Tag Archives: tech4good

free/discounted apps/tech tools that every nonprofit should know about

images meant to look like cave drawings, one of a woman using a smartphone and one at a desktop computer.

I use to regularly write about this subject – about what I thought were the best free/discounted apps/tech tools that most nonprofits should know about, especially the small ones, the ones under 20 people who barely had tech budgets. But honestly, I can barely keep up with things, plus, there’s such a need for highly-specialized software by specific type of nonprofits. Just take a gander into the various software used by nonprofits that run food banks, or what’s used by animal shelters, or what’s used by museums, and you will see what I mean.

But there was a recent thread on the nonprofit subreddit and I found myself wanting to join in. Here is how I answer the question:

  • Google Drive (word processing, spread sheets, presentations, forms, calendar, photos, shared work features, etc.)
  • Gmail, including Gmail chat
  • LibreOffice (word processing, spread sheets, presentations – great alternative to Microsoft, and works with Microsoft tools)
  • Cyberduck – for FTP
  • Signal, WhatsApp and Telegram.
  • VolunteerMatch for volunteer recruitment
  • Canva
  • Grammarly
  • WordPress for blogs and websites (many web hosts provide free templates as well)

I’ll also give a shoutout to two tools that have gone away: YahooGroups, which was an AMAZING online collaboration tool that I miss beyond measure, and BlueGriffon, an amazing HTML editor that stopped being updated in 2019 and no longer works on my laptop. I have never found the equal of these wonderful tools.

Have a look at the thread on the nonprofit subreddit and this related thread on TechSoup for more. And add your own on those conversations and in the comments below! But it’s helpful if you don’t just list the software: say what kind of nonprofit uses it, what your role is, the size of your staff (including volunteers), etc.

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

Our Lady of the Manifest: the icon for a very particular community of online volunteers

When most people think of the Afghan evacuation, they think of August of 2021, when crowds surged around Kabul’s airport, desperate and doomed Afghans clung to the sides of planes taking off, and a suicide bomber murdered scores of Afghans and 11 U.S. Marines, one soldier, and one Navy Corpsman. And they think the evacuation is over. But the evacuation of Afghans never ended. And neither has the volunteering by people all over the world trying to get vulnerable people out.

Jeff Phaneuf of No One Left Behind, the largest volunteer organization working to assist Afghans who served the USA as interpreters, has noted that when the organization surveyed its 16,000 contacts in August 2022, it found 180 clear instances of Afghans killed while waiting on a visa, with a 80 further possible murders they’re looking into. No One Left Behind estimates that there are close to 200,000 people still in Afghanistan eligible for visas from the USA set aside for Afghans and their family members who are at risk because of work they did for the USA. That doesn’t count the women’s rights activists other groups are working on. Those Afghans who do make it out often exist in an indeterminate legal space because of the inaction of governments to give them permanent status. Many of the people in Afghanistan that volunteers abroad are trying to help are literally starving: in August 2022, when No One Left Behind asked Afghans applying to leave about the conditions they lived under, only 5.5% reported being able to feed their families.

a doll with only its white face is visible amid its cover of blue and white fabric, like a chador. It holds a large, fake sunflower. It is hung on an otherwise bare, white wall.

This Time article profiles the work of people, most of them volunteers, who are still in contact with Afghans in Afghanistan and are continuing to try to get people, especially women, out of Afghanistan and to a safe country with official asylum status, and focuses on their macabre mascot, Our Lady of the Manifest, “She’s who we pray to, to get people on flights” – and how she’s helping volunteers facing mounting fatigue, frustration, depression and stress as they feel a growing helplessness to assist Afghans.

The article notes what everyone faces in trying to get at-risk Afghans out of Afghanistan:

You can get every necessary document in order, push your case through the sluggish and unresponsive refugee system, get every name of the family you’re working with on a flight manifest, and somewhere between that Afghan family’s home and the airport they can run into the “18-year-old with a gun” problem—a young Afghan running a Taliban checkpoint who doesn’t have much respect for international agreements or paperwork and who might be in a bad mood, or struck by how a woman is dressed, or acting, or who just doesn’t like the idea of a family who wants to flee the country. Everything can fall apart in a moment.

