Monthly Archives: June 2012

Say it! Say it! “MANAGERS OF VOLUNTEERS”

Imagine you work with youth. You help a group of youth to develop skills or explore careers or improve their grades or appreciate the arts or practice an art form – whatever. Maybe you are a choir teacher or a Girl Scout leader or a tutoring program coordinator. There’s a big, national conference on working with youth coming up, and you think, great, I am so going to that! I want to get lots of tips to help me be a better leader and supporter of youth!

You arrive at the conference, and the opening speakers are all people who go on and on about how important it is to work with youth. Corporations that fund youth programs are lauded, youth are lauded, parents are lauded, politicians and celebrities that say Youth are great! are lauded – but no one ever mentions the people like you, that actually work with youth, that design and lead these programs and make them happen.

You didn’t come to the conference to be convinced to work with youth; you already work with youth. You know how great working with youth is. You have every intention of continuing to work with youth. You came to the conference to get the knowledge and tools you need to work more effectively with youth. And you were expecting for youth workers such as yourself to at least be mentioned on the first day of the conference.

That would be a really crazy scenario. But it’s how a lot of managers of volunteers feel about current national or international “volunteerism” conferences: these are focused on celebrating volunteerism, and that’s nice, but those that actually work with volunteers, that make that volunteer involvement happen, don’t get mentioned on the first day amid all the celebration of volunteers and the celebrities and politicians that love them.

Volunteers are not free. Volunteers also do not magically appear to build houses or clean up a park or tutor young people. In fact, successful volunteer engagement is absolutely impossible without someone coordinating all of the people and activities, training people, screening people, etc. – that person could be a volunteer himself or herself, it could be a paid person, it could be an employee on loan from a corporation, but make no mistake, that person, that volunteer manager, is real and absolutely essential – and deserves to be named at some point during the opening activities that kick off, say, the National Conference on Volunteering and Service?

After attending five of the national conferences on volunteering in the USA, I stopped attending (I think my last one was in 2004). By my last conference, I was tired of managers of volunteers being ignored amid all the celebrations of celebrities and politicians who think volunteers are so swell and magical, and tired of seeing and presenting the same workshops over and over. I was tired of my ideas for advanced volunteer management topics being rejected – organizers wanted only very basic workshops introducing the concept of virtual volunteering (a practice that by the year 2001 was already more than 30 years old!), if at all, and certainly nothing more advanced than that. I gave up.

It took the 2006 NetSquared conferences to remind me of what a conference for those that work with volunteers could be. Here’s why I loved that conference – it would be so great if those that organize the NCVS conference (which will be in Washington, D.C. yet again!) would read it, think about it, and rise to the challenge of presenting such a conference!

If they did, I would so be there….

Note: this blog is in response to a series of tweets by people associated with the NCVS who were miffed (maybe even outraged?) that the conference’s lack of recognition for those that manage volunteer programs was being talked about online. It’s a shame that, instead of listening and considering, they got defensive, even accusatory (apparently, because I wasn’t there, I’m not supposed to talk about it). It’s not too late to turn this into a win, to consider the criticism and really think about ways to take the conference to the next level – and to ensure volunteer managers are acknowledged. I’d be the first to publicly laud organizers if that happened.

How Yahoo could THRIVE

Leave a reply

Yes, this nonprofit management consultant is going to offer advice for a for-profit company on the ropes. I know it’s usually the opposite – corporations tell mission-based organizations – nonprofits, government agencies, schools, etc. – how they should do this or that. But there’s a LOT the for-profit world can learn from the mission-based world – and from very average computer users. And I’ve been a long-time Yahoo user – and have found myself migrating to other services, particularly over the last five years. Yahoo should listen to me!

Your mission

Let’s start with that word mission. Yahoo, what is your mission? Why do you exist, beyond to make money so you can pay staff and shareholders? I don’t know what your mission is. You need a clear mission statement that guides every business decision you make – and keeps you from engaging in activities that get you as muddled as you are now.

