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.

Hearing Directly from Programs Involving Online Volunteers

On Wednesday, December 2, 2020, the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) hosted a webinar on “Virtual Volunteerism.” The purpose of the webinar was to illustrate how broadband allows volunteers in a variety of regions to engage in substantial, high-impact virtual volunteering activities. The webinar presented a panel of representatives from virtual volunteering initiatives – nonprofits that have programs that involve online volunteers primarily, rather than traditional programs that added an online volunteering component (a screen capture of participants is above). I was pleased to have been called on by the FCC to make recommendations about programs they could feature in this webinar, some of which are profiled in The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook.

The webinar featured representatives from:

The webinar was facilitated by David Savolaine from the Consumer Affairs and Outreach Division, who contacted me for references for presenters, and Eduard Bartholme, FCC Associate Chief in the Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau.

The webinar panelists talked mostly about the specifics of how their initiatives involve online volunteers (the exact roles that volunteers undertake), how those volunteers are supported and how those volunteers are central to their initiative’s online program delivery and mission.

It’s rare that there is a presentation on virtual volunteering where audiences get to hear directly, at length, from organizations that are engaging online volunteers. Most presentations on virtual volunteering are by people like me – researchers and consultants about the practice – or by people from the corporate sector either bragging about their employees that volunteer online in a program they designed or that have launched yet another web-based platform to recruit online volunteers. There’s no better place to learn about factors for success in engaging volunteers online than by talking to the nonprofits and NGOs engaging such volunteers – which is why The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook quotes extensively a variety of organizations that involve online volunteers, to illustrate how the recommendations in the book are put into practice.

The panelists talked about the makeup of their online volunteers (quite diverse), the personal, substantial relationships online volunteers have with clients and each other (something I devoted an entire video to on YouTube), and what’s key to success in supporting the volunteers to ensure they are successful – keys that are detailed in The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook. I’ll summarize them below:

Recruitment

When asked how they recruit people to volunteer with their initiatives, all of the panelists said they don’t actively recruit – instead, volunteers find them. Be My Eyes noted that they had 10,000 people sign up to volunteer within the first 24 hours of their launch – far more than they have opportunities for. The representative from Be My Eyes noted, “The key is people having a great experience and they tell their friends about it. We haven’t spent any money on marketing on anything like that.” Infinite Family and Open Street Maps affirmed that volunteers having a great experience and telling their friends is key for not having to actively recruit volunteers.

Per the disproportionate number of roles and assignments for online volunteers versus demand that so manhy virtual volunteering initiatives report, Naoual Driouich in the United Nations Volunteers New York office said, “For the volunteers, I will say to be patient and to continue applying for opportunities, not to give up, even if the opportunity closes, even if there is a waiting list. Just continue looking for opportunities.”

It’s worth noting that in my four years of managing the Virtual Volunteering Project and the four years managing the UN’s Online Volunteering service, those programs were never marketed to people to encourage them to volunteer online – instead, we marketed exclusively to programs to host online volunteers. And, yet, there was always, always, far more people contacting me that wanted to volunteer than there were roles and tasks for them to do.

Make the experience collaborative

Mikel Maron of the Open Street Map Foundation noted a key to ensuring sustainability of a program that I would love to write an entire blog about, and it would make a great research topic to see how this works at other organizations:

I think opening up the opportunity to your volunteers to create with you and to figure out what you’re doing together is really an amazing way to build something, to build a platform. It takes some humility because you don’t know everything, but the result can be – if you can find a way of gathering together and figuring out things together its amazing, and it created more dedicated volunteers if they really have a stake, not just in what they do, but how they do it.

Amy Stokes, Infinite Family, agreed:

I think we’re all learning together, certainly we are in our organization.

Support Volunteers

Infinite Family is an international online mentoring program, which brings together adult mentors in the USA together with students in South Africa, via a special platform the organization uses for interactions. Amy Stokes of Infinite Family noted in the webinar,

One of the things that we found that is really important is (providing) ongoing support for the volunteers throughout the relationship. We have an on-call site all the time (to help with) stressful situations tech problems, whatever. Volunteers know there’s always somebody there to help with ongoing challenges.