As the author of the article notes, “Sometimes, Our Lady feels a little less like an inside joke with these volunteers trying to get Afghans out, and more like a companion on a painful road.”

These volunteers work mostly in isolation. Even with online communities and interacting with others remotely, volunteers can feel very unsupported and alone, especially when friends and family are more than ready to move on and stop talking about this. I know, because I am such volunteer: I wrote about my efforts two years ago as a part of Digital Dunkirk: online volunteers scrambling to help endangered Afghans get visas & out of Afghanistan and the mental and emotional toll I could see it taking on others and myself. There’s no organization supporting me or guiding me in this role – myself and other volunteers are all pretty much making it up as we go along, because the guidelines and information about getting people out of Afghanistan and into an asylum program are ever changing. Most of us, including myself, have no training in interacting with people witnessing and experiencing violence, who have no safe haven from those acts – but we are interacting with Afghans, via WhatsApp, Telegram and Signal – that live in this daily reality and want our help. In addition, many of these volunteers, myself including, know that there are people – former colleagues, real people, with names and stories, who are in the photos we have of our time there – who qualify, on paper, to come to the USA, but are still languishing in a country run by terrorists 18 months later. As Laura Deitz of Task Force Nyx notes in the article, “I probably can’t underscore the toll that this mentally and emotionally takes on anyone who’s trying to help.”

And as I wrote in my earlier blog about this volunteering:

For the online volunteers trying to help, no certificate, no statistic on the monetary value of the time they contributed, no t-shirt, is going to serve as appropriate recognition for what they’ve done. There’s just one way we’re going to feel good about our virtual volunteering: getting people out of Afghanistan.

And I shall say it again, as I did two years ago:

Of course, the stress and frustration of online volunteers in this effort is nothing compared to the Afghans we’re trying to help. In addition to being terrified of the knock at the door that means the Taliban is there, to search the home, to take away boys and young men to fight, to take away girls for rape (there’s no such thing as “child marriage” – please stop saying that), to find files and data that could prove someone in the family worked with the USA, the UK, Australia, or some European country, Afghans are also running out of money and food.

I confess to having a very macabre sense of humor at times, and to gravitating to other humanitarian workers as colleagues and friends who also have such. It’s how I can face the absolute unnecessary absurdity of humanitarian work, whether internationally or just trying to help in my own community. This article provides a good profile of people who I think are like me – we don’t mean to offend. We’re just trying to stay sane.

I may print out a photo of Our Lady of the Manifest and put it on my wall.

If you have read this blog and are in the USA, I beg you to please write your US Congressional representative and both of your US Senators, as well as to the President of the USA, and ask them to please fulfill our commitment to our allies in Afghanistan, and to please put in the staffing and systems necessary to evacuate our allies and their families from Afgahnistan. They believed us – believe me – when we said they could and should pursue their education and careers, and they did so with the belief that we woud have their backs. We owe them this. And if you are in a country that worked in Afghanistan, whether militarily or in humanitarian interventions – Australia, the UK, Spain, Germany, Turkey, Japan, India, where ever – please do the same in your country regarding contacting your federally-elected officials.

The problem with volunteer matching platforms isn’t a software issue

I get a version of this message regularly from an IT or corporate person:

With today’s technology, it seems to me that it should be easier for both volunteers and nonprofits to find appropriate matches online.  

An illustraiton that is drawn like cave paintings - one image is of a figure holding a smartphone, the other is of a person at a computer.

Sigh. The problem is not DATA. It’s not a data issue. It’s not a tech issue. It’s not a software issue. The issue is that the vast majority of nonprofits, and staff charged with recruiting and involving volunteers, have no training in how to do so, and they start with volunteer recruitment when, in fact, that’s the LAST step.

