Author Archives: jcravens

About jcravens

Jayne Cravens is an internationally-recognized trainer, researcher and consultant. Her work is focused on communications, volunteer involvement, community engagement, and management for nonprofits, NGOs, and government initiatives. She is a pioneer regarding the research, promotion and practice of virtual volunteering, including virtual teams, microvolunteering and crowdsourcing, and she is a veteran manager of various local and international initiatives. Jayne became active online in 1993, and she created one of the first web sites focused on helping to build the capacity of nonprofits to use the Internet. She has been interviewed for and quoted in articles in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and the Associated Press, as well as for reports by CNN, Deutsche Well, the BBC, and various local radio stations, TV stations and blogs. Resources from her web site, coyotecommunications.com, are frequently cited in reports and articles by a variety of organizations, online and in-print. Women's empowerment and women's full access to employment and education options remains a cross-cutting theme in all of her work. Jayne received her BA in Journalism from Western Kentucky University and her Master's degree in Development Management from Open University in the U.K. A native of Kentucky, she has worked for the United Nations, lived in Germany and Afghanistan, and visited more than 30 countries, many of them by motorcycle. She is currently based near Portland, Oregon in the USA.

Survey for Returned Peace Corps Volunteers Re: Safety

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A followup to my blog from back in January, Peace Corps must better address assaults and murders of members, which talked about the USA television network 20/20 piece about women Peace Corps members who were sexually-assaulted while serving abroad, and how these women’s needs both before and after these crimes were not addressed by the Peace Corps. You can view the interviews with some of these former Peace Corps members here. 20/20 also did a profile of a slain Peace Corps volunteer, Kate Puzey, who was murdered after the Peace Corps leaked her name to a suspect she had accused of sexually abusing children. You can view part of the story here.

Among the women interviewed on the program was Casey Frazee, whose story and request for change were first published in the Winter 2009 issue of the National Peace Corps Association’s (NPCA) WorldView magazine.  A follow-up blog post was published in September 2010. She formed an ad hoc group, First Response Action (FRA), that “advocates for a stronger Peace Corps response for Volunteers who are survivors or victims of physical and sexual violence.”  The group envisions “a Peace Corps with policies that reflect best practices in all areas of training, prevention and response.”  FRA is currently conducting a survey of current and Returned Peace Corps Volunteers about their experiences during sexual assault training in the Peace Corps. 

NPCA also offers the following information about Peace Corps Resources on Safety and Security:

If you have experienced sexual assault or safety and security issues during your Peace Corps service, here are some resources from the Agency:

  • As noted on the Peace Corps website, Peace Corps works in some of the least developed countries and in some of the most remote areas in the world, therefore health, safety, and security risks are an unavoidable part of life and of Volunteer service. Peace Corps has gathered the key points about Volunteer safety and security on the following website page:  Safety and Security in Depth for Family and Friends.
  • Although the Peace Corps is not authorized by law to provide medical care or counseling to Returned Peace Corps Volunteers, all Volunteers who leave Peace Corps service after having been the victims of sexual assault are eligible for counseling under the Federal Employees Compensation Action (FECA), the workman’s compensation program for federal employees, under which Peace Corps Volunteers are covered.  Peace Corps offers three counseling sessions following sexual assault to serve as a bridge for Volunteers until they can arrange counseling under FECA, with the cost paid by the Peace Corps, not the Volunteer.  FECA is administered by the Department of Labor. Full information on FECA can be found here on the Peace Corps website.

I’m going to continue to monitor how Peace Corps responds to complaints about the safety of its members, particularly women, and continue to post updates here on my blog. To be fair, such information is not available about other volunteer sending organizations, at least than I can find. If you have a heads up about such information, please let me know.

More on the UK’s Big Society

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David Cameron, the prime minister of the UK does not like all of the criticism of his plan to cut government funding and replace paid staff in schools, transportation offices and other public offices with volunteers, under the guise of getting more people more involved in their communities. He defended his program. And then came this outstanding response.

Here’s my previous blog on the UK’s Big Society efforts, with lots of links to the building backlash and government missteps regarding this effort.

