track all of these various ICT volunteering initiatives globally once upon a time – UNITeS both supported volunteers applying ICTs for development (ICT4D) and promoted volunteerism as a fundamental element of successful ICT4D initiatives. UNITeS was launched in 2000 by then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, and was hosted by the United Nations Volunteers programme.

If the Cibervoluntarios organization is looking to develop an online matching service for IT volunteers or circuit riders, where volunteers would provide service onsite and or online to individuals and nonprofits, it might work – though I’d prefer to see this type of volunteering incorporated into the plethora of volunteer matching sites worldwide, or even just in Europe – or even just in Spain! I hope they will look over the UNITeS web site and TechSoup manual for tech volunteers, and provide lots of similar resources for both IT volunteers and the nonprofits that need them. And the organization is welcomed to translate and adapt my resources related to this subject for their web site, as long as I get credit somewhere:

  • Finding a Computer/Network Consultant (volunteer or paid)
    What can mission-based organizations do to recruit the “right” consultant for “tech” related issues, one that will not make them feel out-of-the-loop or out-of-control when it comes to tech-related discussions?
  • Short-term Assignments for Tech Volunteers
    A list of short-term projects for “tech” volunteers — assignments that might takes days, weeks or just a couple of months to complete.
  • One(-ish) Day “Tech” Activities for Volunteers
    This page provides advice on how to put together a one-day event, or just-a-few-days-of activity, for a group of tech volunteers onsite, working together, for a nonprofit, non-governmental organization (NGO), community-focused government program, school or other mission-based organization – or association of such.

Virtual Student Foreign Service & eInternship program

The USA State Department has launched the Virtual Student Foreign Service (VSFS) program. On the site, employees and contractors post “challenges” (online tasks that need to be done), and student volunteer are invited to complete any they want to. Most tasks are designed for students to complete in two minutes to two hours. No clearance is required to post “challenges,” according to the website. Anyone with a State.gov or USAID.gov email address can sign up and post any short “challenge” that does not require a security clearance or any special permissions to complete. Any student with a .edu email address can sign up to volunteer on the microtasks.

The microvolunteering initiative grew out of VSFS’s eInternship program — administered by the Bureau of Information Resource Management’s Office of eDiplomacy — which selects qualified undergraduate, graduate, and post-graduate students to partner with U.S. diplomatic posts overseas while the students work remotely on digital-based diplomacy projects.

While any U.S. student can volunteer to do short tasks through the micro volunteering platform, students must go through an application process to be selected for an eInternship. eInterns complete longer projects as part of their nine-month program. Applications for the 2013-2014 school year eInternships opened July 2 on USAJobs.gov, and VSFS will continue to accept submissions through July 20. Prospective applicants indicate projects they’re interested in and the selected eInterns complete projects assigned by Foreign Service Officers. Selected students intern online for 5 to 10 hours per week through the fall and spring semesters. These students complete all assignments from their college or university campuses; eInterns don’t travel abroad or to the State Department.

Nice to see the State Department providing this opportunity – as the United Nations has been providing this opportunity for more than a decade via its online volunteering service!