Nonprofits, NGOs, community groups and other initiatives that want to involve volunteers – or that do currently – need to have training in:

  • How to create appropriate tasks and roles for volunteers.
  • How to create a variety of tasks and roles (short-term, long-term, for highly skilled, for low-skilled, for high responsibility roles, for micro/episodic volunteering, etc.)
  • How to create accessible tasks and roles (that welcome refugees, that welcome people with disabilities, etc.)
  • What screening is required for different roles in order for volunteering to be safe and in order for appropriate volunteers to be screened in and inappropriate volunteers to be screened out.
  • What support volunteers need in their roles.


That’s all of the many things that are needed BEFORE RECRUITMENT HAPPENS. And such training is getting harder and harder to find, instead of easier. And that doesn’t even get into all the other training that’s needed, like how to evaluate and report the effectiveness of volunteer engagement. Or other things that are needed, like policies and procedures, particularly around safety, and software to track volunteers time and impact, to schedule volunteers, etc. – most nonprofits can’t afford such (in fact, they can’t even afford the time to explore such).

Why is all that lacking? Because there’s no funding for it. Corporations and foundations refuse to fund “overhead”. That means they won’t fund training, they won’t fund the purchase of books or subscriptions to sites like Engage.

I could go on and on. And I do. And I have, many times, as the “also see” links below show. And I’ll keep doing it until funders, particularly, techie companies, “get it” – and are ready to pony up the funds needed to increase the number of people engaged in volunteering and to improve the engagement of volunteers.

Also see:

Should you leave Twitter & Facebook for the fediverse?

It’s a mouthful, but bear with me:

The non-profit, distributed, community-oriented fediverse might be something you need to check out and use, for your personal and professional activities – and maybe the nonprofits you work for.

More and more users are leaving Facebook and Twitter to join such communities because they are uncomfortable with the corporate policies and the owners of the companies. Some nonprofits feel that they have an ethical duty to NOT be associated with such.

Most folks are staying on Facebook and Twitter, but creating profiles on other platforms, including the fediverse, just in case they decide to change their social media patronage altogether.

The fediverse is similar to social media networks like Facebook or Twitter, but it’s not controlled by any one corporation. To you, the user, it will feel like any social media channel, but how it is set up and organized in the background is very different from for-profit platforms.

The fediverse is a network of social media servers that share one another’s content. If I set up my account on one server and you set up your account on another server, we can still see and repost each other’s content because the servers are part of a “federation.” To the user, it feels just like, say, Facebook – you see all the content of those you follow – you will have no idea they are signed up via a different server than you unless you really look for it.

The only challenge you will probably ever face as a user on a fediverse is when you sign in – you have to remember the address of your server. I do this the same way I track my passwords. But, again, otherwise, a fediverse feels just like any other social network.

The most famous example of a fediverse is Mastodon, which is a lot like Twitter. When you join Mastodon, you have to join via one of its servers. Most people join via the “social” server – it’s the first one you see when you go to the site to create an account. Each Mastodon server has its own policies and administrators. If you do not like a change in policies on the server you have joined, you can leave one for another without losing followers. Most servers follow the Mastodon Covenant, which requires a basic level of administrative service as well as active moderation against various forms of hate speech. But, honestly, as a user, you probably won’t ever have to deal with ANY of this.

An added bonus: “Mastodon’s robust REST APIs are based on ActivityPub, a W3C standard”. That means Mastodon has a commitment to accessibility!

This article in InfoWorld by Andrew C. Oliver offers the best argument I’ve seen for creating a Mastodon account and for thinking very seriously about the consequences of supporting Facebook, Twitter and Instagram with your content.

As for me: I am on Mastodon and am using it more and more. I still have an account I use for professional reasons on Twitter, a Facebook professional and a personal page, and a mostly-personal Instagram account. But I like having alternatives – especially Mastodon and Reddit (and I’m getting more and more benefits from Reddit – including lots of traffic for my blog and two consulting jobs). I haven’t deleted my personal Twitter account but I use it primarily to encourage people to follow me elsewhere (difficult to do, since the Twitter algorithms now seek out such content specifically to downgrade it and keep it from being viewed by most followers).