Even if you don’t live in the UK, if you work in the nonprofit or government sector, you need to be staying up-to-date about what is happening in the UK regarding this issue!

volunteer online & make web sites accessible part II

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Comedian, writer, broadcaster and prolific tweeter Stephen Fry is backing a new campaign in the U.K. called Fix the Web, launched to tackle the problem of inaccessible websites. The project aims to have 10,000 online volunteers within two years, all reporting problems regarding web site accessibility for people with sight impairments (not just people who are legally blind, but people who wear glasses – like me!), hearing impairments, mobility issues, and other disabilities back to web site owners to get fixed.

And as I reported earlier, Knowbility is hosting a terrific online event, AIR Interactive, that gives online volunteers a chance to either

    1. create an accessible website for a musician or arts web site of your choice and submit the URL by March 5th.

OR 

  1.  choose from these sites and critique the accessibility features and redesign one page for accessibility. Submit by March 5th.

AIR-Interactive participants help ensure that as arts go online, rich cultural experiences can be enjoyed by everyone – including people with disabilities. Online volunteers need to register and then access online tutorials. There are two call-in conferences for participants to receive live consultations. The AIR Interactive event also allows anyone with Internet access to participate and is another a great example of virtual volunteering. So far teams from Manchester in the UK, Mumbai India and Buda, Texas have joined (in addition to Austin, ofcourse).

One caution about both of these online volunteering opportunities: they take real time. It is so easy to say yes to volunteering via the Internet that many people sign up to do so before really considering their schedule. Most volunteers who take this approach end up never having that spare time originally envisioned and do not complete an assignments they committed to doing, leaving the organization scrambling to get the work done by others. Saying yes to virtual volunteering but then not completing an assignment also affects the organization’s view of online volunteers: staff may decide online volunteers are not trustworthy nor reliable, and challenge or even halt attempts to expand virtual volunteering at an organization.

So please DO sign up for either of these virtual volunteering activities. But also be sure reserve some time to actually get the activities done!

Advanced Volunteer Management Retreat in New Zealand May 25-27, 2011

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The 2011 Australasian Retreat for Advanced Volunteer Management will be held in New Zealand for the first time, in partnership with Volunteering New Zealand. The retreat takes place May 25 to 27, 2011 in Wellington.

If you are working with volunteers in New Zealand, there’s no question that you should look into attending this conference. People working with volunteers in Australia, Papua New Guinea, East Timor, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, or anywhere else in the region should also consider attending this conference. But note that this conference is not open to just anyone: this is an advanced retreat, limited to just 52 participants who have a minimum two year of ‘hands on’ experience managing volunteer programs.

Accepted attendees must agree to attend the retreat in its entirety. If you wish to attend, you fill out an online application via the web site, which will be vetted by an independent panel of managers of volunteers. In most cases, a decision will be made about a person’s attendance within 72 hours of submitting an application. The application asks questions about what you want to learn at the retreat, what specific experiences, skills or resources you have to offer others at the retreat, what would you like to gain from the retreat, etc.

I really cannot emphasize enough the advanced nature of this retreat:

    • This isn’t how do I recruit volunteers. This is how have you created a diverse volunteer corps? How do you reach new groups as volunteers? Here’s what I’ve tried myself.

 

    • This isn’t I don’t have enough time to use the Internet to support and involve volunteers and am tired of people telling me I should do it. This is here is what I am already doing to use the Internet to support and involve volunteers. What are you doing? What works? What doesn’t?

 

    • This isn’t what should be on my volunteer application? This is what might I be doing that’s turning great volunteers away from my organization? Do I need to change the way that I work?

 

    • This isn’t how do I say thank you to volunteers? This is how do I move volunteers into critical roles that involve decision-making at my organization?

 

  • This isn’t give me the safe, easy, quick way to deal with this volunteer management issue. This is push my boundaries, give me new ways of thinking, challenge me, scare me, inspire me! 

There are discussions. There are disagreements. Tears may be shed. But there is also a lot of laughter, a lot of ah ha! moments, lots of encouragement. If you are ready for the next level of volunteer engagement, this retreat is for you.

