Tag Archives: volunteer

Paying thousands to volunteer abroad & ignoring same opportunities at home

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Late last year, I did an all-day training for a state fish and wildlife department – a government agency – about how to better engage volunteers: how to better design tasks for a variety of volunteers, to better support volunteers, to better track what they are doing and to recruit – not just recruiting volunteers to get tasks done, but also to recruit in order to reach a variety of communities and people. The people I taught were a mix of biologists and long-time volunteer leaders who had never had training in volunteer management.

(read more about my consulting services and training work)

Before doing this type of intensive, specialized training, I do a lot of research to look at what similar organizations might be doing, trends that the client might want to consider, etc. One of the things that struck me as I was researching state fish and wildlife departments all over the USA was how many activities these agencies have for volunteers that people will pay thousands to go do in another country: building and repairing fish and wildlife habitats, counting wildlife, reporting on habitat conditions and more.

I thought about how this is true of so many other agencies as well: there are nonprofits and government programs all over the USA that will help people learn English, that help refugees navigate their new homes, that help people better understand the risks associated with HIV/AIDS, that help people who have lost their home, that help impoverished women with maternal health and infant care, and on and on – yet, people are willing to pay thousands of dollars for voluntourism experiences that make them feel like they are helping refugees, helping children, helping people at risk, etc., rather than participating in these programs just around the corner – or, at least, in their own country.

I don’t like voluntourism, where people pay money to go to another country and feel like they are helping people or the environment in just a few weeks, and I blog about my distaste frequently. So many – not all, but so many – are scams: a supposed wildlife sanctuary captures wild animals and puts them into enclosures and then sells voluntourism experiences, bringing in foreigners to “help.” A supposed orphanage is full of children who have parents, but the parents are paid to keep their children in the “orphanage” so that foreigners will pay large sums of money to come from overseas and “help.” The organizations take anyone who can pay – they don’t need anyone with actual skills or expertise because, supposedly, no one locally can do this “work”, so they must bring in anyone from abroad with “a good heart.” Sure, there are some worthwhile organizations for short-term volunteering abroad – and I list them on this free resource on my web site. But most are, to me, loathsome.

But I also am puzzled as to why so many nonprofits and government agencies in the USA – and other countries – do such a lousy job of talking about their volunteering opportunities. When I told the state agency I was training that people pay thousands of dollars to go do in, say, Kenya, many of the same volunteering tasks that this state agency struggles to find volunteering activities for, they were stunned. But it’s true!

Have a look at some of those shiny, heart-warming voluntourism sites. I’m not going to link to them here, but trust me, they are easy to find on Google or Bing. Look at photos on their sites, the language they use – look how much fun they make volunteering sound, or how they make volunteering sound like a challenge worthy of traveling thousands of miles for – and paying top dollar to experience. Now look at your organization’s web site: how does your agency talk about volunteers and the activities they do? Don’t oversell your program, but do recognize that any activity that allows volunteers to be outside, to be very physical, or to interact with clients are highly desired by many people. What you may see as just more work to do they may see as an opportunity to make a real difference in a cause they care about deeply.

Here’s more of my advice on volunteer recruitment:

And here’s more of my blogs regarding voluntourism and Westerners going to help abroad:

My voluntourism-related & ethics-related blogs (and how I define scam)

Read more about my consulting services and training work.

Something New & Innovative? How about something that WORKS?

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So often – TOO OFTEN – I hear nonprofits, government initiatives, NGOs, charities and other mission-based programs complaining that they aren’t getting good attendance at their events or program activities, or aren’t getting any press coverage, or don’t have enough volunteers, and so they are looking for something innovative and new in marketing.

But is something innovative and new really what they need?

In my junior year at Western Kentucky University, a million years ago, one of my professors proposed an idea to me: for one of my senior year classes, to fulfill my minor in theater, I could be in charge of marketing the Fall Children’s Theatre series, a then-annual event where three to four student-directed productions were presented, all focused on children audiences. I would get credit for a full senior-level class for such. I had also been working at the local arts center as a marketing intern outside of classes and had a wonderful mentor there who had taught me a lot about getting press coverage – combining this experience with my journalism major and newspaper experience, it was an offer I couldn’t refuse!

I was oh-so-successful at getting kids and their parents to the plays. One performance had to be delayed a few minutes because there were so many kids pouring in from an area kindergarten. We consistently sold out of intermission snacks, filling the coffers of our student theater society. Of course, I got an “A” for my efforts: my professor said they had never had so many full houses for the Fall Children’s Theater series.