She noted that volunteers are all using different tools to access Infinite Family’s tools and resources – they are using different browsers and different operating systems – and so the nonprofit has tried to create a platform that will work across these systems – and it doesn’t always.

The interaction between the browser, the operating system, the application, whatever your ISP is doing that day – all of a sudden, something that worked a week ago beautifully won’t work at all. Sometimes, tech companies don’t put out notes to say, ‘Oh, we’re going to do this and it might affect the rest of your system.’ And so, sometimes, a volunteer reaches out and says ‘What is going wrong?’ It might not work today, they might not be doing anything wrong. We find that it helps if we tell them upfront, at the very beginning, ‘You know, this is a tech thing. You’re probably used to everything working in your world and you can control it. But now you’re working in a lot of other worlds at the same time, and we can’t control all of those things…’ I mean, how many times do you log in at the last minute to do something and the app pops up and says, ‘Oh, no, you’ve got to change your password. Or, Oh, no, you’ve got to upgrade, please download.’ You just have to build in a kind of flexibility.

Ashley Womble of Crisis Text Hotline also talked about the importance of support to volunteers when you are asking them to use a custom online tool:

We teach as part of our training how to use our platform. We don’t expect crisis counselors and volunteers to come to us knowing how to use our platform at all. We built it and we have to train them… certainly, we can’t know whenever people are going to have Internet issues, but we do help in the beginning (with training) and that reduces a lot of the stress.

A diversity of people and experiences

Mikel Maron of the Open Street Map Foundation noted the importance of remembering that every place in the world is not the same when you are dealing with online volunteers that are in other regions, especially in other countries.

I spent a lot of time working in Kenya and it looked very different to volunteer in a place where you may also have a struggle to make ends meet day-to-day. But people (from those places) also want to contribute.

So Open Street Map has to help support those online contributors. “How do you testify what a road is in rural Kenya versus the middle of London?” He says that organizations need to consider how different people from different places communicate online.

We’re a global project and even if you all speak English… there’s just a lot of assumptions about our communications and we miscommunicate all the time…. Within Open Street Map that just means we’re constantly on our toes and learning about how we can connect to others. On the flip side, it’s amazing we get to connect with others through what we do. We learn so much about other places and other people and really build rich relationships with people on the other side of the world and around the corner.

Crisis Text Line had a unique approach:

We’re also gamefied our program a little bit. Based on the number of conversations people have, they get to a certain level, and people want to work up the ladder so they can unlock different perks, as you might in a video game. That’s worked really well for us. I know I’m personally very proud that I’m a level four, and I can’t wait to become a level fie, and I’ll be spending more time myself volunteering in the organization.

Final advice

Naoual Driouich in the United Nations Volunteers New York office had this advice for organizations that want to involve online volunteers, and I think she’s absolutely correct:

Please put yourselves in the shoes of the online volunteer when you put together the opportunity. Make sure it is complete and straight forward.

I absolutely agree. When host organizations put themselves into the shoes of volunteers, thinking, “What would I need to be able to do this assignment if I was not already a part of this organization? What would I need to be successful?” they end up instituting the support volunteers need.

It was a terrific learning experience, and if you missed it, here’s the full information about the webinar and here is the recorded webinar on YouTube. Congrats to the FCC on an excellent webinar.

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

As noted earlier, some of these initiatives, and all of what they noted was essential to success, are profiled or detailed in The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook. The book, available as an online book and in traditional print form, offers 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. It also talks about policies and procedures, such as how developing written agreements to be signed by both online volunteers and their host organization (page 66) can prevent problems down the road, not only regarding ownership and use of what an online volunteer create, including web sites and code, but also regarding confidentiality and privacy in using of the volunteer’s information, including images of them, regarding confidentiality regarding the organization and the information the volunteer has access to, particularly client information, regarding how the online volunteer should represent his or her association with the program online (in emails, on social media, on LinkedIn, etc.), and liability regarding malware.


Copyright, ownership & works by volunteers

Happy New Year!

When I directed the Virtual Volunteering Project back in the 1990s and did workshops introducing virtual volunteering to a room full of representatives from nonprofits and government agencies, an early question I got was, “Who owns what an online volunteer creates as a part of their service?” So I asked the various experts in traditional volunteer management for the answer – and they didn’t know! That question had never come up for them. It took cornering a panel of lawyers at a conference (they were presenting on liability and volunteers) to get the answer: volunteers own what they create.

