Monthly Archives: November 2020

Please share about your experience working with online volunteers

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If your nonprofit, NGO, library, school or other mission-based program is involving online volunteers, or if your business / corporation has a virtual volunteering component in its employee volunteering program, below is a list of public online spaces where you can share information about your program: what software volunteers use to check-in or communicate with you, what they use to collaborate with each other, what tools and techniques (IT-based or otherwise) you use to support online/remote volunteers, your successes, your challenges, etc. These are also great places to ask questions and for advice regarding virtual volunteering:

You can share exactly the same information across all three of those online communities because each of those communities reaches a very different audience – the Linkedin group reaches a mix of people at a variety of programs working with volunteers as well as corporate representatives and university students and faculty. The subreddit reaches a younger and mostly male audience that you probably won’t reach otherwise. The TechSoup community reaches a mix of nonprofit folks and tech-savvy people who care about nonprofits. In short, there is very little audience crossover on those three communities.

(note that only the Reddit group is for recruiting online volunteers; on TechSoup, you should use this forum to recruit online volunteers)

Why share publicly about your experience working with online volunteers, including challenges? It’s a great way to both brag about what you are doing – and what you are doing is worth bragging about – and to learn from others. No one has a monopoly on knowledge about virtual volunteering – everyone is constantly learning, including me – and this is how we can all learn together.

The reality is that there needs to be a much greater diversity of contributions to those groups regarding virtual volunteering and I’m NOT going to work forever. This call is also my effort to try to cultivate a greater number of voices talking about virtual volunteering – there was far, far more online discussion about it back in the late 1990s than there is now!

Full disclosure: I am a moderator for all three of those groups, and I’m also hoping to see emerging leadership such that I can hand over the reins on these eventually!

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

For much more detailed advice on creating assignments for online volunteers, for working with online volunteers, for using the Internet to support and involve ALL volunteers, including volunteers that provide service onsite, and for ensuring success in virtual volunteering, check out The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook. Tools come and go – but certain community engagement principles never change. You will not find a more detailed guide anywhere for working with online volunteers and using the Internet to support and involve all volunteers – even after home quarantines are over and volunteers start coming back onsite to your workspace. It’s available both as a traditional paperback and as an online book. It’s co-written by myself and Susan Ellis.

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. 

So much public health communications failure!

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Face with rolling eyes

I ranted back in April about the lack of public health messaging targeting teens and young adults, specifically, regarding how they are spreading SARS-CoV-2, the infectious disease which causes Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). I was told that such specific messaging was “unnecessary.”

I was right about the need for this targeted messaging… and I really didn’t want to be… and now we’re seeing the consequences, as young people quickly became, and still are, some of the most prolific spreaders of this virus, while most of them remain unaffected by such.

I have so hoped we’re all learning about how to best communicate about this global pandemic, particularly regarding prevention. But after the last four days, my hopes have, once again, been dashed.

Here’s a first-hand account of just how bad communication and contact tracing is across corporate HR departments and across city and county health departments in the USA – from my current home in the Portland, Oregon metropolitan area:

Someone in my household got exposed to COVID-19 by a co-worker 11 days ago. He found out about the exposure on Friday – day eight after exposure. He came home and we implemented our quarantine protocols (yes, we have them!), retreating to divided-up spaces of the house (his part and my part), him wearing a mask at all times etc.

No one told him to, but he made an appointment with Kaiser, our health care provider, to get tested for SARS-CoV-2. He got tested the next day, nine days after exposure. He got his results – “undetected” – on day 10. He continued to stay home on day 11, today, despite some in his workplace implying it’s okay now for him to come back.

We have waited for our county public health office to contact him with whatever they need to contact him for. That’s how contact tracing works, right? He finally heard from a Multnomah County person on Day 11, yesterday, who said, “Oh, you know, I shouldn’t be the one contacting you, it should be Washington County” (where we live).

The representative also told him he had to quarantine until December 4, and he asked WHY!? She said she had down in her records that he was exposed on Friday. He explained that he was exposed a week ago Thursday, 11 days ago. She corrects her records and then says she has a letter for him for his employer, but she can’t send it – she’ll have to send it to Washington County and they will send it to him.

That same night, on Day 11, his doctor texted him to tell him his test was negative – which he knew from an earlier message on Sunday (Day 9).