Yahoo home page & news search site

Let’s look at the Yahoo home page or the Yahoo news site in comparison to, say, your arch rival’s, Google’s home page or the Google news site. What I see when I look at your pages: a bloated mess. What I experience: memory-hungry sites that take forever to download unless I’m on the very best computer, sites that like some browsers but not others. Sites that seem to have no reason behind the design – my eye has no idea where to go. The experience is frustrating and confusing.

Your guiding principle in your redesign should be quick to download. Put posters up all over your offices that say lightening-fast to download. Test and retest the design on a variety of devices and operating systems. Download speeds need to be lightening fast for everyone, not just those with incredibly fast Internet connections and using the same tools as your web designers.

Your news site search also seems to be broken, and has been for many, many months: I’ve often heard breaking news on TV, or want to look up the results of a sports event that has been over for a few hours, even 24 hours. I’ve used your search site to find those results, and the results are, more often than not, not the latest. I’m tired of looking up the results of a game that’s long over and getting back stories published the day before the game ever happened. I go to Google and get the results I need. So – FIX THIS.

That said, the results page for your news site search has the kind of design the rest of your site needs: simple, easy to navigate, easy to read.

Yahoogroups

Yahoogroups is a far superiour platform for online discussion groups and online collaboration than LinkedIn groups or GoogleGroups. The web interface is much easier to read and navigate than those platforms – although it could use a refreshing upgrade (but not anything that will make it more bloated in terms of bandwidth!). I cannot count how many times someone tells me they need an online tool that will allow them to collaborate with remote staff or students, or allow members of a project to share a calendar, have a shared but publicly-private message space for a group or class, and various other features – when they say they want a basic cloud-based, file-sharing platform – and when I show them YahooGroups, they say, “This has everything I need! How did I not know about this?”

How did they not know about YahooGroups? You don’t advertise it. I’m a better advocate for this service of yours than you are!

In addition to all the advanced features, YahooGroups allows for group members who do not want to join Yahoo to receive and respond to messages via email – and, like it or not, there are still millions of folks who prefer to interact with online groups that way. That’s a major draw to YahooGroups among some folks I work with.

Push Yahoogroups! Have people talking about it at conferences and on various online fora where people are asking, “Where can I find a group that does this and this and this?” Advertise it on TV. Highlight organizations, families, and other groups that love it oh-so-much and are using it for so many different reasons.

Want to make money with it? I would happily pay a monthly fee to get rid of the advertising. I’m not alone. Offer an affordable rate – say, $100 a year – for a group to have all ads removed from the web site and from emails sent from the group. I’d pay that for my group, which I use to distribute my newsletter, Tech4Impact.

Yahoo IM

Interesting that most people I work with also have Yahoo IM, and have for years. Since my colleagues all use cross-platform IM tools (I use Adium), what platform we all have should be moot, yet so many of us are still on Yahoo. But that could change. Are you going to keep Yahoo super-simple to use and integrate with other IM platforms? Are you going to make it the fastest and most reliable, or are you going to bloat it up with features that will eat up bandwidth?

Yahoomail

I have my own domain name and, therefore, my own custom email address. Yet, I also have a Yahoomail account too: I like using it for ecommerce (for anything I buy online) and the spam filter rocks. And the text isn’t as tiny as Googlemail – and I’m so tired of tiny online text. Advertise Yahoomail!

Shine

Get rid of Shine. Or radically alter it.

I don’t want advice on shoes (unless it’s advice for motorcycle boots), I don’t read horoscopes and loathe any publication that thinks it’s what women want, and I need advice for saving money that has less to do with bargains at department stories (how to get that designer look for less!) and more to do with how to save money on utility bills, water bills, rent, gas, etc. Movie news is fun – but I would prefer information about the best places to go in Canada or Mexico for single women travelers, how to get started kayaking in my 40s, the realities of starting a dog-walking business, certifications offered through most community colleges that can help my career prospects, the easiest veggies to grow in a tiny space, etc. I want something that it fierce and funny and intelligent. Partner with the people behind the magazine Bust and do something that women would actually like to read every day.