Was I innovative in my approach to marketing these shows? No. All I did was the basics:

  • Sent press releases in a timely manner, with complete information, to area newspapers, and the one local TV station, in time to get into their calendar sections.
  • Sent press releases to local schools and kindergartens as early as possible.

That’s it. That’s all I did. And I sent these by mail – there was no Internet in my world back in those days. I had no budget to do anything else. All I did to be so wildly successful was the basics of marketing. And I did the basics WELL. Before my involvement, press releases were never sent, or were sent too late for information to be included in a local newspaper or on TV, or didn’t have complete information.

Before you start looking for something innovative to improve attendance at your events, increase program participants, recruit more volunteers, increase your visibility, etc., look at your current communications:

  • Is information on your web site up-to-date and complete, with answers to Who?, What?, Where?, Why? and When? right in the first paragraph of any information about events?
  • When you post about information on social media, do you make sure it includes Who?, What?, Where? and When? (you may not have enough room on Twitter for Why?)
  • Are you sending press releases and announcements to every area media outlet in your area, including newspapers, radio stations and TV stations watched in your area, in a TIMELY manner?
  • If you have a poster or brochure about the event, are the answers to Who?, What?, Where?, Why? and When? obvious and easy to find/easy to see?
  • Has your up-to-date, complete information been emailed directly to every employee, every consultant and every volunteer at your organization, in a timely manner?

There’s nothing innovative about any of that – but these steps are absolutely fundamental to successful marketing by nonprofits. And often, it’s all that’s needed.

Also see:

Trump’s War on Volunteerism

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Volunteer engagement is essential to the democracy and the life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for which my country, the USA, strives – paid staff just cannot do everything that needs to be done in this regard. Some activities are best done by volunteers – by people who aren’t being paid a wage to do certain work, who are freed from fear of being fired from a job that pays for their home, food, transportation, etc. and, therefore, able to speak more freely about what they are seeing and doing at the agency that hosts them as volunteers or in the community in which they are providing service.

But volunteer engagement does not magically happen and it is also not sustainable by mere good will and passion. Effective, sustainable volunteer engagement requires knowledge and processes.

A few months ago, I finally read By the People: A History of Americans as Volunteers, a book by my long-time colleague and friend, Susan Ellis, along with Katherine Campbell. The book does a fantastic job of showing the role of volunteers in the formation of the United States of America and so much of the best parts of our way of life, from mobilizations that lead to nonprofits like Goodwill, the YWCA and the Sierra Club – efforts often lead by women – but also of showing how volunteers have played such an important role in establishing the American character, one that relishes community-driven and do-it-yourself driven efforts to address community needs and concerns. The book provides repeated examples of how volunteers seized a social issue in the USA and amplified it and addressed it, from the abolition of slavery to the health of soldiers to the civil rights movement and so many things before and after.

But this American value is under attack by the current President of the USA, and it’s overdue for everyone who cares about volunteerism to speak out.

Here are five things that have been happening regarding volunteerism in the USA, lead the Donald Trump, that every association of nonprofit organizations and every DOVIA (directors of volunteers in agencies) and other association of managers of volunteers like the Northwest Oregon Volunteer Administrators Association (NOVAA) based in Portland, Oregon, needs to be commenting on via their outreach to members, their blogs, their social media and to the press (I think consultants regarding nonprofits, particularly regarding volunteer management, need to be speaking out about these as well):

(1)

In 2017, Donald Trump appointed Carl Higbie as chief of external affairs for the federal government’s volunteer service organization, the Corporation for National Service, to direct the public image and messaging of this agency that manages millions of Americans in volunteer services like AmeriCorps and Senior Corps. Before this role, as host of the radio program “Sound of Freedom,” an Internet radio station, Higbie made comments deriding black Americans, Muslims, women, LGBT people, veterans suffering from PTSD and immigrants. Higbie resigned in January 2018 after a CNN story brought these comments to light. All of these statements were publicly available and known by HIgbie’s associates, yet he was appointed anyway.

(2)

On February 12, 2018, Donald Trump sent his official Fiscal Year 2019 Budget request to Congress. This budget proposed the elimination of the Corporation for National and Community Service in FY 2019, and provided funding for an “orderly shutdown.” This budget cut would have meant the elimination of AmeriCorps, VISTA, the Conservation Corps (the modern-day CCC) and Senior Corps. Later, because of pressure from Republican colleagues and efforts by Voices for National Service, a coalition of national, state and local service programs, state service commissions and individual champions, President Trump signed the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2018 that provides the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS) $1,063,958,000 for FY 2018, a $33.6 million increase over FY 2017 enacted levels. Here’s more about these two different budget announcements.