For the nonprofits I work for, including TechSoup: I do have profiles for them on Reddit, and was able to reclaim TechSoup’s Reddit group, and posting there has resulted in some traffic here on the TechSoup community. But I still haven’t put any of them on Mastodon – mostly because I know that, in the case of one of the nonprofits I work with, none of their clients or donors are on it. But that could change… and I need to be ready.

What about you and the nonprofits you help/work for? Are they exploring other social media platforms with an eye to not over-relying solely on just one channel? Remember: no social media platform is forever. Eventually, the one you love most will go the way of AOL communities, MySpace, Friendster…

Also see:

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

For detailed information about leveraging online tools to support and involve volunteers, whether they provide their service onsite at your organization, onsite elsewhere, or online, get yourself a copy of The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook. Online platforms and social media channels come and go, but the recommendations here are timeless. You will not find a more detailed guide anywhere on this subject than than The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook. It’s available both as a traditional print publication and as a digital book.

If you have benefited from any of my 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.

An App for Good Being Derailed by An Ugly Rumor

A woman is hidden by the target she is holding up in front of her face.

It’s the latest example of a troubling pattern regarding social media apps, especially one designed to do good: a phone-based app starts to become widely popular, especially with young people, but then becomes beset by rumors – all unfounded – that it’s a front for sex trafficking.

It happened in May 2016 to the social app Down To Lunch, in 2018 to IRL, a social app that helps users plan in-person meetups and, in 2021, to WalkSafe, an app designed to help women gauge the safety of neighborhoods. And now it’s happening to the Gas app, a tool that lets high schoolers send praise to one another.

As this article in the Washington Post points out:

Gas has never been linked to any form of human trafficking, and the app’s very structure makes it impossible, experts say. The app has limited features, doesn’t track users’ locations and can’t be used to message someone. It’s a basic polling platform that allows users to vote anonymously on preset compliments to send to mutual connections.

The false information that the app is somehow tricking children into being trafficked has ricocheted across the internet. Teenagers have posted videos on TikTok and Snapchat saying the app trafficks minors. Parents have warned other parents. On Oct. 31, the Piedmont, Oklahoma, police department issued a statement warning parents about the app and encouraging them to check their kids’ phones and the post received hundreds of shares on Facebook. The police ultimately issued a tepid retraction. The Oktaha Public School system in Oklahoma posted an announcement on its Facebook page on Thursday claiming the Gas app tricks students into giving away their locations. Local media also latched onto the hoax and shared it as the truth.

That a police department, a school district and a TV station shared such an obvious lie is outrageous. I wouldn’t be surprised if some nonprofits have as well.

How sad that this Tech4Good tool, one designed to encourage civility and positivity, is under attack by people spreading lies online.

Related resources:

Myths about sex trafficking abound in the USA.

Examples of Folklore, Rumors (or Rumours), Urban Myths & Organized Misinformation Campaigns Interfering with Development & Aid/Relief Efforts & Elections. (note there are several examples of mobs who have murdered strangers visiting their towns under the mistaken belief that such were there to abduct children for organ harvesting)

You have an obligation to be truthful online.

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 marketable IT skills should be taught mobile-only users?

Someone online asked the following – they were asking about people in a particular developing country:

If you had to teach an IT skill (IT used in the very broad sense and including social media management, online chat support, microblogging) to a group of people whose only exposure to tech is their cellphones and social media platforms, in 16 half-day sessions, what would you pick? These should be skills that are in demand by employers and can give them a foot-in to work on platforms like Fiverr and Udemy.

I found the question interesting because, when it comes to online volunteering, finding roles where you use ONLY a smartphone are few and far between. Similary, I’ve never seen a paid job where all you need is a smart phone (but LOTS of scams implying there are such).

My answer was very different than everyone else’s. Here are the suggestions I made:

I would make sure they understood:

  • the basics of cutting and pasting, editing,
  • spell check with the free version of Grammarly, when something is online/in the cloud and when something is downloaded,
  • when something SHOULD be in the cloud versus when something is downloaded,
  • using a VPN,
  • keeping information safe online,
  • knowing what of your information should be private and what’s okay to be public,
  • how to protect privacy online and stay safe online and detect scams,
  • the basics of netiquette and
  • how to build trust online.