There is nothing like this retreat in the USA, unfortunately. Which is particularly sad since I believe that organizations in the USA are doing the most innovative, exciting things regarding the involvement of volunteers in the world. But there is no conference here in the USA that captures and shares those innovative experiences; our volunteerism conferences are the usual, with corporations telling nonprofits how they should operate, celebrities talking about all the great volunteering they do, large, traditional organizations talking about experiences and resources that aren’t at all possible for small nonprofits, and everyone having the same old same old discussions. Conflict is avoided, debates discouraged.

I was honored to be the keynote speaker at this advanced retreat last year in Australia, and to then travel across the country presenting intensive workshops on trends in volunteer management, diversifying volunteer ranks, and, ofcourse, using the Internet to support and involve volunteers. Here are my blogs from that experience, which reflect the level of discussions that happen at the retreat “down under”:

Are You a Member of the Cyber Sweatshop?

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One of the most contentious discussions ever on OzVPM, an online discussion group for volunteer managers in Australia and New Zealand, was whether or not it was appropriate for people to volunteer for for-profit companies. The discussion started with a question on April 7, 2010, and it exploded with 221 messages for the month, on a group that averages about 35 messages in a month. Boundaries were pushed. Tempers flared. Teeth were gnashed. No conclusion was every reached.

Of course I was in the middle of it all. I said that, indeed, volunteers already DO contribute to for-profit organizations. I talked about volunteers in for-profit hospitals and for-profit hospices. I talked about volunteers at a recent Triumph motorcycle event I had attended. I talked about how these companies didn’t involve volunteers to save money; they involved volunteers because volunteers were the best people for the jobs. I also brought up that at least 90% of the content on Facebook was generated for free by users, meaning that we were all volunteering online for a for-profit company.

A year after I was bringing this up in workshops and online, The New York Times has thought of it as well, publishing a commentary, At Media Companies, a Nation of Serfs, which laments:

the growing perception that content is a commodity, and one that can be had for the price of zero… Old-line media companies that are not only forced to compete with the currency and sexiness of social media, but also burdened by a cost structure for professionally produced content, are left at a profound disadvantage.

Journalists aren’t happy. “The technology of a lot of these sites is very seductive, and it lulls you into contributing,” said Anthony De Rosa, a product manager at Reuters, in the article. “We are being played for suckers to feed the beast, to create content that ends up creating value for others.”

This isn’t the first time this concern has been vented, and that a backlash has been built against an online media company by users providing its content — remember America Online? Several of its users sued over ownership of the content they had created for AOL, content they weren’t paid for. Note this from the Wired.com article Disgruntled users called it a Cyber Sweat Shop from a few years ago:

Call them volunteers, remote staff, or community leaders – they are the human face of AOL. They host chats, clean scatological posts off the message boards, and bust jerks for terms-of-service violations. Fourteen thousand volunteer CLs not only play hall monitor to AOL’s vaunted “community,” they are that community. Their hours? Flexible: Some work as few as four per week, others put in as many as 60… Six months ago seven former AOL community leaders asked the Department of Labor to investigate whether AOL owes them back wages.

A disgruntled AOL community leader started making noise about his unfair treatment as far back as 1995. Here we are, 16 years later, having a very similar conversation about the Internet. Is there another backlash coming?

Volunteers don’t necessarily save money, even online volunteers: Wikimedia’s content is created and managed primarily by volunteers, yet Wikimedia still needs to fundraise every year to cover the many costs that come with involving several thousand online volunteers. And look at the quality of Wikimedia content – if I can’t find a fact in an academic article or newspaper article, I won’t quote it in something I’m working on, and many people feel similarly; without professional editors, the information there cannot be fully trusted.

I certainly have my own limits regarding when I think it’s appropriate to ask someone to work for free, and when I think such goes too far. I am on numerous online discussion groups, and I freely share a lot of resources – and it takes several hours of my time to do so. I admit I’m not doing it just to be nice; I’m also hoping that it could lead to paid work. I’m happy to share my time for free only up to a point, however: at least once a week, I have to turn down at least one request asking me to review a business plan, offer advice on a web site, etc. – for free. Unfortunately, the utilities company, DirectTV, my car insurance company, grocery stores, gas stations, my Internet Service Provider, and others that charge me for products and services do not accept volunteer time helping nonprofit organizations or aspiring entrepreneurs as payment.