That a US President even entertained the idea of eliminating AmeriCorps, VISTA the Conservation Corps and Senior Corps, let alone announced it, should have gotten everyone’s attention, but the lack of outcry from DOVIAs and organizations that promote volunteerism was shocking. Make no mistake: these institutions remain under threat. I hope someone is working to scramble volunteers to preserve the research and resources CNCS has compiled on its web site before the government deletes it.

(3)

In July 2018, at a rally for his supporters, Donald Trump mocked the Points of Light volunteerism concept introduced by President George H.W. Bush.

“You know all of the rhetoric: ‘Thousands points of light.’ What the hell was that?” Trump asked his audience. “What does that mean?”

“I know one thing: ‘Make America Great Again’ we understand. ‘Putting America First’ we understand. ‘Thousand points of light?’ I never got that one. What the hell is that? Has anyone figured that out? It was put out by a Republican.”

In his inaugural speech in January 1989, President George H.W. Bush promoted the virtues of volunteerism, saying: “I have spoken of a thousand points of light, of all the community organizations that are spread like stars throughout the nation, doing good.” In 1990, he created the Points of Light Foundation for volunteerism in 1990. The initiative has been supported by every Democrat and Republican President since, until Donald Trump.

(4)

Breaking with his predecessors, Trump skipped doing any community service activities on Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 2018, spending time on his golf course instead. By contrast, when President Barack Obama was in office, the First Family paid tribute to the civil-rights legend with some form of volunteer work, whether visiting a soup kitchen or helping paint a mural at a shelter. President Bill Clinton and President George W. Bush also participated in volunteering activities in association with the day.

What message is being sent by the current President in refusing to do any community service – to serve a meal to someone experiencing homelessness, to help build a house via Habitat for Humanity, to participate in a beach cleanup? No, throwing paper towels at reporters covering hurricane damage does not count as volunteering.

(5)

Donald Trump and Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin, as well as governors all over the USA, want to require unemployed Medicaid members to volunteer with nonprofit organizations – or, probably, Christian churches (but not other religious houses) – in order to receive those benefits. Bevin and Trump are expecting nonprofits to involve several thousand more people as volunteers – people who are being forced into the act – but without funding all of the increased costs nonprofits are going to have to create more assignments and supervise these people.

These five points, altogether, show a very disturbing message being sent out by the current President about the value of volunteerism in the USA. 

It’s overdue for nonprofits, consultants and anyone that claims to care about the spirit of volunteerism in the USA to speak out in press releases, guest columns in newspapers, letters to the editor, blogs and social media about this disdain for volunteerism coming from the current White House. The lack of any comment on these activities is why I have not joined any of the associations trying to fill the gap left by the Association for Volunteer Administration. It’s long overdue for bold statements regarding public policy that affects volunteerism and community service by these associations. I’m tired of being out here on my own.

No nonprofit will jeopardize its 501 (c) (3) status by commenting on any five of these items, by saying that these stances and activities are disappointing at least and outrageous and deplorable at worst. Any excuse that implies such is unacceptable.

That said, kudos to the Kentucky Nonprofit Network for being outspoken on some of these activities. Your voice and your courage is needed and appreciated.

Now, what about the rest of you?

Also see:

A plea to USA nonprofits for the next four years (& beyond)

Governor Bevin & Donald Trump Are Wrong on Community Service Requirements

Requirements to volunteer are getting out of hand

Kentucky politicians think volunteers are free

How Will Trump Presidency Affect Humanitarian Aid & Development?

Still trying to volunteer, still frustrated

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Back in February 2012, I wrote a blog called I’m a Frustrated Volunteer. It was about how often people try to volunteer but run up into so many roadblocks: incomplete, hard-to-understand information on the organization’s web site, lack of followup by the organization after the person expresses interest, no clear direction or support when they are trying to complete a volunteering task, etc. So often, when organizations, especially schools, tell me they can’t find volunteers, the problem is, in fact, they are turning potential volunteers away per the aforementioned challenges.

In that blog, I admitted that the frustrated volunteer wannabe I was describing was, in fact, ME, based on my experiences trying to volunteer oh-so many times since September 2009, when I moved back to the USA – Oregon, specifically. I noted that the upside with all this frustration was that my own attempts to volunteer had made me a better consultant and better manager regarding volunteer engagement, and the experience had generated a lot of new resources on my web site. Those experiences as a frustrated volunteer also influenced my writing of The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook.

It’s six years after that blog. Am I still a frustrated volunteer?

Yes. Yes, I am.