YahooAnswers

YahooAnswers is NOT living up to its potential. It could be awesome. Instead, the same questions are getting asked again and again on YahooAnswers. Some version of I’m 13/14 and I want to volunteer in my hometown with animals. How can I do that? gets posted to the community service section EVERY DAY. YahooAnswers needs a FAQs, with answers. And you need to pay some experts to regularly monitor and answer questions in certain sections, to ensure people are getting quality answers. For instance, give PeaceCorps and Girl Scouts small grants to cover their staff time for spending a few minutes every day on YahooAnswers and answering questions regarding their respective organizations.

Flickr

QUIT MESSING WITH FLICKR. Photos already take up a lot of bandwidth – stop adding scripts and other “features” that make it even more bloated!

Get Personal

I never see your staff on TV being interviewd or offering commentary. I don’t hear about your staff doing something wacky, or philanthropic, or participating in take-your-dog-to-work day. I don’t see or hear them at the conferences I go to. I don’t see them hosting webinars to help different business sectors, including nonprofits, to get the most our of the Interwebs. You’re just this faceless company, a fortress, with web offerings that are, more and more, not what I want or need. I don’t see you sponsoring or participating in things like AIR events by Knowbility.

Who are you, Yahoo? How are you going to let me know who you are? Woo me, Yahoo. Woo me.

Do departments at your org hate each other?

Leave a reply

I once had lunch with a friend of a friend who worked at a very large, well-known company in Silicon Valley. She worked in the marketing department, and had been charged to create policies and activities around employee volunteering, product donations to nonprofits and schools, financial grants to nonprofits and schools, and all other philanthropic activities the company untertook, or wanted to undertake. Since I had run such a program at a Fortune 500 company in Silicon Valley back in the early 1990s, she wanted advice.

My advice was, more or less, this:

You’ve got this great resource already at your company, I’ve no doubt: it’s called the BNA Index. Your human resources department or your corporate library has it. It’s a series of notebooks that has samples of just about any policy or procedure you can think of. It’s frequently updated. I used its samples as models for the policies we developed at such-and-such company for all of our philanthropic activities. It’s awesome!

(note: BNA stands for Bureau of National Affairs, the early name of what is now Bloomberg BNA).

She smiled in a wow-that-is-totally-not-helpful way, and said, firmly, “The marketing department is in charge of our philanthropy activities, NOT the HR department. HR would really like to be in charge of it. So I’m not going to them. That’s out of the question.”

I gently pointed out that she didn’t have to tell the HR department why she wanted to see the BNA Index – just that she wanted to look up a policy. And that I didn’t see how telling HR staff what she was looking up would somehow give them the power to take the activity away from her. That just made her – well, kind of hysterical. The rest of the lunch was super awkward and we haven’t spoken since.

I wish I could say departments not getting along is unusual, but it’s not: I find this story again and again from people that work for corporations, as well as people that work with government agencies or nonprofits. I’ve encountered it at many organizations where I’ve worked as well. The siege mentality that so many individual departments have is unhealthy to the organization and counter productive to everything that organization is trying to accomplish.

I’ve always wondered: are executive directors of these organiations aware that departments within their own agency are refusing to work with each other? Not one to mince words, I have brought up such circumstances in meetings: “That’s a great idea. Do you think the IT department will support us though, because based on such-and-such incident, I’m not sure they will help out with this.” Awkward silence follows… but what’s funny is that the department in question is then usually shamed into helping because their past non-support has been talked about so openly and officially.

I look at fellow employees as my customers. They have needs, and part of my job is to support those needs. In any position, I look at the requests of fellow staff members as priorities, and I treat them as I would like to be treated. It’s but one of my many wacky approaches to working.

I’ve also suggested at several organizations that staff performance reviews include rankings of all departments by all other departments:

are the staff charged with evaluation providing your department the data it needs in a timely manner?
is the IT department supporting you with the tools and resources you need to meet your department’s goals in support of the organization’s mission?
on a scale of 1 – 10, with 10 being an absolutely perfect score, how would you rate the customer service of the human resources department?