Neither his company’s HR department, nor Kaiser, nor the Multnomah County Health Department ever told him about these official guidelines for our area on what to do after you get tested. I saw a link to the guideline on a friend’s Facebook newsfeed on Monday morning – that’s the only reason we know about such.

So, in sum: his company failed (wrong date on exposure, wrong date on when to return to work, never told him about the official guidelines for what to do after being tested), our health care provider/testing site failed (never told him about the official guidelines for what to do after being tested), and two health departments have failed (the wrong one contacted him, contact was not at all timely, and no representative ever told him about her own department’s official guidelines for what to do after being tested).

What didn’t fail? Face masks and social distancing. It’s why he doesn’t have COVID-19. It’s why I don’t either.

There is a global pandemic going on, hospital rates are soaring, infection rates are soaring, and if this is how it is, not just in the Portland, Oregon metro area but across the USA, this is part of why: information isn’t timely and complete, accurate information isn’t being distributed. None of the aforementioned, with the exception of the timeliness of the public health department finally reaching out, can be attributed to lack of money nor lack of time.

We’re hopeful that he’ll make it to day 14 – Thanksgiving – without developing symptoms, and that if he does have it, I don’t. We’re thankful to still be able to work and that we have a home big enough for quarantine protocols. But, yes, I’m frustrated! There’s no reason not to do better regarding public health communications!

supporting your stressed-out team without falling into toxic positivity

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Because of the global pandemic and the drastic way our work, volunteering and social lives have been altered, volunteers are stressed. Employees at nonprofits are stressed. Consultants at nonprofits are stressed. WE’RE ALL STRESSED.

The changed types and degrees of workload, the increased demands on most nonprofits, the dire financial crisis at most nonprofits – it’s causing anxiety to be at an all-time high.

“The onslaught of bad news is so relentless, it begs the question: How do we cope with it all?” Also, “positivity that isn’t grounded in reality… can actually poison your expectations,” as this article from October 15 from Fast Company notes. The article, How to inspire your team during a crisis without falling into toxic positivity, also offers realistic advice that can be helpful in your work with volunteers (and everyone). It’s written by the CEO of an agriculture tech company.

Also see:

How not to treat volunteers: another saga.

Your right to turn away volunteers who won’t adhere to safety measures (& your right to refuse to volunteer at an unsafe program).

You do not need to meet via video conference with every potential volunteer.

A senior neighbor with intellectual disabilities gets an iPad

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I live two doors down from a home for adults with intellectual disabilities, most of them over 40 years old. Some residents are on the autism spectrum, some have Down’s Syndrome, and some have brain damage from birth. They are terrific neighbors: kind, observant and friendly. And a couple of them are my friends: we sit together on the low wall around my front yard and interact with my dog and the various neighborhood dogs and cats that pass by – and the people, but always from a safe distance, as this is a group of people who are particularly vulnerable to the novel coronavirus.

Because of the danger of COVID-19, most of the residents can’t do the daily things that have brought them joy: one that had a job has now lost it because there isn’t enough work. They can’t go to church. They can’t go to the bottle drop center to recycle bottles and cans, something they enjoyed as much for the social aspect as the money. They can’t walk through Goodwill or Walmart. They can’t take mass transit. There are no public festivals. There are few garage sales. And their favorite shows, Live PD and Cops, have been canceled.

A month ago, a sister of one of the residents I’m particularly close to decided to buy him an iPad, so he could watch the church services he’s dearly missing because of the global pandemic, as well as watch videos like the dog videos I regularly record and share on YouTube. I volunteered to try to set it up in such a way that her brother could more easily navigate it. My goal was that, once someone logged into the iPad for him, he could watch the videos he wanted to without someone having to load a video each time. What I imagined was that there’s a particular time of day – let’s say 10 a.m. – when a staff person would log on to the device for him and, from there, he would have just a few clicks to watch and re-watch the videos pre-selected for him, and he could do that for, say, an hour on his own. It was tough to set up: he cannot read, so everything has to be done by easy-to-recognize icons. I don’t think he can remember more than two steps on a device. There can’t be too many things to click on – it will just be a sea of confusing symbols. He’s over 70 and has no experience using any device other than turning a device on or off or changing TV channels manually (he can’t use a remote and a phone is much too complicated for him to operate, even to call someone).

