Monthly Archives: April 2022

Don’t over-invest in one social media channel: Redux (Twitter)

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In November 2021, I wrote a blog that warned nonprofits, NGOs, community groups, etc. not to over-invest in one social media tool – specifically Facebook. I wrote that blog because, when Facebook went offline in October of that year for about six hours, many organizations panicked: Facebook was their primary, even only, way of sharing up-to-date information with clients, volunteers and the general public – the organizations had either abandoned their own web sites and weren’t updating such much anymore and they used no other social media tools. That blog was a companion to another I’d written in 2019 exploring whether or not nonprofits should delete their Facebook accounts per Facebook’s reprehensible data mining, selling of data and unfettered spreading of misinformation and hate speech.

With the news that an extremely rich man who spreads medical misinformation, eschews philanthropy and efforts to address poverty and inequity, doesn’t treat his factory workers well, etc., has bought Twitter and will make it a “free speech” zone, removing its current community standards and probably restoring suspended accounts, many are thinking of deleting their personal or company Twitter accounts. And many folks are reeling from losing Twitter as we know it now, because they rely hugely on Twitter to get the word out about their work, to engage with others doing similar work, to network for jobs, etc. I am one of those people: while Facebook has been relatively useless for me professionally, Twitter has helped me sell my book, gotten me consulting gigs, gotten me invitations to speak at conferences and introduced me to so many amazing people I now call professional colleagues. It’s been more helpful to me professionally than any onsite, traditional conference I have ever attended in terms of networking, job leads and professional development. It’s been way more fun than Facebook personally as well: I have loved the social media challenges among museums on Twitter, the spontaneous poetry-writing events, and more very fun trending topics than I can count.

What to do regarding the Twitter dilemma? To stay could be seen as supporting the new owner, something that makes me very uncomfortable – and I’m not alone in that sentiment. And the reality is that, if he follows through on his plans, Twitter just isn’t going to be of value to me anymore.

Here’s what I’m doing in response to the potential changes at Twitter:

  • I acknowledge that, right now, stopping my participation on Twitter would be disastrous for me professionally. While Facebook has been largely useless for me professionally, Twitter has been a hugely important tool, for the reasons I’ve already stated, so I’m going to continue to try to squeeze some benefit from it until the changes come.
  • If Twitter goes in the direction that everyone is predicting – longer messages, adding suspended accounts back onto the platform (accounts that have spread misinformation, harassed people, etc.), not having rules about content, being a complete “free speech” zone, etc. – I’ll have to stop participating. I’m not sure if I will delete my Twitter account or just freeze it (just a last post to say where to find me).
  • Over the last three years, I’ve been investing more time in my YouTube channel and Reddit, as well as following my own advice and making sure my web site is always up-to-date, so that no one social media is my only outlet. I’m active on several LinkedIn groups as well, like the virtual volunteering group (which I own, actually) and ALIVE (a national group for managers of volunteers). You can follow me on LinkedIn (but note that I link only to those that I know professionally, that I could say something about you and your work) and join me on any of those groups. So, I’m already diversified, and will continue to do so, and hope that one of those platforms, at last, proves even half as valuable to me as Twitter has.
  • I’m always exploring other social media platforms. However, so far, the audience I want to reach professionally isn’t on TikTok, SnapChat, Instagram, etc. I’m on Signal, WhatsApp and Telegram, but I use those mostly for one-to-one communications, especially with folks overseas – the one group I’m on, for a nonprofit I volunteer for, is overwhelming and I’m not at all liking it. MeWe has never caught on with my colleagues (but you are welcomed to friend/follow me there).
  • I have a blog, which you are reading now. That blog is on my own web site, not on someone else’s web site. Twitter has been the primary of driver of readers to this blog (I post to Facebook and LinkedIn too, but those bring very little traffic to my blog). I’ll need to look for new ways to drive subscribers. Before you recommend RSS feeds – I would say 90% of the people that are my professional audience have no idea what that is.
  • I’m redoubling efforts to make sure anyone who visits me on any online platform knows where else to find me. This blog is one part of that effort. I’ve put in links to all of my other sites on social media – please subscribe / follow / and like if you are there too.

I’ll be watching what the people that I follow on Twitter do, as well as the people and organizations on each of my many wonderful, informative Twitter lists do, as far as posting about their work other than Twitter. I rely on my Twitter lists more than anything else to know who is doing what in my professional worlds – I have yet to find anything that even comes close to a substitution for that (I’m NOT gonig to subscribe to hundreds of email newsletters!).