Here are some experiences I’ve had in trying to volunteer over the last few years:

  • I wanted to volunteer at the local high school. I was ready to help with their drama club, their speech team, or any other club or class where my expertise might help the students. The home page for the school doesn’t even have the word volunteer on it. Once you find the page for potential volunteers, it has just three paragraphs: no information about what volunteers do, the minimum amount of commitment required, etc. The lead statement is “Our volunteers contribute more than $1.6 million worth of help each year — the equivalent of about 12 extra hours of adult time for every student in the district.” Yes, that’s right – volunteers are great because it means the school doesn’t have to hire people to do that work! Next…
  • I wanted to explore volunteering with a local public service agency that supposedly involves volunteers in auxiliary support roles for staff engaged in a very intense activity. The web site has no info about this auxiliary, though I’m sure it exists. I wrote the person who is in charge of agency’s more labor-intensive, time-intensive volunteering. He wrote back and said he had some PDFs he could share with me about the program – but offered no summary of what the program was about, the application process, etc., and certainly no encouragement – I felt like I was bothering him. And why isn’t this information on the web site? He never said why. Next…
  • I’ve wanted to volunteer to help girls go camping or to become leaders or to use tech both safely and to explore careers, but Girl Scouts doesn’t do those kinds of activities where I live, and another group that I thought did those things never got back to me after my TWO applications to volunteer. Next…
  • I was interested in volunteering at a nearby jail to help people regarding résumé writing, finding volunteering after incarceration in order to build community ties and skills, interviewing skills, etc. But when I tried, I was told a religious-based organization was in charge of all of these volunteering activities, and I would need to contact that religious-based organization. I am not of that religion – in fact, I am not religious at all, and I felt like I wouldn’t be welcomed because I’m not religious and wouldn’t be helping from a faith-based motivation. I submitted my application, but I never heard anything back from the church in charge of the program. Next…

What volunteering has worked out for me?

  • There’s a woman in the town where I live who is trying to start a nonprofit, and I’ve been able to help her with by-laws, writing a mission statement and other basic requirements.
  • I still help Bpeace on occasion as an online volunteer. And, BTW, Bpeace is awesome – check them out.
  • I signed up online to help at a forum for candidates running for a particular office. I ended up being the greeter at the sign-in table, something that I actually really enjoy. I wasn’t given much guidance – good thing I’ve worked a LOT of registration tables over the years. But it was over in just three hours. No more candidate forums until the Fall, before the November election.
  • I’m still volunteering online with TechSoup, contributing information to their community forum.
  • I’m serving on a citizens’ committee for public safety in the town where I live; after a year, the committee has come up with exactly zero recommendations to police and fire or the city council regarding safety in our town, and other committee members have balked at my ideas regarding pedestrian and bicyclist safety. Still, she persisted…

Online volunteering is super easy to find, as always, and I love it. But I continue to be frustrated in my attempts to be an onsite volunteer in activities that I feel a personal passion about. And I know that this is a chronic problem. Wouldn’t it be great if, instead of campaigns to get people to volunteer, we had funding and training for nonprofits, public sector agencies and schools about how to appropriately on-board and engage volunteers?

So, what volunteers has your initiative been turning away?

More on this subject:

 

Diagnosing the causes of volunteer recruitment problems

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graphic by Jayne Cravens representing volunteersI see it and hear it over and over: comments from nonprofits or churches or schools saying they are having trouble recruiting volunteers.

Before you hire a consultant, even me, to see what the problem is regarding why you don’t have enough volunteers, you might be able to diagnosis the problem yourself. The only catch is that you MUST be honest as you answer these questions. Also, answering these questions is rarely a one-person exercise; you may think you know the answer, but you need to ask other staff members, including volunteers themselves, what their answers are to these assessment questions. Don’t be surprised if your receptionist or a volunteer gives you a very different answer to any of these questions than you yourself would give.

Questions to diagnose your volunteer recruitment problems:

  • Is it easy to know just from looking at your web site what volunteers do, the different roles, the time commitment, the training requirements, and how to sign up?
  • Is there an OBVIOUS link from your home page to information for potential volunteers, a link as obvious as your donation link?
  • When someone calls or emails about volunteering, or submits an application, does that person get an immediate reply regarding next steps? In fact, do they get info at all, or does someone take their name and say someone will get back to them and then, most of the time, no one ever does? Often, when I’ve been asked to assess a volunteer recruitment at a school, THIS is where the problem lies: plenty of people are calling to volunteer, but they never get the response they need to get started, or the response comes months later, when they are no longer interested or available.
  • Are your next steps for volunteering with your organization something that the volunteer can get started on in a few days? In several weeks? In a few months? The further away the next step, the more likely the volunteer candidate won’t follow through.
  • Are your volunteering opportunities listed at the most popular third party volunteering sites for your area? For instance, where I live, the most popular volunteer recruitment sites are VolunteerMatch and HandsOn Portland. Go to Google or Bing and type in volunteer and the name of your city and see what comes up. Also see these tips for Using Third Party Web Sites Like VolunteerMatch to Recruit Volunteers.
  • Do you need to alter the volunteer role so that a volunteer would get more out of it, in terms of training, career-development, university class credit, or personal fulfillment? Is there anything you can do to make the role more fun?
  • Can the people you are trying to recruit as volunteers afford to volunteer – to work for free? Do they have childcare responsibilities that are preventing them from helping? Could you offer childcare? Could you pay for parking or mass transit, provide lunch for volunteers, or do anything at all to ease their financial burden?
  • Could you make the service time commitment less for volunteers? Could you try to recruit more volunteers for shorter shifts, for instance, instead of fewer volunteers for longer shifts?
  • Do you have a myriad of opportunities available for volunteers, like Short-term Assignments for Tech Volunteers, One-Time, Short-Term Group Volunteering Activities, and virtual volunteering?
  • Does the task you are asking volunteers to do seem especially intimidating or daunting? Could you make it less so, by reducing the time commitment the volunteer would have to make, or by guaranteeing that there is a seasoned volunteer or employee always with the new volunteer? Or by taking away the tasks in the role that are the most intimidating and giving them to paid staff? Or by better-assuring candidates that they will be fully trained before they are put into potentially challenging situations?
  • Are you asking too much from volunteers in terms of a time commitment, training and the responsibilities they will undertake as unpaid staff? Do you need to convert such roles into paid positions, in order to better attract the people that can make the time and emotional commitment to the role?

A terrific, easy exercise that can be really helpful in diagnosing your volunteer recruitment problems is to create a flow chart mapping your volunteer engagement, or a series of maps for different parts of the volunteer management process — the volunteer in-take process, the volunteer assignment development and matching process, the volunteer support assignment, etc. You could do charts for each of these processes, and then show how they all intersect. You can do a map on what you do, and don’t do, now, and then alter it to show how it SHOULD be. A dry erase white board with markers is best, better than any computer app:

Here’s one example of what a volunteer in-take flow chart could look like as a result of your mapping exercise (every organization is different):

Let’s be clear: people WANT to volunteer, including the much-derided millennials. Just go to Quora or Reddit and see how many people, mostly from that generation, are posting questions about how to find volunteering. And people are hungry to connect: in this age of always-online, there are so many, many people looking to connect in a meaningful way offline. Your obstacle to recruiting volunteers isn’t that people don’t want to volunteer; it’s that people that want to volunteer can’t easily find your information, or your volunteer roles don’t fit their interests or schedules. What worked to recruit volunteers 30 years ago doesn’t work now; if you are having trouble recruiting volunteers, it’s overdue for you to take a hard, in-depth look at both how you recruit, what your in-take process is like, and the volunteer opportunities you have available.

Also see:

Governor Bevin & Donald Trump Are Wrong on Community Service Requirements

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logoRemember at the start of the year when I warned that 2018 is the time for USA nonprofits to be demanding?

Well, here we go.

Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin and Donald Trump, as well as governors all over the USA, want to require unemployed Medicaid members to volunteer with nonprofit organizations – or, probably, Christian churches – in order to receive those benefits.

This idea was first floated back in Spring 2017. At that time, Danielle Clore, executive director of the Kentucky Nonprofit Network, had a lot to say to Bevin’s office when it asked the group to support his proposal:

The bottom line is this will cost nonprofits money – money and resources we don’t have to spare. It takes professionals to effectively manage volunteers. For the experience to be valuable for both the agency and the individual, volunteer efforts have to be managed. Is it worth the limited and precious resources of a nonprofit to manage a volunteer that is there because ‘they have to be,’ not because they want to be? Nonprofit employees are spread so thin as it is and I feel like a volunteer requirement for anyone not truly committed to the mission of the agency isn’t an effective use of anyone’s time.

I do not typically take people who are ‘required’ to volunteer, because they don’t make good volunteers. Also, 20 hours is A LOT OF TIME. We don’t allow people to volunteer that many hours because at that point they could be considered a part time employee employee, and you have potential legal issues to consider.

Emily Beauregard, executive director of Kentucky Voices for Health, told Kentucky Health News in an interview at that time, “We need to provide them with the support services that they need, but forcing people to volunteer in order to get health care doesn’t make anybody healthier. We know this. There are data to suggest that. In fact, sometimes these stringent requirements put people in a position where they are unable to get care and then they get sick, and they are unable to work.”