Two more recent articles confirm this:

In this article from INFORMATION OUTLOOK V16 N04 JULY/AUGUST 2012, Volunteers are Copyright Owners, Too!, author and copyright lawyer Lesley Ellen Harris notes, “Whether it be an article, image, video, business plan, table based on research, or other type of content, it is possible that the material being created by your volunteers is automatically protected by copyright (yes, even without registering the material or using a copyright symbol).” The article strongly recommends entering into a copyright agreement with volunteers to help prevent problems, such as a volunteer quitting and demanding that you stop using their work.

This February 2019 article from copyrightlaws.com, Who Owns Copyright in Works By Volunteers, affirms the previous recommendation: “You may want to consider developing an agreement with your volunteers that transfers to your organization the copyright in any works they create for you. Such an agreement ensures your organization can use their work as needed. It can also address the liability of volunteers using third-party works without obtaining permission.” It’s something companies frequently include in a contract that an employee or contractor/consultant signs, but that they often forget to have volunteers sign.

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

As noted in The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook, developing written agreements to be signed by both online volunteers and their host organization (page 66) can prevent problems down the road, not only regarding ownership and use of what an online volunteer create, including web sites and code, but also regarding confidentiality and privacy in using of the volunteer’s information, including images of them, regarding confidentiality regarding the organization and the information the volunteer has access to, particularly client information, regarding how the online volunteer should represent his or her association with the program online (in emails, on social media, on LinkedIn, etc.), and liability regarding malware.

That said, I regularly look for controversies regarding volunteers and the materials they create for programs they support, particularly regarding copyright, and haven’t found anything. But just because there hasn’t been a newspaper article, newsletter article or blog about it doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened.

And note: I’m not a lawyer. Don’t use this blog as your ultimate, last guidance. If volunteers are creating things for you, or engaging in activities that result in a product or program you use (photos, a strategy, a database, etc.), talk to a lawyer about legal agreements you may want to have volunteers sign regarding use and ownership of what they create for your program.

Also see legal issues and virtual volunteering.

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

Reflections on Virtual Volunteering in 2020 (& My Most Popular Blogs for the Year)

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When the end of a year approaches, I look over my visitor statistics for my blog and my web pages to see which of my resources were the most popular in the last 12 months. It helps me to know what topics resonated in that year – it’s always something different – and what promotion is most effective. It’s something your nonprofit or government agency should do as well, regarding your online resources (your web site, your blogs, etc.). It’s not just looking at numbers – it’s looking at when pages launched, what people clicked on to get to a resource, etc.

As is true every year, my blogs that got the most traffic are the ones that other people amplified, posting about them on their own social media channels, or referring to them in workshops they did, so if that’s you, THANK YOU. I hope my sharing of others’ material on my social media accounts was also helpful to colleagues and many people I admire as well.

In 2019, I wrote about communications, community relations and ethics in nonprofits far more than volunteer engagement. I had intended to do the same in 2020 – it’s not that I want to downplay volunteer engagement, or not to explore it anymore, but I find those other subjects just as interesting, maybe more, and I work professionally in those fields even more than I do regarding volunteer management. Plus, I just wasn’t sure what else there was to say about virtual volunteering, a subject I have researched and talked about since the mid-1990s.

But then came the novel coronavirus and the massive pivot by thousands of organizations for the first time to virtual volunteering – and suddenly, I was reviving lots of my previous work, filling lots of orders for my book on virtual volunteering, trying to keep up with requests to lead trainings and producing a lot of videos on YouTube to bring everyone up-to-speed about the history and basics of virtual volunteering.

I promote my blog, web site and videos through my Twitter accountmy Facebook account, my LinkedIn account, some Subreddits, and some LinkedIn groups. I’m a one-person shop and create and promote these resources entirely on my own – and it’s getting harder and harder to get my voice out there amid a growing sea of competition for attention. Even in the area of virtual volunteering, lots of new “experts” have emerged (please remember that, to be an expert, someone should have experience engaging volunteers online and being an online volunteer themselves).