I’ve been turned down every time…

Are you brave enough to explore how well employees, volunteers and consultants, grouped by department, get along with each other?

Before you create that online profile… do you want to keep it?

2 Replies

Each time you create a profile on any service — Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Twitter, whatever – you have to use an email address for that profile.

Choose that email address carefully, because it could determine whether or not you get to keep that profile once you leave your organization or agency.

More and more, staff members across organizations – not just the marketing department – are creating online profiles and participating in online groups and social media as a part of their work. An organization’s IT staff might be participating on the TechSoup Community to talk about their approaches to choosing hardware or tools to ensure system security. An agency’s human resources staff may be on an online community for other HR managers, to discuss the latest legislation and court rulings affecting the workplace. An agency’s program director may be on Facebook and Twitter to interact with people participating the agency’s services, classes, whatever.

When that staff member leaves the organization or agency, the tech waters can get quite muddy over who owns those online profiles. Often, it’s not the content of the profile that determines who owns such – it’s what email address was used to register that profile.

If there is any chance you will want to keep any online profile after you leave an organization, don’t register that profile using your organization’s email address.

In an article by Society for Human Resource Management, entitled, Ownership of Social Media Accounts Should Be Clarified in Agreements, Jim Thomas, an attorney with Minor & Brown in Denver (whose No Funny Lawyers Blog has been listed as one of the top 25 U.S. business law blogs according to LexisNexis) offers advice regarding company ownership of employee online activities. He notes in that article:

The clearest case for employer ownership will be an employee who uses other employees to maintain his or her accounts,” Thomas stated. “Beyond that, indicators will be use of employer e-mail addresses, employer standardized or coordinated formats (this is what your page should look like) or approaches to social media (coordinated campaigns); employer-provided photos and/or content; employer-provided passwords or passwords that are shared with the employer; employees who are allowed to use employer computers to use social media during working hours. Not that any one of these or even all of them will be dispositive.

The best advice is to have frank conversations with your supervisor, and to get clear policies from senior management, regarding who owns employee social media activities, and how accounts will be handled if you depart the organization. And you will have to have more such conversations and agreements every time your supervisor or senior staff changes, if policies aren’t in writing.

Pioneering in “hacks for good”: Knowbility

Leave a reply

Hackathons, hacks for good, hackfests or codefests are quite the buzz words these days.

There are a lot of new initiatives getting a lot of attention for mobilizing people with high tech skills to help various causes at individual events: these initiatives bring these people together to spend the day, or maybe a few days in a week, at computers, usually in one big room, with everyone using their skills to do good, eat some good food, take lots of fun photos of everyone in action, and celebrate the great work at the end of the day.

Good stuff. But one of the first organizations to do this, Knowbility, gets lost amongst the much better-funded, higher profile newcomer groups, and it’s such a shame, because more people really should get to know Knowbility!

Knowbility is a national nonprofit organization based in Austin, Texas that creates technology programs that support independent living for people with disabilities, including veterans. Knowbility’s signature event is its Accessibility Internet Rally (AIR) – a hackathon that brings together teams of web designers to learn about web design accessibility standards, and then to apply those standards in a competition to create web sites for nonprofit organizations. The result of an AIR event isn’t just a fun day and new web sites; all participants walk away with an understanding of web design accessibility standards they didn’t have before that they can apply to their daily professional work, and the volunteer teams, most of them from the corporate sector, learn about the unique work of nonprofit organizations, creating opportunities for better partnerships in the future.

Knowbility’s activities have earned all sorts of awards and recognition – like the Peter F. Drucker Foundation Recognition for Nonprofit Innovation. On September 21, 2000, the White House issued a press release to highlight programs across the country that are helping to bridge the digital divide for people with disabilities and Knowbility’s AIR event in Colorado was mentioned by President Clinton as a new and noteworthy initiative. And I’ll never forget when they got mentioned at the end of Oprah’s talk show, resulting in an onslaught of emails and phone calls and oh-so-much excitement.