I would do a workshop on what an effective online video interactive meeting looks like versus an online panel or online presentation. I would show how YouTube, Vimeo and Facebook video work – how to post, how to “like” a video, how to set privacy settings for videos, how to moderate comments, and if possible on a phone (I’m not sure if it is), how to edit such. I would emphasize that online tools are fluid – what we use now might not be what we use in 10 years, and that’s okay, because what we learn and how we work now will just transfer over to whatever comes along.

What’s interesting is that the person didn’t really seem to like the answer. She found them too “basic.” My rebuttal, which I didn’t post on her original question, but will here:

The aforementioned skills are what I look for when hiring someone, and I find them severely lacking among both applicants and co-workers – especially co-workers under 35. Whether the role is social media management, web site design, database management or online counseling, all of the aforementioned skills are fundamental to an employee, consultant or volunteer’s success in that role – and when any of these skills are lacking, the work suffers and it reflects poorly not only on the person but the entire organization.

Basic or not, these are the essential skills 21st-century workers need to master, no matter where they are in the world. And way too many of them are falling short. When an applicant has these skills, they get hired and they FLOURISH, no matter what tech changes come along.

And for those in the USA: Happy Labor Day!

Also see:

Virtual Volunteering & Employability

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

It’s time for a new assessment of virtual volunteering in Europe (& elsewhere) – who will do it?

Back in 2012 and 2013, I was one of many researchers in the ICT4EMPL Future Work project, focused on the countries of the European Union and funded by the European Commission. The overall project aimed to inform policy regarding “new forms of work” and pathways to employability that involved online technologies. For this project, I researched and mapped the prevalence of virtual volunteering in Europe and explored how virtual volunteering could support people’s employabilityHere my complete final paper. And here is the Wiki I created for the project.

It is time for a new effort to research and map the prevalence of virtual volunteering in Europe. Because now, more than 10 years later, I’m sure the conclusions I found about virtual volunteering in Europe have changed, and it would be great to see what’s the same, what’s evolved, what’s reversed and what new insights have emerged – and see how this compares with past research.

Some of those conclusions from 10 years ago about virtual volunteering in Europe:

  • Organizations using the Internet to support volunteers, or that had roles and tasks for online volunteers, usually never used the term virtual volunteering. For instance, Germany hosted the FIFA World Cup in 2006 and recruited, trained and supported hundreds of volunteers all across Germany to help with the event; no doubt the Internet played an important role in the screening, training and support for volunteers, however, I could find no reference to activities related to Internet-mediated volunteering for the World Cup (and they also never responded to my emails).
  • Services where charities could recruit traditional volunteers might have talked about virtual volunteering 10 years ago, yet often did not allow for searches of just online roles and tasks opportunities on their platforms.
  • Online volunteering schemes come and go; for instance, while Samaritans was profiled for its involvement of online volunteers in the 1990s, as of the time of this paper’s writing, the web site did not note this past involvement, and a page on the site said that such an online program was “coming in the future.” Virtual volunteering activities were cited at a dozen European organizations in the paper – are they still happening?
  • 10 years ago, there was no organization tracking the practice in Europe – or in any country outside of Europe, for that matter. Has that changed?
  • The research 10 years ago found at least 60 specific examples of organizations in the EU involving online volunteers, or involving online volunteers in the EU. The number of online volunteering opportunities, using a search of the services, was more than 1000, in total. And the research noted that Wikipedia already had contributors from every European country at that time. Excluding Wikipedia, a conclusion can be drawn from the research cited in this paper that there are at least a few thousand online volunteering opportunities available from organisations in Europe.
  • Spain was, by far, the country with the most virtual volunteering roles and tasks for volunteers, across a few hundred NGOs, and had a deeper history regarding digital volunteering than any other European country, by far. The UK, which was in the EU at the time, came in a distant second.
  • Far in the distance in terms of virtual volunteering, and well behind rates in Eastern European countries, was France – in fact, the lack of virtual volunteering materials in French was particularly shocking to me. I could find NO such materials in Europe – the few I found were in Canada. I so hope that’s changed in 10 years!