What about going back to traditional avenues for networking and outreach: writing one-to-one emails, attending onsite conferences, buying advertising, etc. I don’t have the financial resources to attend onsite conferences, and as I’ve mentioned earlier, attendance has rarely lead to a book sale or a new gig. I don’t have the financial resources to buy advertising – and quite honestly, I can’t figure out Google Ads. As for email, I barely read email I receive – I know that what I send also often doesn’t get read (if it makes it past a spam filter).

Am I disappointed about Twitter? Hugely. If the changes that the new owner has threatened do come to fruition, I am going to lose one of the most effective and easy-to-use outreach tools in my toolbox, and I’m going to lose touch with so many, many people and organizations whose viewpoints and resources I value in my work.

This tweet is very representative of how many of us feel about the potential of losing Twitter as we know it, from Lainey Feingold / @LFLegal:

News about the Twitter sale is hitting me hard. What’s going to happen to #a11y and #DisabilityTwitter communities? Or the committed team at @TwitterA11y? I always say accessibility is global and some of that is because of this platform. Plus @twitter pals and chats Cheer me up!

But I’ve been here before:

  • Back in the early part of the new millennium, when USENET newsgroups started becoming overwhelmed with off-topic advertising messages. Soc.org.nonprofit was an incredibly important outreach tool for me for almost a decade, and ALL of my professional successes since 1994 can be traced back to my participation in that online community. I hated losing it. In some ways, I feel like Twitter was a return to those wonderful, well-connected days.

I’ve been on America Online, MySpace, GooglePlus and GoogleWave – those are all gone, at least in the form I used them. I left each of those because something better came along. I should be used to this situation by now… but I also have to say that, other than YahooGroups, no platform has ever been the powerhouse for my professional work that Twitter has been. And nothing better seems to be coming along.

So, this is yet another cautionary tale about over-relying on a social media platform. While you cannot use everything out there, you absolutely need to use a diversity of outreach tools. And remember: there are people who are going to interact online with your initiative only via Facebook, or only via Twitter, or even only via email. None of those audiences are more important than another for your nonprofit, NGO, etc. Make sure all of your clients, volunteers, donors and others are reminded regularly of all of your various online communications channels, including your online communities – and your web address!

What are you or what is your organization doing about impending changes at Twitter? Please share in the comments below.

May 3 update: A tweet worth sharing:

screen capture of a tweet
Tweet from Eoghan Beecher: Elon Musk’s taking over twitter has serious ramifications for nonprofits who’s role is to challenge power. Not because he’s cozy with the establishment – they all are, but because he’s proven to be incredibly petty, and that is a huge threat to activist community.

If you have benefited from this blog, my other blogs, 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.

The delicate challenge of warning volunteers & others going abroad about racism or sexism they may experience.

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I have been uncomfortable for many years with the lack of guidance about the specific discrimination black volunteers and black professional humanitarian workers face when they go abroad. I’ve seen the discrimination, firsthand: at airports, in restaurants, in shops and even on the streets in countries all over the world without many black residents – including Germany and Afghanistan. And I’ve heard so many first-hand horror stories from humanitarian colleagues about what they’ve experienced. Yet, when I’ve tried to find guidance on how to be an ally or guidance for people experiencing discrimination, I’ve found nothing.

So I was impressed that the Peace Corps starkly and specifically acknowledged this situation and was frank about just how much harder it can be for black volunteers – specifically for Ukraine, but the reality is that this warning would be valid for a variety of countries where the Peace Corps has, or used to, place members, including Russia. The Peace Corps recommends that the Black volunteers react to racism in various ways depending on the situation, choosing to “remove themselves” from the situation for their own safety, get help from other volunteers or staff, or practice and explore self-care or coping strategies. It’s similar to the recommendations for women humanitarian workers – or women travelers: when you are in a country where you may not be respected, you’ve got to be prepared to deal with ugly comments and ugly situations and you won’t have the resources you have in the USA (not that law enforcement in my country always takes a woman’s safety concerns seriously, but I digress).

This article in the Atlanta Black Star says “Some have rebuked the Peace Corps for not doing more to protect Black volunteers.” One person tweeted that the Peace Corps shouldn’t send black Americans “to a place like this where you know they’ll be racially abused” and claimed that the Peace Corps was placing “the burden of educating racists” on the shoulders of Black members.

I think it would be a terrible shame if the Peace Corps didn’t send black Americans to Ukraine or anywhere in Eastern Europe or Asia or anywhere else where there is not a large black population, or if the United Nations didn’t send black African professional humanitarians to Afghanistan or elsewhere in Asia and on and on. Absolutely, people need to be safe, and there has to be a consideration for what specific challenges an African, a woman, a trans person, a person of a particular nationality, and others may face in various countries – and it may mean not sending a great candidate somewhere because the security situation is just too tenuous for the person, specifically. But while the Peace Corps’ primary mission is to empower communities in underserved parts of the work, the corps is also intended to promote mutual understanding between citizens of the USA and foreign peoples. Black Americans are a part of the rich fabric that makes up the USA. You cannot understand this country without experiencing its very specific forms of black culture.