I spent hours looking at the Internet trying to find apps he would enjoy as well, but all seemed too advanced for him. Everything I read about online about apps that people with intellectual disabilities can use required a level of remembering and understanding and reading he just doesn’t have. There are lots of resources for parents to find apps to help their children with intellectual disabilities use an iPad or Android, and there are lots of resources to help people help elderly people use these devices, but resources to help seniors with intellectual disabilities use these devices? THAT has been a fruitless quest.

Here’s how I set it up:

  • I made three web pages, which are on my own web site, so that I can change them from my own home, without having to take his device back. I have a shortcut to the home page for these pages on the iPad, in the top left corner of the main screen. I wish I could have made the icon a cat or a dog, two images he easily recognizes, but I never could figure out how. The icon also has his name on it, which he does recognize.
  • I made the icons on the iPad as large as I could (and even then I wish I could have made them larger).
  • I moved all the icons off the first screen that I don’t want him to use. I left the icon to the web page that I created as his main interface, as well as the shortcuts to YouTube, kids’ YouTube, FaceTime, Zoom, his contacts and the camera button.
  • I created accounts for him on Google (for YouTube and gmail) and Facebook, and automatic logins for such. He will not use email, but he needed an email account in order to have accounts on things like video-conferencing software his sister might want to use to communicate with him.
  • After someone signs him in, he clicks on the icon with his name on it and he will come to a web page with three photos on it. One is of his church, one is of his pastor and one is of me. If he clicks on the church photo, he goes to a long list of links that go to church videos on Facebook. If he clicks on the photo of his pastor, he goes to a long list of links to videos his pastor has made, some on Facebook and some on YouTube (singing, puppet ministry, etc.). And if he clicks on the photo of me, he goes to a long list of my animal videos and silly videos on YouTube. He clicks on a link and pushes the play icon, and can watch the video.

Here’s the problem: after the video is done, he doesn’t have the capacity to navigate Facebook or YouTube and go to the next video. Instead, he has to remember to push the home button at the bottom of the device. Then he starts all over: clicking on “his” icon, coming to the web page with the three photos, choosing which “channel” of videos he wants to view, and then choosing a video to watch.

So, how is it going? I can’t observe him using it, and I wasn’t able to train him myself on using it. But in the evenings, I have been sitting out on my wall, talking with the pastor’s wife sitting eight feet away, and my neighbor has come walking over to say, “I saw you on that box thing!” He then recounts seeing her or her daughters singing or her husband preaching. I don’t know how often he watches videos on it, but it seems to be enough to delight him a few times a week. And as we all stay home day after day, being delighted a few times a week is the best we can hope for.

I hope it continues to work out for him. But either no one is thinking about people like him in the development of apps and interfaces, or they are but they’ve made those tools extremely hard to find.

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. 

Online Harassment Field Manual

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PEN America is a 501(c)(3) organization based in the USA. Founded in 1922, PEN America works to ensure that people everywhere have the freedom to create literature, to convey information and ideas, to express their views, and to access the views, ideas, and literature of others. Its members are a nationwide community of more than 7,200 novelists, journalists, nonfiction writers, editors, poets, essayists, playwrights, publishers, translators, agents, and other writing professionals, as well as devoted readers and supporters who join with them to carry out PEN America’s mission.

Writers and journalists, particularly women, are facing unprecedented levels of online hate and harassment. PEN America has created an Online Harassment Field Manual that has strategies and resources that writers and journalists, their allies and their employers can use to defend against cyber hate & online abuse. I have found it very helpful.

Manual chapters include: 

  • Prepare for Online Harassment – Tactics, tips, and guidelines for protecting your online presence and accounts
  • Respond to Online Harassment – Strategies for response, including assessing threats, navigating social media and email, deploying cyber communities, and practicing counterspeech
  • Practicing Self-Care – Advice for practicing self-care and maintaining community during online harassment
  • Legal Considerations – What to expect when turning to law enforcement during online harassment
  • Requesting and Providing Support – How-to guides and helpful information for targeted writers, their allies, and their employers
  • Learn More about Online Harassment – What is online harassment, what forms does it take, and why is it a free expression issue?

I highly recommend this manual. Read it even if you are not being insulted or harassed online. Even if you don’t think you will ever be thus targeted, even if you think being insulted or harassed online wouldn’t bother you, even if you don’t have any public social media activities (you aren’t on Facebook, you don’t blog, etc.), but you do produce content in some way, or you oversee staff or have co-workers that produce online content, you need to read this.