If you are looking for a research project idea, I highly recommend you take a stab at researching and mapping the prevalence of virtual volunteering in Europe – or even just one country in Europe. Or break entirely new ground: India? Certain countries in Africa? I will be happy to turn over all of my materials to you to help you in your research. I’m also happy to write a letter of endorsement if you want to shop this project around for funding. Contact me and let me know your full name, share your LinkedIn profile or another online profile where I can see your professional connections and research to date, let me know the kind of research you have in mind, etc.

Why am I not interested in doing this research myself? Both because I lack any funding to do this and also, I would really like to read someone else’s research!

If you are doing any research regarding virtual volunteering, or if your agency or organization is considering virtual volunteering as a path to helping people become more employable, check out the Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook: Fully Integrating Online Service Into Volunteer Involvement. 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.

Also see:

If you have benefited from this blog or other parts of my web site or my YouTube videos 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

Facebook, Meta, Virtual Worlds – Benefits? Risks? Does Second Life offer lessons?

a screen capture of a webinar that took place in Second Life, an avatar-based virtual world.

An online multimedia platform that allows people to create an avatar for themselves and “live” in an online virtual world. Avatars interact with places, objects and other avatars, exploring the virtual world, meeting other residents, socializing, having business meetings, hosting events, participating in group activities, building, creating, shopping, collaborating, even trading virtual property and services with one another.

Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaverse? No! I’m talking about Second Life, which launched back in 2003. The image at the top of this blog, and the image below, are of me, as an avatar, leading an event in Second Life for TechSoup back in 2014:

An image of Jayne Cravens as an avatar in front of a giant silde from her event within Second Life.

TechSoup was an early and passionate adopter of Second Life, hosting numerous online events there. If you do a search for Second Life on the TechSoup forum, you would find numerous references to the platform and TechSoup activities there over the years.

Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook (now Meta), said to much fanfare that he wanted to launch his own metaverse. The new virtual-reality app Horizon Worlds is Facebook’s first foray into the much-hyped “metaverse” for Facebook parent company Meta. Horizon Worlds, a beta version of which featured prominently in Zuckerberg’s announcement, launched Dec. 9 in the United States and Canada on the company’s Oculus virtual-reality platform and represents its first major attempt to deliver on his vision.

Were you on Second Life? Are you still on Second Life? Did you participate in TechSoup’s events on Second Life, or any other nonprofit-related activities? What do you think emerging virtual worlds, including Meta’s projects, can learn from Second Life? Comment below!

This article from The Duke Law JournalThe Development and Failure of Social Norms in Second Life, seems like something that the Meta folks should read. Its conclusion about Second Life:

Second Life is so thoroughly steeped in conditions that have impeded the development of successful social norms in other communities that any system of social norms in Second Life will ultimately fail. Because social norms will likely fail to successfully maximize resident welfare, regulatory schemes imposed both by the operators of the virtual world and by real-world governing institutions are needed to enhance the functioning of this particular alternative reality inhabited by millions.

Do you think Meta’s virtual world is addressing this issue? Do you think they need to plan for how to address such? And are you worried about safety at all with any online platforms? Comment below!

Nina Jane Patel was targeted with sexual harassment in Facebook/Meta’s platforms. “Within 60 seconds of joining — I was verbally & sexually harassed — 3–4 male avatars, with male voices, essentially, but virtually gang-raped my avatar & took photos…” The 43-year-old mother said it was such a “horrible experience that happened so fast” before she even had a chance to think about using “the safety barrier,” adding that she “froze.” She continued by confessing how both her “physiological and psychological” reaction was similar to it happening in real life. “Virtual reality has essentially been designed so the mind and body can’t differentiate virtual/digital experiences from real,” Patel wrote.