I’ve blogged about all this before, in April 2017, when I said that requirements to volunteer are getting out of hand. And I’m calling on all nonprofit centers, all consultants regarding nonprofit management, including volunteer management, and everyone claiming to be advocates for volunteerism to speak out about this.

Here here’s my Facebook post about how I feel:

Nonprofits are not sitting around saying, “I wish several thousand people were forced to volunteer and they would then show up at our offices to do all this work we have just laying around waiting to be done by just any ole’ person that comes through the door.” Bevin and Trump are expecting nonprofits to involve several thousand more people as volunteers – people who are being forced into the act – but without funding all of the increased costs nonprofits are going to have to create more assignments and supervise these people. Nonprofits, don’t do it. Just DON’T. Not without a great deal more money.

Let’s see your statement.

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.

 

Re-creating offline excitement & a human touch online

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Back in 1998, an effort that became the nonprofit Knowbility started a hackathon competition before such events were called hackathons. It was called the Accessibility Internet Rally, or AIR, and in one day, professional web designers and web design students volunteered their time to build web sites for nonprofits in Austin, Texas – web sites that are fully accessible to people with disabilities and people using assistive technologies. Designers were divided into teams, and each team had a nonprofit to build for. The teams were all on one floor of a training center that donated its space and computers for the event.

It was crazy, fun, exciting and, at times, silly. I was at that first competition, and at the events in 1999 and 2000, representing a partner organization, via the Virtual Volunteering Project. I helped greet and register every participant as they came in. I also ran through the hallways, into the training rooms, shouting deadlines, like “Two more hours! Just two more hours!”  We got donated food from a local Subway shop and various grocery stores, and teams wouldn’t take a lunch break, despite our pleas for them to do so – they’d run into the room, scarf, then run back to their computers, ready for more designing. Austin-area corporations donated their branded swag that they had leftover from conferences in the past, or that had old logos on them, and we were able to put together goodie bags of memo pads, pens, frisbees and more to hand out to all participants. The second year, several corporate teams returned – this time with custom t-shirts they had made for their team especially for the competition! The event was so energizing and fun that teams came back year after year.

I still use the crockpot that we used to provide nacho cheese for teams…

The AIR competition has continued, and is still awesome, but a few years ago, it became an entirely online competition. It’s now called OpenAIR. The event is not limited to Austin, Texas – it’s global! Instead of one day, teams now have five weeks to develop new accessible web sites for participating nonprofits – and the web sites are far more sophisticated than they were back in the 1990s. A team’s members are all onsite together, at the same company or in the same web design class, for the most part, but they aren’t in the same room with the other teams, nor the nonprofits they are supporting – all interaction among teams and clients is via phone, online conferencing, email and shared online spaces. Another big difference from those early years is that, now, most of the participating nonprofits already have web sites, so their material is already digitized – we don’t need to scan logos or photos anymore, because it’s already done.

It’s almost 20 years after that first AIR competition, and I’m back with Knowbility, this time as a consultant, in charge of recruiting nonprofits to participate and supporting them through the entire process. And I have a goal: to find ways to recreate that craziness and fun and excitement and personal touch from the offsite, in-person events of the past online.

I’m supposed to be the virtual volunteering expert. So this should be a piece of cake for me, right? Afterall, I have ideas for creating a personal experience for working with online volunteers in The LAST Virtual Volunteering Guidebook. I’m using those recommendations, as well as looking through research I’ve curated about organizations working with online volunteers, information about virtual teams, remote teams, ework, telecommuting, etc., to come up with ideas… but I need more!

Here are my ideas so far:

  • Talk one-on-one with the nonprofits as much as possible live via phone or web conference. There could be as many as 45 nonprofits participating, and while there are plenty of tools to communicate en masse with the nonprofits, and I will use many such tools, I’m also committed to talking, in real time, with EACH nonprofit, one-on-one, both right after they sign up and as they need it through the process. If I’ve been clear in those mass communications – on the web site, on the intranet, in email, etc. – then we’re talking about a few minutes at time in real-time communications, not hours and hours. But those one-on-one meetings are, IMO, essential to restore that personal touch and personality to participation.
  • I’ll be asking each nonprofit to take a group photo of their staff holding a small 8 1/2 X 11” sign I will send them electronically, and that they will print out, that says something like “We’re in for #OpenAIR2018,” and then share via their various social media channels tagged with #OpenAir2018. And then Knowbility will share those photos as well via their social media channels, like Twitter and Facebook. That allows us to again see happy faces as a part of this event, and energize participants.
  • I’m going to do some short, private videos for nonprofit participants – maybe 5 minutes – very informal, just giving them updates about what’s going on or something they need to keep in mind, and with each one, having a joke of the week, or some theme (Star Wars, Halloween, nature, pets, basketball, whatever) – hoping that both the key message and the silliness will guarantee viewers and energize participants.
  • I’m going to have at least one live webinar, an “ask me anything” session, allowing nonprofits that have signed up to ask anything, “live”, and everyone in the webinars hearing my answers in real time. This is something PeaceCorps does periodically, and I really love how approachable it feels for participants.
  • I’m hoping the design teams and nonprofits, after they are matched together, will do some screen captures of their meetings together and share them with me, so we can share them with other teams to show each other what they look like when they are working together. Silly hats could be encouraged.
  • I’m going to ask the nonprofits to send something via postal mail to their design team. It can be a postcard of encouragement, a t-shirt from a previous event, a pen with their logo on it – just SOMETHING the web design team members can hold in a hand, something that represents the nonprofit in a personal way, something tangible, and something that didn’t have to be purchased or, if it did, was less than $2 and has something personal written on it by the nonprofit’s executive director or key contact (postcard!). If the NGO is, say, in Afghanistan, and has no way to send postal mail to the design team, I might ask them to send, via email, a recipe for a traditional Afghan dish, and ask the design team to share a photo of them enjoying the dish together.
  • I’m going to ask the design teams to send something via postal mail to their nonprofits. Same rules: it can be a postcard of encouragement, a t-shirt from a previous event, a pen with their logo on it – just SOMETHING the nonprofit staff can hold in their hands, something that represents the design team in a personal way, something tangible.

Those are my ideas for getting more fun and a human touch back into this competition. The challenge is to come up with things that are free, simple, worthwhile to spend the time on, that teams won’t see as a burden, and that nonprofits won’t see as a waste of time. If something can’t be all of those things, it’s not going to work!

So, there’s my challenge. What are YOUR ideas? Remember those restrictions:

  • free
  • simple
  • worthwhile
  • not burdensome
  • not a waste of time

Please put your fabulous ideas in the comments section!

And if you represent a nonprofit, non-governmental organization (NGO), charity, public school, or any other not-for-profit, mission-based organization anywhere in the world, I hope you will consider participating in OpenAIR. Your organization gets a new web site that is accessible for people with disabilities, people who want to donate to your organization, volunteer for it, support it or otherwise participate it in some way. Imagine how being a more welcoming organization online will look to your current supporters and to potential donors! The sooner you sign up, the sooner you can start preparing for the competition, and the more support you will get. Although the deadline for signing up isn’t until the end of this year, if you wait that long, you miss out on more than three months of support and preparation for the event!

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Short-term deployments with Peace Corps & UNV

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From February 2001 to February 2005, I worked at the headquarters of United Nations Volunteers, in Bonn, Germany. Sometimes, people outside the UN would say, upon learning where I worked, “Oh, you’re just a volunteer?”

My UNV colleagues would get this comment too, and would visibly bristle at the idea that anyone would think they were a volunteer!  They would quickly assure the person that they were not merely a volunteer – they were, in fact, a fully-paid staff person with a UNDP contract!

By contrast, here’s how I would answer such a comment:

Oh, no, I’m not a UN Volunteer. I don’t think I’m qualified to be a UN Volunteer. I would probably be turned away if I applied. International UN Volunteers are experts in their professional field, highly skilled and experienced. I’m just an employee at headquarters, and my role is to support UN volunteers out in the field, doing amazing things.

A UNV HQ colleague was with me once when I said that, and her eyes became huge when she heard my response. Later, she told me she’d never thought of UN Volunteers the way I had talked about them, and that it had never dawned her that, in fact, maybe she wasn’t qualified to be a UN Volunteer either.

I know of two UNV HQ staff, both my colleagues and dear friends, who decided to apply to become international UN Volunteers themselves, were accepted into the UNV roster, and were deployed for two years to a developing country. Both of these colleagues worked in ICT. After those in-the-field experiences, they went on to be employees at other UN agencies, and I thought it was a shame UNV hadn’t worked hard to entice them back to HQ, as they would have brought a much-needed perspective to headquarters.

As I was leaving UNV HQ, where I managed the UN Online Volunteering service and helped manage the United Nations Information Technology Services (UNITeS), I decided to apply as an international UNV myself. I decided that maybe I had acquired the qualifications at last to be a UNV. I was delighted when I was accepted into the UNV roster – the UNV staff that decided which applications to accept were in Cyprus, I had no personal relationship with them at all, and there was no policy (and still isn’t) on automatically accepting UNDP staff as UN Volunteers. I was available only for six-month assignments, however, and those were, and are, few and far between. I interviewed for two such assignments – and didn’t get either. Which should just go to show you how competitive the process to be a UNV is. I eventually got a six-month UNDP gig in Afghanistan, but it was as a consultant, not a UN Volunteer.