On a related note: there’s also this resource from the Women’s Media Center: Online Abuse 101. It’s a primer on targeted online harassment. “The purpose of harassment differs with every incidence, but usually includes wanting to embarrass, humiliate, scare, threaten, silence, extort or, in some instances, encourages mob attacks or malevolent engagements… Online harassment can be a steep tax on women’s freedom of speech, civic life, and democracy.” 

And if you haven’t in a while, check-in with whoever manages your social media and make sure they are okay. Ask them what sort of negative comments get thrown their way. They need to know that senior management supports them.  

Also see:

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. 

NYT spotlights how seniors are volunteering virtually

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The New York Times, in a story last week, says “Older adults, particularly vulnerable in a pandemic, still work for their causes, but primarily from home now”, via virtual volunteering.

The story notes what all of us that work in or with nonprofits know so well: in March, the health risks of in-person contact brought in-person volunteering to an immediate halt at many programs, particularly for seniors / the elderly. Volunteers are the lifeblood of many nonprofits and other community programs,, but the pandemic has created major barriers to volunteer participation, especially for older people, who face a higher risk of serious illness or death if they contract the coronavirus. As a result, many seniors have pivoted to virtual volunteering, and some of these elderly volunteers are finding themselves devoting even more hours each month to their causes now.

The story profiles two senior volunteers who are doing more virtual volunteering because of the pandemic, and what they are doing as online volunteers:

Before the pandemic, Paula Brynen devoted 15 hours a month to various causes, including arts groups and a volunteer recruitment clearinghouse. For instance, she volunteered onsite for the local chapter of the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, volunteering that is especially important to her, having survived leukemia in 2011. She used to help with the setup for the annual fund-raising walk; now, she focuses on fundraising phone calls. Opportunities with arts groups have disappeared for her for now, but she has several new projects, including working as a mentor with Table Wisdom, a St. Louis-based nonprofit that matches older adults with students and young professionals in the United States and abroad who need career advice and help with English-language skills. She connects each week via Zoom with a young environmental engineer in Colombia who is hoping to advance her career by improving her English. Ms. Brynen is also volunteering for Democratic candidates in the November election, and she recently helped a graduate student in psychology complete her training by serving as a sort of virtual guinea pig, doing sessions as an art therapy patient.

Barbara Lewers is a 79-year-old New Yorker who spent two afternoons every week volunteering at Senior Planet’s center in Manhattan before the pandemic. When Senior Planet, a program of the nonprofit Older Adults Technology Services and which helps older adults learn to use technology. shifted its work completely online, Ms. Lewers shifted, too. A retired advertising creative director, she has volunteered in a program that makes check-in calls to older New Yorkers. She has also helped with a program that has deployed 10,000 tablet computers to older low-income residents in city housing, helping to train people how to use them.

The Times article notes that technology can be a barrier for some older adults, who can be less likely to use the latest technology, according to the Pew Research Center; for example, last year 59 percent of Americans age 65 and older had broadband internet connections, roughly 20 percentage points fewer than those in younger age groups. Efforts to help seniors use online tools are noted now almost every week on the TechSoup online community forum (do a search for the world senior, click on forums, sort by date).

I am not surprised at all that the online volunteers profiled in this NYT story are people who already had an established relationship with the nonprofits they are now helping as online volunteers – that’s something that’s usual for online volunteers even when there isn’t a pandemic going on (as noted in The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook). I’m not surprised that these experienced, traditional volunteers are finding themselves spending MORE time as online volunteers. I am very glad the article spotlighted senior citizens as the online volunteers in this story, not just as the recipients of service. I just wish this story had talked to more nonprofits about how they are creating activities and roles for volunteers, what challenges they are facing, etc.

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

For much more detailed advice on creating assignments for online volunteers, for working with online volunteers, for using the Internet to support and involve ALL volunteers, including volunteers that provide service onsite, and for ensuring success in virtual volunteering, check out The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook. Tools come and go – but certain community engagement principles never change, as this Times article confirmed! You will not find a more detailed guide anywhere for working with online volunteers and using the Internet to support and involve all volunteers – even after home quarantines are over and volunteers start coming back onsite to your workspace. It’s available both as a traditional paperback and as an online book. It’s co-written by myself and Susan Ellis.

Also see all of the blogs I’ve developed JUST THIS YEAR to help nonprofits quickly launch online roles & activities for online volunteers and to deliver their programming and services online:

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.