This is similar to assaults that happened in Second LIfe. Examples:

Horizon Worlds is supposed to be limited to adults 18 and older. In practice, however, very young kids appear to be among its earliest adopters. Some say the presence of children in Meta’s fledgling metaverse raises a grave concern: that by mixing children with adult strangers in a largely self-moderated virtual world, the company is inadvertently creating a hunting ground for sexual predators.

When new online forums arise that attract kids, sexual predators “are often among the first to arrive,” said Sarah Gardner, vice president of external affairs at Thorn, a tech nonprofit that focuses on protecting children from online sexual abuse. “They see an environment that is not well protected and does not have clear systems of reporting. They’ll go there first to take advantage of the fact that it is a safe ground for them to abuse or groom kids.”

More on safety for children in virtual worlds from the Washington Post.

Could nonprofits that engage in an online metaverse be putting their clients or others at risk by asking them to be there too? Comment below!

There’s one more consideration: accessibility. If you engage with people in a graphics-based environment, you are leaving out people who have sight-impairments. How will auditory displays work for graphics-based environments to address accessibility issues (I’m asking because I really don’t know)? Or is it a matter of ensuring you never limit your service delivery and volunteer engagement to only a graphics-based environment?

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

There is section devoted to virtual volunteering and avatar-based environments in The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook. The section offers some examples of nonprofits using Second Life to engage with clients and volunteers, and offers specific advice on how a nonprofit should get started using such environments, considerations to explore and pitfalls to avoid – all of which is relevant for any graphics-based virtual world. The rest of the book is easily adaptable to engaging with volunteers in graphics-based/avatar-based virtual worlds as well.

Looking forward to hearing your comments!

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.

United Nations Volunteers says, when it comes to onsite & online, “They are ALL volunteers”

My, my, how times have changed…

United Nations Logo

When I worked at the United Nations Volunteers (UNV) programme from 2001 to mid-February 2005, one of my duties was directing the Online Volunteering service, the platform that UNV had co-created with NetAid for nonprofits serving the developing world to recruit and engage online volunteers. Near the end of my time at UNV, the new communications manager would not support any of the wildly successful online volunteering program’s communications needs: she would not include information in the quarterly UNV newsletter, she would not pitch stories to the press related to online volunteers and she would not include promoting of the online volunteering platform in any of her strategies. We had a meeting for our entire departments’ staff so I could ask why, and her reply was, “I was hired to promote UNV, not the online volunteering program.” My response: “Gee, UNV is my employer, so I assume the online volunteering program was a part of UNV.” The meeting went downhill from there.

Even before she joined UNV, it was a constant struggle to get UNV staff, both at HQ and in the field, to think about online volunteers as a part of UNV’s mission, despite the full support of the then head of UNV, Sharon Capeling-Alakija:

  • The head of the department responsible for recruiting onsite UN Volunteers and managing their applications successfully petitioned to create an unwritten policy that only onsite volunteers could be called “UN Volunteers”, not online volunteers recruited and engaged through the online platform, even if they were supporting UN initiatives. She also refused all of my attempts to walk her through the online volunteering platform and to potentially integrate some of its features into UNV’s overall application system (she had only VERY reluctantly agreed to the creating of an online application system for onsite UN Volunteers – she preferred postal mail and faxing).
  • A survey of all UNV HQ staff found that, in the three years following the site coming under the sole management of UNV, the vast majority had never logged into the online volunteering platform. This was despite frequent internal presentations about online volunteering.
  • Presentations to UNV program managers, who were responsible for overseeing the creation of UNV assignments and managing those UNVs in the field, would provide examples of what online volunteers were actually doing, yet, the response from the majority of participants would always be, “I just don’t see how those roles can be done by online volunteers.”
  • In my last four weeks at UNV, the new head of UNV noted to me that the online volunteering service would be eliminated unless a funder was found, because he didn’t think it was that important – and given that he successfully eliminated the United Nations Information Technology Service (UNITeS), I was pretty sure that virtual volunteering within UNV was doomed.

