A followup to my last blog, where I whined that so many organizations charged with measuring volunteering in a region or country refuse to ask any questions related to virtual volunteering.
As I’ve said many times: when I do workshops on virtual volunteering, and describe all the different aspects of what online volunteering looks like, including microvolunteering, someone always raises a hand or comes up to me afterwards to say, “My organization has online volunteers and I didn’t even know it!” or “I’m an online volunteer and I didn’t know it!”
If you ask organizations, “Do you have virtual volunteering / microvolunteering at your organization?” most will say “No.” But if you ask the question differently, the answer is often “Yes!”
How would YOU ask the question of organizations to find out if they were engaging volunteers online?
Here’s one idea:
In the last 12 months, did any volunteers helping your organization work in whole or in-part offsite on behalf of your organization, and use their own computers, smart phones, notebooks (Internet-enabled devices) from their home, work or elsewhere offsite, to provide updates on their volunteering, or the results of their volunteering?
What is your idea for ONE question? Please post it in the comments.
Challenges to getting answers:
- There’s rarely just one person at an organization involving volunteers; often, several employees or key volunteers are involving volunteers, but there may not be one person tracking all of this involvement. So if you ask this question of just one person at the organization, you might not get an accurate answer.
- The word volunteer is contested. People will say, “Oh, we don’t have volunteers. We have pro bono consultants, we have unpaid interns, we have executives online, we have board members, but we do not have volunteers.” That means someone who is advising your HR manager regarding the latest legislation that might affect hiring or your overworked marketing person regarding social media, and offering this advice unpaid, from the comfort of his or her home or office or a coffee shop, won’t be counted as an online volunteer – even though they are. In fact, I talked to the manager of an online tutoring program who brought together students and what she called “subject matter experts” (SMES) together online for school assignments, but because it never dawned on her that the SMES were volunteers (unpaid, donating their service to a cause they believed in), she had no idea she was managing a volunteer program, let alone a virtual volunteering program.
This is not easy. I’ve been researching virtual volunteering since 1996 and, geesh, it’s still not easy! When does it get easier?!
How about: Does anyone every help your organization out, without expectation of payment, via phone, email, or other gadget?
Great try, Heather! Unfortunately, when I’ve asked that question that way, I get a “no” – but further conversation almost ALWAYS leads to finding out the board sometimes have online board meetings, there’s a pro bono consultant doing most of his or her work from home and using email and Skype to deliver that work or talk about it, etc.
Why can’t this be easy?
It does seem that defining the massive scope of the word “volunteer” is the biggest hurdle, by far. Asking someone to think through all the different types of folks who are involved with their organization or serve it in some way (without being employed by the organization itself) is more broad a question than most people reckon.
Perhaps it would be helpful to ask: Not counting employees, how many (rather than “did any”) people, who were involved in your organization in the past year, did some of their work off-site/helped without coming to your office? Followed up with: How many of those used the phone, email or some other gadget to get the job done?
Avoiding the word volunteer itself *might* help overcome some of the assumptions organizations make about their volunteer programs.
I empathize. Not an easy task. It’s like asking people to remember everything they accomplished last week. We know we should keep track. We know we can go back through our emails, but it’s gonna take some digging.