As I say each year, the blog visitor numbers are great – but the emails and comments on resources are what really keep me going, so please keep them coming!

What did I write that got people’s attention in 2020? Here’s (almost) all of my top 11 blogs for 2020:

How to Immediately Introduce Virtual Volunteering at Your Program: roles & activities a nonprofit, charity or other program could launch immediately to involve online volunteers.

Free training in virtual volunteering (involving & supporting volunteers using online tools): a list of my videos on virtual volunteering in 2020.

Ethics of Paying to Volunteer Online.

Systemic Exclusion in Volunteer Engagement and More: systemic racism in volunteer engagement.

Why qualified people get passed over for jobs.

Saying “no” to recruiting volunteers for certain tasks.

Three resources for your COVID-19-related volunteering.

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

21 simple things to do while your programs are on hold during COVID-19 quarantines.

I also had a look at my most popular web pages. Some were quite a surprise. These aren’t in the exact order of popularity:

But the two big news items regarding virtual volunteering for 2020 aren’t necessarily reflected in these stats:

  1. I’ve now identified more than 100 research and academic articles on virtual volunteering (the announcement got shared and retweeted a LOT) and
  2. virtual volunteering becoming a necessity because of the novel coronavirus, surging in popularity and being embraced by organizations that have shunned it for decades.

Over the years, and until this year, I’ve made and appeared in many videos about working with online volunteers for nonprofits I’ve been working or volunteering with, but just one about virtual volunteering that wasn’t on behalf of someone else, back in 2012. By contrast, this year, 2020, I’ve made seven videos for my own channel, including a 36-minute introduction to virtual volunteering. In fact, I made 11 additional, private videos for a consultancy I did regarding a user experience related to online volunteering. You can see all my free trainings on my YouTube channel.

It’s been exhausting to say, over and over in 2020: virtual volunteering is not new, it’s more than 35 years old. I’ve said it in my book. I’ve said it on the Virtual Volunteering Wiki. I’ve said it in a video. I’m exhausted from saying it. What I haven’t said is that I’m stunned that so many people from both the nonprofit and corporate world seem to have never heard of involving volunteers remotely, of using the Internet to engage volunteers, a WIDESPREAD, popular practice that’s more than 35 years old. It’s been disheartening to see just how many nonprofits, foundations and corporate social responsibility programs have kept themselves in the dark about virtual volunteering for decades – and I say kept themselves in the dark, because I know just how much, how often, the practice has been talked about in publications, at conferences and in presentations by nonprofits. It has taken a lot of effort on the part of these folks to ignore this well-established practice over the years. I hope that, at last, that has changed.

I’ve also had a very traumatic, challenging time professionally, one that I’m not ready to talk openly about yet. But I will say: please ask colleagues – co-workers, staff at partner organizations, volunteers you work with, etc. – how they are doing. Ask them what challenges they are facing. And ask about safety issues – bluntly ask, “Are you feeling safe in your work? Are you feeling safe online?” Be prepared to eventually hear, “No, I’m not okay. I don’t feel safe. And here’s what I’m facing…” And for anyone you know who isn’t feeling safe online, I have this page of resources regarding online harassment, defamation & libel

And thank you to everyone who has supported me this year – I learned this year just how many people have my back. My gratitude to you knows no bounds.

May you have a safe, prosperous, healthy transition into 2021.

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

A reminder yet again that The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook provides 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, for ensuring success in virtual volunteering, and for using the Internet to build awareness and support for all volunteering at your program. Tech tools come and go, but certain community engagement principles never change, and those principles are detailed in this comprehensive guide. 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 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

Cultivating Online Civility

When I began writing about online culture, back in the late 1990s, misinformation was at a minimum and easy to identify, and hateful trolls were oh-so-quickly banned from the online communities they tried to disrupt.

Now, hate and misinformation rage online, and not just among strangers – neighbors are raging against each other on local online communities.

Back in the 1990s, in promoting virtual volunteering – using the Internet to support and involve volunteers – people who were new to the Internet (yes, there used to be such people) would ask lots of questions about what it is like to work with people remotely, rather than onsite, in-person. I created a section of the Virtual Volunteering Project web site, and then my own web site, specifically to talk about online culture, about the different ways people expressed themselves online and how to appreciate those differences, and how to quickly ramp up your skills for working with others online. I linked to some netiquette guidelines, but didn’t put much emphasis at all on online civility, dealing with trolls or addressing misinformation.

