Monthly Archives: September 2024

The truth about working from home

A truth bomb from a Facebook group I follow, for people that want to work from home:

I am amazed at the amount of people who believe that work from home means that they can: stay home with their kids, do things around the house, leave the house to run errands, go shopping, etc. 
My wfh job we got two 15 minutes breaks, no lunch, could only leave our desk around 2 feet - the length of my corded headset and my supervisor literally told us if we were taking more than a FIVE MINUTE bathroom break we were stealing from the company!!!
The ones that think they can get away with having their kids screaming in the background are sadly mistaken because customers will call in and complain about you!  And the calls are listened to by management at any given time!!

Most work-from-home jobs are customer service jobs, for insurance companies, airlines, subscription TV services, etc., and you don’t work when you want: you have a fixed, strict schedule. And these jobs don’t pay well. The trade-off is, of course, that you get to work from home, but if you think you are going to be doing child care at the same time, think again!

I work from home most of the time, and I don’t have a strict fixed schedule: I work in marketing and press relations for one nonprofit, I manage the online community for another, and I pick up marketing or volunteer management-related gigs here and there. I work from home 90% of the time, and I don’t have a strict schedule: I can walk my dog when I want, for the most part, I can take a break to watch a movie on TCM if I have time in the middle of the day, I can sleep late some days… but I have to work real hours most every day, and I can’t have distractions while I’m working. The deadlines are real. And I have to be available for phone calls and emails from clients. As flexible as my schedule is, there is NO room in it for child care.

The myths around working from home are important to me for three reasons:

There are so many work-from-home scams out there. I have a plate on my web site about What Work-At-Home / Remote Jobs Look Like and how to avoid scams because there are so many scams (and so many people falling for them).

There are so many desperate people in developing countries that believe the myths about working from home, that think it’s work you can do with just a smart phone and you can do whenever you might have some time, that you don’t need a computer or absolutely perfect and fast Internet access. They are among the prime targets for work-from-home scams.

The myths about working from home are similar to myths about virtual volunteering: that volunteering roles online don’t require a schedule (they do – extra time for online volunteering does not magically happen), that the deadlines aren’t strict (they are – if you don’t do an assignment, it often leaves the nonprofit scrambling to get something essential done that they were counting on you for), that you don’t need any skills (you do), etc. Here’s a list of myths about virtual volunteering, from the Virtual Volunteering Wiki.

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

There are a LOT of parallels between working online from home and volunteering online from home. My book The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook is focused primarily on people who want to engage online volunteers, and covers how to create online roles, and how to properly onboard and support online volunteers during their engagement. If you are a manager of online employees, you might find it helpful. It’s available both as a traditional print publication and as a digital book.

If you have benefited from any of my 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.

Be careful using Canva – nonprofit graphics are starting to all look the same!

three cartoon people are jumping

I had never used Canva before August 2022. I’m not much of a graphic designer and would never be hired for such, but since I work mostly for nonprofits, I also usually don’t have a budget for a professional graphic designer, so I have to make due on my own. But my primary employer these days has an account with Canva and I’ve been able to use it.

Canva is really amazing and I use it often. BUT, I am also noticing something: a lot of graphics on social media produced by nonprofits and independent bloggers is starting to look the same. The drawn human images on Canva look very similar in style. And I live in a small community and I’ve seen one particular Canva design used by three different nonprofits for their galas – same image and colors.

Here are some tips for making your products produced via Canva unique:

  • Never use a template without a LOT of alteration. Add or change the graphics, change colors, change fonts, etc. Otherwise you risk having an image that looks almost exactly like someone else’s.
  • Never use photos from Canva. Use your own photos. Make sure your volunteers and staff have all signed photo releases, and use photos of them. Same for clients: make sure you have photo releases and, of course, that using their photos publicly is allowed.
  • Alter any ready-made images in your own designs. Flip some horizontally. Change the clothes colors for what the people in the drawings are wearing, for instance. Change skin tones. Change hair colors. If you can’t do this in Canva, use whatever graphic design software that came free on your computer to do it.
  • Follow nonprofits in your area on social media and read their posts regularly. This can help you avoid using similar designs.
  • Canva images tend to not be as diverse as you might need. It can be hard to find a family image with diverse members, for instance, or a family that might better represent a Latino family, a black family, a family where the mother is wearing a hijab or chunni, a family where the men are wearing a dastaar, etc. Or to find a classroom drawing with a diversity among students. I sometimes search for images representing a cultural group specifically so I can make sure my imagery of a family scene, a crowd scene, a classroom, etc. better reflects the community served by the local nonprofit I work for.
  • Standards in graphic design still apply when using Canva: you need to have excellent color contrast for text versus the text background, you need to have an overarching word, phrase or image, one that is bigger than everything else so that it draws in the viewer, you need to think about how you want someone’s eye to move across the graphic, the image should be easily and immediately understood, you need to make sure the graphic has all of the information needed or will be accompanied by the text of all that is needed, etc.

I’m not at all saying don’t use Canva. But don’t get complacent and confuse ease of use with good practice.