I used to freely provide answers on the community service section of YahooAnswers, where the same questions about volunteering, community service and fund raising events get asked over and over again. At first it was to learn more about teen perceptions about volunteering, but it dawned on me finally that I was adding tremendous value to this Yahoo service, without being paid for it. So I created a series of web pages on my own site to answer these frequently-asked questions, and started pointing questioners to these pages; if visitors click on the GoogleAds on the page, I get a few pennies. In less than a year, I’ve raised enough money to pay for my web site hosting and my domain name ownership. Without this financial incentive, I’m not sure I would continue answering questions on YahooAnswers.

I also have seen a different trend emerging: more and more sites that pay people for their time to contribute to projects, instead of asking them to volunteer it: CrowdSpring, Yahoo’s Associated Content service, Freelancer.com, Elance.com, Guru.com and similar sites pay people for the content they create. If the companies using these services could get the quality content they need for free, they would NOT be paying for it. Will other sites now getting their content for free, like YahooAnswers, eventually have to follow suit in order to get the quality content more and more users are demanding?

I’ll end with this: the hilarious Should I Work For Free chart that was brought to my attention during my presentation in Hungary last month.

What it is like to be a consultant

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A frequently-asked question to me is, “What is it like to be a consultant? How can I be one?”

I’ve offered what advice I can, like about how to telecommute/work from home and how to pursue a career in humanitarian activities, but today, I’ll share a Friday funny that shows what it’s often like from a financial standpoint to be a consultant (thanks to Martin Cowling for the heads up):

Video

Criticism Continues for UK Government Talk Re Volunteers

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Like the USA federal and state governments, the government of the United Kingdom, lead by Prime Minister David Cameron, is hoping that its citizens will step up and volunteer their time — work for free — to provide local services that local and federal governments no longer want to fund. Cameron calls this the big society drive. He wants volunteers — unpaid staff — to take over the staffing of post offices, libraries, transport services. He never says that it’s being done to save money: he says that staffing these organizations with volunteers will empower individuals and give them a greater voice in their communities.

Anyone who knows me or this blog knows that I am passionate about involving volunteers, so much so that I do not trust a nonprofit or community-focused initiative that does not involve volunteers – and does not involve them in more than rudimentary tasks. I believe involving volunteers does benefit communities far beyond money, and have said so many times (see the list of links at the end of this blog).

But let’s be clear: Cameron is being disingenuous about why he wants volunteers engaged in these programs. It’s all about defunding programs, not about increasing community involvement. 

If he were serious, then he would be talking about increasing the money for the resources needed (training, people, etc.) to involve larger numbers of volunteers. He would be talking about increasing funds to Volunteering England, the primary institution in England for tracking, supporting and celebrating volunteering in the country, not cutting them.

The criticisms have been going on for a while now in the British press (‘Big society’ museum plans in Liverpool condemned, 19 July 2010). But this month, the criticisms seem everywhere:

I hope that US politicians who are making similar noises about saving money with volunteers are paying attention; this is what is in store for you if you get serious “big” ideas about volunteers. The criticism will be 10 times louder in the USA!

By all means, let’s undertake activities to involve more volunteers in nonprofits and the government in the USA – AND LET’S PAY FOR THAT. Volunteers don’t just magically show up and get the work done, without a tremendous amount of money and paid staff to support them. Even Wikimedia online volunteers aren’t free!

Also see these blogs on related subjects:

Volunteer online & make web sites accessible!

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Knowbility is hosting a terrific online event, AIR Interactive, that gives online volunteers a chance to either

    1. create an accessible website for a musician or arts web site of your choice and submit the URL by March 5th.

OR 

  1.  choose from these sites and critique the accessibility features and redesign one page for accessibility. Submit by March 5th.

AIR-Interactive participants help ensure that as arts go online, rich cultural experiences can be enjoyed by everyone – including people with disabilities.

Online volunteers need to register and then access online tutorials. There are two call-in conferences for participants to receive live consultations.