I’m going to continue to do all I can, including abroad, to be an ally. I stumble, sometimes I flounder, often I misstep, but I’m going to keep trying. And I hope everyone else will too, not only for Black Americans but for any person who might be targeted for insults, harassment, abuse or violence.

I’m also going to continue to try to encourage people, especially women, to travel abroad, while also offering realistic safety recommendations (and I’ve been criticized for my recommendations by women travelers who say they have never experienced any problems and I’m being alarmist. Sigh.).

When your perceived race, sexual identity, religion or nationality can put you in danger in a region, you have every right to know of the specific dangers you might face, and you have every right to reconsider going to that region. And when you feel insulted anywhere, you have every right to choose how you are going to react, based on what you think is the appropriate thing to do.

I know if I made a list of everything that has been said to me by local people where I’m living or working, targeting me as a woman or as an American, I would scare a lot of folks from traveling abroad. Sometimes, I have pushed back: I’ve sometimes expressed anger, I’ve sometimes expressed hurt feelings, and I’ve sometimes just walked away – it depends on how safe I feel and what I think the consequences might be. It’s all my choice to make. I hope that my reactions have sometimes helped to change some local people’s minds – but I can only do so much.

What do you think of its advisory to applicants about racism they may face? Share your thoughts in the comments.

For those who think the Peace Corps, or any other volunteering abroad or humanitarian agency, should “do more” to “protect” black volunteers & humanitarian workers, what would that look like? Share your thoughts in the comments.

If you have benefited from this blog or other parts of my web site or my YouTube videos 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.

The key to retaining volunteers

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Please, no more workshops called how to recruit and retain volunteers. Not unless each is about six hours long. Because to recruit volunteers is one function, but to retain volunteers – to keep volunteers beyond just a few days or weeks, to prevent sudden and frequent turnover – requires doing well in all aspects of effective volunteer engagement, and those aspects can’t be taught in an hour or two.

This graphic represents what I mean: if you have clear roles and tasks for volunteers, in writing, if you quickly onboard volunteers and ensure they are prepared for the role or task they will take on, and if you have excellent, appropriate support for volunteers during their service, you will retain volunteers:

And I believe that all of those functions frequently and regularly intersect – you cannot think of them as entirely separate activities.

If you aren’t retaining volunteers, if volunteers are leaving before they even start a task, or they are leaving soon after joining, the reasons probably lie in one of these three areas:

  1. they signed up to help but there was a big gap between that time and when you held your first meeting with them or got them started on a task,
  2. they did not have realistic expectations or understand what you expected because roles and tasks weren’t in writing, or
  3. they did not feel adequately supported or prepared for the volunteering role.

Another big reason for volunteers leaving is that they do not feel appreciated or that their service doesn’t seem to really be of value. I count that under support for volunteers, but you could certainly do an entire workshop just on that aspect of effective volunteer engagement (I certainly could).

Of course, the only way to know for sure is to ASK VOLUNTEERS WHO LEFT.

Also see diagnosing the causes of volunteer recruitment problems.

The principles of effective volunteer engagement, including identifying appropriate roles and putting them in writing, onboarding volunteers quickly and providing appropriate and regular support for volunteers are the basis for the recommendations detailed in The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook: Fully Integrating Online Service Into Volunteer Involvement. This is the most comprehensive resource anywhere on working with online volunteers, and on using the Internet to support ALL volunteers, including those you might not think of as “online” volunteers.

If you have benefited from this blog or other parts of my web site or my YouTube videos 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.

Ending Orphanage Volunteering (Webinar presentation – about 7 minutes)

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Sinet Chan of Cambodia shared her lived experience in a Cambodian orphanage, where she was placed when she was 10 years old after her parents died of AIDS in a presentation, about 7 minutes, that was given as a part of the “Beyond Institutional Care: Rethinking How We Care for Vulnerable Children” conference addressing the issue of care reform.

While at the orphanage, she was “badly neglected.” The orphanage was set up to attract foreign volunteers and donations, but the children rarely benefitted from this – children were denied food, medical care and education. She and other children were forced to do manual labor, and she and other children were regularly raped.

Sinet Chan’s own words are so powerful:

During this time, we had many volunteers and donors coming and going. We would always entertain them, singing them a song, and playing games with them, to encourage them to donate money… the volunteers were nice people trying to help us, but now I realize it was a form of exploitation: using children to generate funding.”

