WIth movement limited, public gatherings banned and so many people on home quarantine, many nonprofits, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), charities, government programs and other programs focused on helping or enhancing our communities or the environment are on hold. Some offices are closed entirely.

But there are LOTS of simple ways to use this “down” time that will benefit your program and make your program even stronger when physical distancing is no longer required. Many of these activities will help in fundraising efforts later.

Here are 21 ideas. Please add more in the comments:

1. Make a list of your city, county, regional, state and national elected representatives and their contact info, if you don’t have it handy already. Going forward, you are going to always email these people about public events when your program starts having them again, and you are going to better advocate for your programs and all nonprofits, NGOs and charities as a result. An online volunteer could help you compile this info if you don’t have time.
2. Make a list of all the off-site places your organization has held events, including meetings, classes and workshops, in the last few years. Put this list on a GoogleDoc or other shared space and ask staff and volunteers to comment on them in terms of what they liked about them, what they didn’t, etc. As a result, you have a robust database of event and meeting sites for the future.
3. Make an archive of data you have always wanted to have handy: a list of every Executive Director your organization has ever had, or a list of every board member that has ever served, a list of every winner of a Volunteer-of-the-Year award you have given, a list of every major grant your program has ever had, etc. You can use past versions of your web site archived at the Internet Wayback Machine to access past info to the late 1990s (or ask a volunteer to do it). Such archives are great resources for institutional memory, to renew old contacts, to show your credibility, etc.
4. Look over old versions of your web site at the Internet Wayback Machine and think about pages and resources your program has gotten rid of over the years that might need to be brought back and updated. This is a project multiple people can work on, including online volunteers.
5. Find out the most-visited page on your web site, other than your home page. And what’s the second most-visited page? The third? What pages aren’t visited much, but should be? What can you do to make sure under-visited pages get noticed? Or should some pages be deleted per lack of interest, because they are so outdated, etc.? Compile this info and work with your web master or a volunteer to improve your site.
6. Are your policies and procedures up-to-date regarding confidentiality, safety and sexual harassment, including in terms of online activities? Research the policies of similar programs (most will be happy to share them with you if they aren’t online already). Online volunteers can help with research.
7. Define or revisit your organization or program’s Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) and their answers. Documenting this helps new employees and volunteers and helps guide our web site design and communications strategies. The best person to define your program’s FAQs is the person who answers the phone and your main email account the most. Ask that person the top 10 – 20 reasons people call or stop by your organization or email your organization. Also ask this person to whom he or she transfers the most calls, and then talk to that person/persons as well, asking him/her/them what the top 10 reasons are that people call or email them.
8. Do you have all of the information you should have on your web site for potential volunteers and for current volunteers? This is a great time to get your policies and procedures uploaded, an electronic version of your volunteer application posted (a volunteer can help you), photos of volunteers in action on the site, etc.
9. Research Facebook groups and Reddit communities (subreddits) focused on your geographic area and think about how you could better leverage them in the future to promote your events, share new volunteering opportunities, share any messages meant to influence the public about an issue, etc.
10. Create an online survey, or more than one: a survey to find out about the level of satisfaction of current volunteers (before lockdowns began) and where things can be improved, a survey of event attendees about what they would like to see in the future offered by your organization, etc.
11. Create an online discussion group for your current volunteers. You can use GoogleGroups or https://groups.io/ for free. If you already have such an online discussion group, create a question or discussion of the week: How could our web site be better to represent what volunteers do at our organization? What’s the most challenging thing you’ve faced as a volunteer and how did you address that challenge? What’s a skill or talent you have that most people don’t know you have? Share a photo of you “in action” as a volunteer.
12. Ask volunteers and clients to take a video of themselves on their smartphones or computers, something under one-minute, saying what your program has meant to them, why they think it’s valuable, etc. Tell them you will be using clips from these videos for a compilation video you will post on YouTube. Once you get enough footage, recruit a volunteer to knit these together, adding a title page, fade ins and outs, music, etc.
13. Get your Twitter lists in order.
14. Do you have raw footage of videos of events or training that aren’t shared with the public – but you wish you could do something with them? You could recruit volunteers to do things with such: make a one-minute or three-minute video with copyright-free music that offers program highlights, or to edit a video down to something that could be shared with the public.
15. Add robust descriptions to your YouTube videos: name of the video, a summary of what it is, the full name of your organization, names of people featured in the video, a web address for more information, keywords/tags, etc. This will vastly improve the findability of these videos.
16. Ask volunteers to caption your videos on YouTube so that people with hearing impairments and people who are in an environment where they cannot listen to them can experience them (YouTube will caption these automatically and then a volunteer can fix them).
17. Ask volunteers to transcribe your program podcasts so people can read them (not everyone wants to listen to them).
18. Ask volunteers to add alt text on all of your photos and graphics on your web site, making the site more accessible for people with sight impairments.
19. Get rid of all “read more” and “click here” links on a web site, replacing them with descriptive links, so that the web site is more accessible for people with disabilities (you can ask a volunteer to do it if you don’t have time).
20. Add appropriate titles in the title HTML for every page on your web site. This will improve Search Engine Optimization, improve accessibility for people with sight impairments, and means when someone types the URL (web address) of a web page into something like Quora, the correct title of the page will automatically show up.
21. Take a deep dive into expanding virtual volunteering, exploring how to use the Internet to support ALL of your volunteers, including your traditional, onsite volunteers, is via The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook, which I wrote with Susan Ellis. It is the most comprehensive, detailed resource available regarding virtual volunteering, and a copy of my book is far cheaper than hiring me to do a workshop!

And a reminder that there has never been a better time for your organization to launch immediate activities and roles for online volunteers. How they could help you with the aforementioned activities should be obvious. Here are even more ideas, from my last blog.

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