My, how times have changed…

A recent Wall Street Journal investigation revealed that Facebook was aware of its Facebook groups feature’s polarizing tendencies as early as 2016, and the Facebook groups feature continues to serve as a vector for lies, especially regarding COVID-19, as this Wired article, Facebook Groups Are Destroying America, notes:

Facebook users have been seeing more content from “friends and family” and less from brands and media outlets… Dynamics in groups often mirror those of peer-to-peer messaging apps: People share, spread, and receive information directly to and from their closest contacts, whom they typically see as reliable sources. To make things easier for those looking to stoke political division, groups provide a menu of potential targets organized by issue and even location; bad actors can create fake profiles or personas tailored to the interests of the audiences they intend to infiltrate. This allows them to seed their own content in a group and also to repurpose its content for use on other platforms... Related memes and links to fringe right-wing websites have been shared millions of times on Facebook in the past few months. Users coordinating their activities across networks of groups and pages managed by a small handful of people boost these narratives. At least nine coordinated pages and two groups—with more than 3 million likes and 71,000 members, respectively—are set up to drive traffic to five “news” websites that promote right-wing clickbait and conspiracy theories. In May, those five websites published more than 50 posts promoting Obamagate, which were then shared in the linked pro-Trump groups and pages. The revolving door of disinformation continues to spin.

And that doesn’t even begin to address the problems with dedicated trolls – people who target others online with insults and harassment in an effort to drive the person offline.

I now have a curated list of resources on online civility, and I continue to update my long list of recommendations on how to address online misinformation, which I’ve been maintaining for more than two decades. I also now have a web page of resources regarding online harassment, defamation & libel, and I regularly share on the TechSoup Online Community about how women worldwide are the frequent targets of harassing trolls who dedicate their time to silencing those voices. I never dreamed back in the 1990s things would be so overwhelmingly negative now and these would be the highly critical issues that they are. But, here we are.

Can online civility be restored? Is it possible to challenge misinformation and destructive speech in the strongest, most deliberate of terms without being accused of hate speech yourself? Can there be rules for online civility that don’t stifle much-needed debate? I hope these curated resources can help answer those questions – but, honestly, based on what I’ve experienced myself this year, I’m deeply skeptical. Perhaps I need to create a list of resources on “Learning to live and thrive in a world with hateful, hate-filled people.”

Also see:

Also, the Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook: Fully Integrating Online Service Into Volunteer Involvement can help you better work with people online – specifically volunteers. These can be volunteers in short-term, “microvolunteering” tasks or longer-term, more high-responsibility roles. These can be volunteers who do some or most of their service onsite, at your organization or volunteers who do most or all of their service remotely, rarely or ever onsite and in-person with you. 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 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

Contributing to online communities can help you professionally

I see lots of young people online who are wondering how to build up their skills and résumés in this time of COVID-19, or to explore careers with so many onsite experiences closed to them. I want to remind them all (they all read my blog, right?) that volunteering to help with an online community is a great way to get experience, to build your skills, to build your knowledge, to build your portfolio and to network for jobs.

Don’t believe me? I’ve been helping with online communities since 1993 or so, mostly as a volunteer. And those experiences have played a substantial part in both getting professional positions and getting experience that’s helped me in my offline work.

The first online community I participated in was the soc.org.nonprofit USENET newsgroup. It was created in June 1994 and gatewayed to the email-based mailing list USNONPROFIT-L. The community was for the discussion of nonprofit management and program issues. I found it soon after it was created and, after a couple of years of participating, because I was such a prolific contributor, I got asked to co-moderate it, as a volunteer, and I did so for several years. My participation there, and some onsite volunteering and collaboration, lead me to being offered a paid position: to direct the Virtual Volunteering Project.

In the late 1990s, I participated in three other online communities, all on YahooGroups: CyberVPM, UKVPMs, and OZVPM, all focused on managers of volunteers. It was because of my participation in those three communities, talking about the VV Project and virtual volunteering in general, that I got noticed by a United Nations agency in charge of the online volunteering portion of NetAid, and ended up directing what became the UN’s Online Volunteering Service. I also have lifelong colleagues and friends because of my volunteer participation in those three communities specifically.