Knowbility earns more than 60% of its revenue through fee-for-service offerings. But that means it still relies heavily on grants and donations. Knowbility is worth your financial support. I really want this organization to continue – more than that, I actually want this organization to launch more AIR events and other activities all over the USA, and beyond! Knowbility is worth your investment.

And if you have ever been involved with Knowbility in any way, consider blogging about your expereince, talking about it on your Facebook status update or Twitter feed or Google Plus profile or other social media profile, and linking to the donation page.

Here are some other blogs I’ve written about Knowbility:

Hackathons for good? That’s volunteering!

Volunteer online & make web sites accessible

Volunteer online with TechSoup

Leave a reply

I’m doing some work with TechSoup, a nonprofit based in San Francisco, and I’m recruiting online volunteers to help in two roles:

Wiki Contributor/Editor – online opportunity
This is in support of a wiki regarding Online Community Engagement. The goal of the wiki is to provide essential information and links related to online community engagement, particularly regarding the cultivation of communities of practice / knowledge networks. Please visit the wiki to learn more. We’re looking for one – three online volunteers ready to help with proofreading (correction of spelling, checking links, etc.) and adding resources. Volunteers should have excellent writing skills, be an expert at finding resources online, and be ready to see a task through to its completion.

Online Community Forum Subject Expert
Offer advice to nonprofits via the TechSoup online community forum regarding software use, database choices, using tech tools to engage and support clients, remote staff and volunteers, FOSS options, accessibility, building staff capacities, community tech center management, IT security – whatever your area of tech expertise! Frequent community forum participants may be invited to become community moderators, committing for at least three months (with possibility of renewal) to ensuring various forum branches have fresh information every week. Volunteers should have excellent writing skills and an understanding of how nonprofits use at least some aspect of computer or Internet tools.

These are virtual opportunities, and it’s not just for two volunteers – multiple volunteers can help in each of these roles.

Want to apply? In addition to the requirements already stated, you should also have a good understanding of how people and organizations communicate online, have excellent, reliable Internet access, commit to at least two hours a week (10 hours a month), and commit to at least three months in this role.

To apply, click on the volunteer role title and express your interest (via VolunteerMatch).

I’m happy to sign off on any paperwork a volunteer might need for a class. And if you want to call it an internship, I’ll be happy to call it such.

So, why have these roles been reserved for volunteers? Why do I want volunteers to help in these tasks?

Fresh ideas from volunteers – there’s just nothing like them. They are unfettered ideas. And such ideas are needed!
More involvement of volunteers means more opportunities for people and organizations to participate in decision-making – and this can create more ownership by the community TechSoup seeks to serve.
It provides opportunities for professional development; many people are looking for activities that will look great on their résumés, or for a university-level class that requires a practicum. This is a way to help a few folks in that quest – just as many of us have been helped along the way.

Here’s more about justifications for involving volunteers – something I think any organization to do before recruiting volunteers.

Nonprofits & volunteers – time to brag on Techsoup!

Leave a reply

There are a LOT of opportunities right now on TechSoup for nonprofit employees and volunteers to share experiences and offer advice. Here are some recent questions and topics oh-so-ripe for your comment:

Nonprofit looking for Best Practices for Gathering Emails, other Info from New Donors.

Nonprofits, libraries, universities, others using Moodle? There’s someone looking for advice from you!

How does your nonprofit, library, other mission-based organization deal with “bad” tech etiquette?

What’s your experience with ICTs for rural economic development?

A small nonprofit maritime museum books sailing trips – & needs software advice for reservations

Are you a nonprofit or volunteer using Ubuntu Linux?

Nonprofit that collects veterinary medical supplies seeks inventory management software for Mac.

Firing a volunteer over insulting musings on Facebook re: a nonprofit or library?

Software for Substance Abuse and Mental Health Treatment?

Nonprofits & libraries: are employees, #volunteers using Google Drive, iCloud, Dropbox, other cloud apps? Share!

Nonprofit with network question: Some entries in NPS logs are in Hex others in plain text. Help?

SMS Engagement for civil society, the humanitarian sector, nonprofits, government programs – your experience?