And here we are, almost 20 years later, and UNV has launched a Unified Volunteering Platform and Unified Conditions of Service. This new Unified Volunteering Platform (UVP) has brought together UNV’s onsite UNV assignment recruitment and the UN’s Online Volunteering Platform (OV) – that means www.onlinevolunteering.org no longer exists as a distinct entity. Via this new unified platform, organizations can request services of both onsite and online volunteers, and candidates can apply for both onsite UN Volunteer assignments and online assignments. It is the single-entry point for all UNV partners – from candidates for onsite and online volunteering to donors, funding partners and UNV personnel and partner organizations.

I love that UNV now, at last, sees its online volunteering engagement as part of its overall volunteer engagement. I would love to know how it happened! But this change, this unified platform, comes at a big cost: UNV no longer allows any nonprofit or NGO that’s working on behalf of the developing world to recruit online volunteers via its platform. The only organizations allowed to use the platform to recruit online volunteers are “eligible partners”: UN entities (UNICEF, UNDP, UNESCO, etc.), those with accreditation with the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), or an organization working with a UN Country Team as an implementing partner. That means small NGOs who don’t have a formal partnership with UNV or aren’t working with a UNV in the field are now locked out of the platform for recruiting online volunteers.

The other downside: all those great lessons about how to work with online volunteers that the online volunteering service is now much harder to find, since it no longer exists on any UNV web site (I’ve done my best to salvage them here, since I wrote most of them).

But even with those costs, ultimately, it’s the right decision, because it means UNV now makes it clear that ALL of the volunteering it facilitates, including online volunteering, must be in support of the goals of communities in developing countries, and must have real impact – it must put the needs of the communities first. It further distances UN Volunteers, including online volunteers, from voluntourism or vanity volunteering.

What will happen to the domain onlinevolunteering.org? Not sure. For now, it points to UNV’s new unified platform. But UN agencies are notorious for not keeping URLs it no longer uses as its primary address (like unvolunteers.org, which now goes nowhere) or for programs that have sunsetted, no matter how popular, like all the many sites associated with International Year of Volunteers in 2001, or worldvolunteerweb.org. So if you have a virtual volunteering initiative, you should keep an eye on the onlinevolunteering.org URL for when UNV inevitably abandons it.

My other UNV-related blogs:

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

If you want 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. UNV’s Online Volunteering Service is referred to frequently in the book, and some of its star online volunteers are featured.

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.

Apps4Good should be based in reality, not be tech fluff

I sent out this tweet thread December 3 from my Twitter account:

Listened to a podcast by someone wanting to develop an app to address a particular community need. He has no stats regarding the need, no research showing his approach is what partner agencies or potential clients want. Just talked about #app4good he’ll develop. (1/5) #CSR

This project leader has no experience regarding this particular community need. None. It’s another case of someone from the corporate world deciding that he knows what nonprofits or at-risk community members need, with no data or research to back that up. (2/5)

Looked at the web site. It’s very slick, uses all the buzzwords. You have to really read (which most folks won’t) to realize every project is in development, that no people with actual expertise in this issue are involved in this supposed nonprofit effort. (3/5)

It’s great that folks from the corporate / business / tech world want to help with community issues. Your involvement is vital. But just as you have to do your homework before developing an app for consumers, you have to do research before you develop an #app4good#CSR (4/5)

Years of experience in the tech sector doesn’t prepare app creators for addressing homelessness, hunger or street harassment, or navigating mass transit, or working in emergencies. You must talk in-depth with the experts: nonprofits & their clients. (5/5)

I’ve written a LOT about how folks from the corporate world, from executive directors to app developers, don’t talk to nonprofits before they develop tech tools for their clients. Here’s more:

And then there is this brilliant tweet from World Bank Water, an initiative of the World Bank:

To paraphrase a comment I wrote in a previous blog, it’s wonderful to see so many tech4good / apps4good / hacks4good initiatives anywhere in the world, but I see way too much attention being spent on their launch, on their promise, and not nearly enough researching if this is really what clients or the community wants, let alone evaluating their impact and sustainability after launch. And if we don’t focus on those things, then they are just tech fluff.