All the other children in the orphanage – they all had parents who were alive and they missed their families… all the coming and going of the volunteers and visitors then compounded our feelings of loss and abandonment. The love and affection we feel from the visitor initially feels nice. Some visitors and volunteers would come for one day, some for a few weeks, and some for six months or more. It was always very traumatic when it was coming time for them to leave. We would be very (unintelligible) and cry a lot. I think it is a trigger memory of the loss and separation we have all suffered already. Having adults coming in and out of our lives feels like we were constantly being abandoned. They would always say they were coming back but, they never come back.

I think the uncomfortable truth behind the reason why white people feel like they need to participate in voluntourism is they have a white savior complex. The white savior complex is caused by the unconscious belief in the incompetence of the people they are trying to help. That belief justifies why they feel they must come and do it for us, like building our house, digging our wells, saving our children…

So, in order to combat voluntourism white people must examine their unconscious bias and learn how to be a white ally instead of a white savior.

You can hear her entire presentation on YouTube:

Also see:

How to connect & engage with volunteers remotely – even when those volunteers work onsite

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Well before the COVID-19 pandemic, nonprofits, NGOs and other organizations that involve volunteers were leveraging a variety of tools to communicate with those volunteers, and understood that ALL volunteers are, at some point, remote: even if all of their volunteering service is provided onsite, much of the communications with them happens when they are in their homes or work places. For organizations that were relying solely on onsite meetings, physical bulletin boards in the break room and paper letters and paper newsletters, the pandemic meant they had to quickly catch up and implement new ways of keeping volunteers informed (not to mention engaged) and to hear back from those volunteers regularly.

How do you effectively communicate with volunteers remotely? It takes much more than email – though email remains oh-so-important:

Have a web site that has all the info current volunteers need.
Absolutely, you need information on your web site to entice new volunteers and a way for candidates to express interest in volunteering via that web site, whether via an application they can submit online or an email address of your manager of volunteers. But current volunteers also need information from your web site: the list of current staff members, the profile of your executive director, the history of your organization, evaluations of your programs, the latest news about your organization, etc. Volunteers need to have that central place they can go to for reliable, complete information about the program they support.

Keep your social media up-to-date & encourage volunteers to follow your accounts
Your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and other accounts shouldn’t be focused on just encouraging people to donate money; your social media channels should have regularly-updated information about upcoming events, the results of events that just happened, breaking news about your organization, etc. Your social media audience includes your CURRENT volunteers, and they need to be kept up-to-date about what’s going on so they can properly represent your organization while they are volunteering. Your social media should also talk about the cause: a nonprofit theater should be posting about how students involved in performing do better in school, a nonprofit animal shelter should be posting about studies that show how a family’s health can improve if they have a dog, etc. Again, this helps volunteers become better advocates for your organization, including in casual conversations with friends and colleagues.

Online Discussion Groups & Channels for Volunteers
Group emails are one-way communications and can result in replies from volunteers filling up your email in-box, with the same questions asked over and over. “Reply all” conversations become tedious and unwieldy. By contrast, using a private online group can allow you to communicate with all vounteers quickly and allow everyone to see the answer to a question they may have as well. This can include using Whats App, Signal or Similar Direct Messaging Apps in Volunteer Support & Engagement.

Building a team culture among remote workers
Coming together face-to-face, in the same room, does not automatically create team cohesion and a strong sense of team. Yet, many people think having online meetings automatically means it’s difficult for staff to have a strong sense of team. People feel a part of a team if they feel heard and included, whether online or off. And they will attend meetings and pay attention to those meetings if they feel the meeting is relevant to their work – on or offline. This resource offers ideas for live events, asynchronous events & activities that can build a sense of team among remote workers.

Recognizing Online Volunteers & Using the Internet to Honor ALL Volunteers
Recognition helps volunteers stay committed to your organization, and gets the attention of potential volunteers — and donors — as well. With the Internet, the Cloud, cyberspace, whatever you want to call it, it’s never been easier to show volunteers — and the world — that volunteers are a key part of your organization’s successes. This resource provides a long list of suggestions for both honoring online volunteers and using the Internet to recognize ALL volunteers that contribute to your organization.

Also see:  How to Immediately Introduce Virtual Volunteering at Your Program and Helping online volunteers stay engaged & energized.

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

If you want to learn even more about how to leverage online tools to communicate with and support volunteers, whether those volunteers are mostly online (virtual volunteering) or they provide service mostly onsite at your organization, and to dig far deeper into the factors for success in supporting online volunteers and keeping virtual volunteering a worthwhile endeavor for everyone involved, you will not find a more detailed guide anywhere than The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook. It’s based on many years of experience, from a variety of organizations. It’s available both as a traditional print publication and as a digital book.

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.