Now, at this time in my life, I can no longer do a full six-month assignment, so I doubt I’ll ever deploy as a UNV. When you read about me going to abroad for a UN gig now, it’s for less than four months – like in Ukraine – and, again, it’s as a UNDP contractor (which I love – great colleagues, fascinating work and the pay is good).

But there is this part of me that still really wants to go abroad as a volunteer.

So, for more than two years, I’ve been watching listings at the Peace Corps Response web site. This is a program by the Peace Corps that places highly-skilled volunteers in short-term assignments abroad, from four to 12 months. It’s open to US citizens. I’ve been looking for an appropriate four-month gig and, at long last, I’ve applied for a position. I think it fits my expertise perfectly. But I also know that this is a highly-competitive program, and I may not even make the interview round. Still, it was fascinating to go through part of the Peace Corps application process. I’ve also been a reference for a friend that applied for the regular Peace Corps, so I’ve seen that part of the online process as well.

Fingers crossed!

One last note: the Peace Corps Response program, the entire Peace Corps program, and all United States Agency for International Development (USAID), are under threat of severe cuts by the current Presidential administration in the USA, as well as by current Congressional leadership. I encourage you to write your US Congressional Representative, your US Senators, national media and your local media, and let them know what you think of these proposed cuts.

April 20, 2018 update: Here is a blog by Jasmin Blessing, a UN Volunteer with UN Women in Ecuador. It is a really nice example of what effective volunteering abroad looks like.

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What effective short-term international volunteering looks like

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I’m not kind when it comes to discussions of pay-to-serve international volunteering. Most programs out there are voluntourism, focused on an unskilled volunteer paying to have a feel-good experience abroad, doing an activity that would be oh-so-much more effective by local people being paid to do it themselves, and spending just a few weeks somewhere – not at all enough time to make a sustainable, positive impact on local people or the environment. Voluntourism is primarily about the volunteer, not the people in the developing country, who would prefer to be paid to build a school for their children themselves, care for the community’s orphans themselves, help take care of local wildlife themselves, protect their own environment, etc.

That said, not all pay-to-serve programs are purely voluntourism: there are some terrific programs that require volunteers to pay their own way, such as Bpeace traveling business mentors and Humanist Service Corps (more on pay-to-serve programs I think are worthwhile here). There are also examples like this: students from the College of Engineering at Oregon State University going to Kenya to help a small village create a series of water projects to give them sustainable, ongoing access to clean water; the local Kenyan people benefitted from the project because they defined what they wanted, and they worked alongside the students so that they could take on more and more responsibilities themselves.

In contrast to pay-to-serve programs, there is the Peace Corps Response program, which is part of the Peace Corps, and that places highly-skilled volunteers in short-term assignments abroad, from four to 12 months. Participants do NOT pay to participate. It’s open to US citizens, and it represents what effective short-term international volunteering can look like: volunteering that’s focused on building the capacity of local people rather than just doing things for them.

In doing some research on the program, I found this terrific blog by Brenna Mickey, who did a four-month assignment in the Peace Corps Response program in Port Vila, Vanuatu, and whose experience represents what a short-term, effective volunteering experience can look like. It’s also a great example of what a tech-related volunteering gig can look like anywhere, at home or abroad. Her specific job title was web design and development consultant for the Ministry of Youth and Sports. Among other things, she worked

  • “as the project manager or product owner, creating a scope of work and requirements documents after meeting with stakeholders of the website, managing expectations and deliverables.”
  • “as an UX strategist, working with the department in the Ministry through card sorting, developing a site map together, sketching out wireframes and talking through user flows on our website.”
  • “not only as the designer of the site, but the developer as well. I taught myself a new content management system and dove in headfirst to writing responsive CSS and HTML5 instead of handing over my designs and CSS to the developers.”
  • “But most importantly, I worked as a teacher, making sure knowledge was transferred to my coworkers in Vanuatu during the web design process, including how to update the CMS after I left.”

Also, “I happened to be in town during another Peace Corps Volunteer’s project, which had been under development for more than two years. The SMART Sistas ICT Camp for Girls was a week-long camp where girls were brought to the capital and taught the fundamentals of informational technology. I was asked to teach an Intro to Web Design course during this camp.”

Please note that Peace Corps Response initiative, and the entire Peace Corps program, and all United States Agency for International Development (USAID), are under threat of severe budget cuts by the current Presidential administration in the USA, as well as by current Congressional leadership. I encourage you to write your US Congressional Representative, your US Senators, national media and your local media, and let them know what you think of these proposed cuts.

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