“We are accumulating some fabulous prizes including round trip for two from Southwest Airlines, SXSW passes for 2012 and more.”

Knowbility is a nonprofit organization based in Austin, Texas with a mission to ensure barrier-free IT – supporting the independence of people with disabilities by promoting the use and improving the availability of accessible information technology. It’s traditional Accessibility Internet Rallies (AIR) are onsite web design competitions to benefit local nonprofit organizations and schools by providing them with free, professionally designed ACCESSIBLE websites. In these events, of professional web developers learn skills to create accessible web content and then use those new skills to create accessible websites for local community groups. The result: dozens of professionally designed, accessible websites are donated to nonprofit groups and hosted for free for one year.

The AIR Interactive event allows anyone with Internet access to participate! It’s a great example of virtual volunteering!

 

 

Drop the Jargon!

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Trina Wallace, a writer at ngo.media, has written a fantastic blog, Here’s to a jargon-free voluntary sector in 2011:

Too often, charity writing is littered with the latest buzzwords and highfalutin phrases in the belief that this sounds impressive. Strip away the jargon, though, and there’s often very little meaning underneath.

Brilliant! Read it! Show it to all consultants you work with! It’s an article that United Nations staff and those at other humanitarian organizations should read as well…

My favorite Super Bowl moment: NFL Man of the Year

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My favorite Super Bowl XLV moment came before the game: it was the presentation of the Walter Payton NFL Man of the Year award.

Minnesota Vikings (American) football player Madieu Williams was the 2010 recipient of the award. Williams has built a primary school in Sierra Leone and is now building a secondary school there. His foundation sponsored a mission to Sierra Leone that brought American teachers, surgeons and dentists to help educate the teachers at his school, give free dental cleanings to all of the students and provide free surgeries. He recently gave a large donation to create The Madieu Williams Center for Global Health, affiliated with the University of Maryland College Park School of Public Health. The center focuses on the public health issues in Prince George’s County and Sierra Leone, his birthplace. Williams is also involved in the North Community YMCA, the United Way and Harvest Prep/Seed Academy.

The other nominees were Oakland Raiders’ Nnamdi Asomugha and the Chicago Bears’ Israel Idonije.

Asomugha serves as Chairman for the Orphans and Widows In Need (OWIN) Foundation, providing food, shelter, medicine, vocational training, literacy efforts, and scholarships to widows and orphans victimized by poverty or abuse in Nigeria. In 2006, Asomugha launched the annual Asomugha College Tour for Scholars program, taking selected students from San Francisco Bay Area high schools on college tours across the country. Asomugha participated in the 2009 Meeting of Clinton Global Initiative University (CGI U) to discuss the importance of global service and student activism. Additionally, Asomugha distributes backpacks to the incoming freshmen each year at Narbonne High School in Los Angeles and outfits the football and basketball team with shoes, a mandate he wrote into an endorsement contract he signed with Nike.

Idonije established the Israel Idonije Foundation to help families in economically challenged communities around the world. It provides medical health care services, clean water and youth sports empowerment programs to underpriviledged residents in Africa. Its Street Love program provides assistance for the homeless and those in need of support. Its First-Down Attendance Program works to encourage and sustain sutdents’ regular school attendance, high achievement and good citizenship in Chicago and Winnipeg. More than 600 students participate annually. It’s a shame, however, that the Foundation’s web site isn’t accessible under Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act.

The three finalists were chosen by a panel. All of the 32 nominees receive a $1,000 donation to the charities of their choice. The three finalists will receive an additional $5,000 donation to be made in their names. The final winner of the award receives a $20,000 donation to the charity of his choice.

What a shame I didn’t see this news covered on any TV news report. If we have to be subjected to stories about NFL players’ reprehensible behavior (Michael Vick, Ben Roethlisberger, Brett Favre, etc.) can’t we also have some positive news about off-the-field activities as well?

On a related note, Forbes did an interesting article about celebrity charities, focusing on the amount of money they have given out versus how much they spend in overhead.

Also see an article I did back in 1999 about Fan-Based Online Groups Use the Internet to Make a Difference (would love to have the time and resources to update this!).