In 2001 or so, while living in Germany and working for the UN Volunteers program, I started participating in the then newly-launched TechSoup online community. You can see an early version of that community on the Internet Wayback machine. I was a very active volunteer contributor and ended up getting asked to be a volunteer moderator, helping to introduce topics, answer questions and delete spam, and to lead a couple of online events. And years later, in 2009, after volunteering on and off, I got a part-time contracting gig helping with the community and some online events. I’ve done that off and on ever since (including now!).

Around that same time, someone set up an online community for people working in international aid and development work. I joined that community and, once again, I was a prolific contributor, as a volunteer, and eventually got asked to be a volunteer board member of the newly-formed nonprofit that got set up to support the community. The Aid Workers Network lasted for just a few years, but I got asked about that experience regularly in job interviews, and there are two people that remain my professional colleagues to this day.

On Reddit, I’ve been the volunteer moderator for the volunteer community, the community service subreddit, and the inclusion subreddit, for a few years now – and I got a short, well-paid consulting gig earlier this year because of my activities on the volunteer subreddit specifically.

So, that’s my story on how volunteering to contribute, moderate, facilitate and lead online communities has helped me professionally. It could help you, too:

  • Look for Reddit communities that represent what you want to do professionally or as a volunteer. Read a lot before you contribute, and always read as much as you yourself post. When you feel ready, post helpful, on-topic questions, advice and comments. Follow the rules. If you do this regularly, don’t be surprised if you end up getting asked to be a moderator. Even if you aren’t asked to be a moderator, if you think your contributions show your expertise, workstyle and character, consider including a link to your Reddit profile on your résumé.
  • If you use computers or your smart phone as a part of your volunteering or professional work with nonprofits, NGOs, charities, community groups, advocacy groups, libraries, religious groups, etc., and you want to share your experience and help others that might be trying to do so, consider joining the TechSoup online community and contributing to the subjects there, like Databases and Software (including apps), Web Building, Digital Engagement, Hardware, Servers & Networks, Security, Privacy & Safety, Tech in Disasters, Tech Planning and Policies or Tech4Good, Tech Making a Difference, Tech in Society.
  • Use Google, Bing or Duck Duck Go, and on Facebook, to find online communities hosted on other platforms that relate to what you want to do, whether its humanitarian work, nonprofit theater management, rescuing wildlife, logistics after disasters, whatever. As always, read a lot before you contribute, and always read as much as you post. Post helpful, on-topic questions, advice and comments and follow the rules. You might get asked to be a moderator, but regardless, you’ll create an online profile potential employers might find quite interesting.

And if your nonprofit, NGO, charity, library, etc. has an online community, the contributors to that community are volunteers, even if you don’t call them such, even if you also call them clients or community members instead. If they are asking questions, offering comments and advice, introducing discussions on your community, even debating (but are staying on topic) and you aren’t paying them, they are online volunteers, they are contributing their time and talents, and you are engaged in virtual volunteering.

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

For detailed advice on creating assignments for online volunteers, for working with online volunteers, for using the Internet to support and involve ALL volunteers (including those providing service onsite), and for ensuring success in virtual volunteering, check out The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook. You will not find a more detailed guide anywhere for working with online volunteers and using the Internet to support and involve all volunteers. It’s available both as a traditional paperback and as an online book. It’s co-written by myself and Susan Ellis. If your organization wants to better engage the people who contribute to your online communities – and, yes, those are online volunteers – this book can help.

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

Apps4Good should be based in reality, not be tech fluff

I sent out this tweet thread December 3 from my Twitter account:

Listened to a podcast by someone wanting to develop an app to address a particular community need. He has no stats regarding the need, no research showing his approach is what partner agencies or potential clients want. Just talked about #app4good he’ll develop. (1/5) #CSR

This project leader has no experience regarding this particular community need. None. It’s another case of someone from the corporate world deciding that he knows what nonprofits or at-risk community members need, with no data or research to back that up. (2/5)

Looked at the web site. It’s very slick, uses all the buzzwords. You have to really read (which most folks won’t) to realize every project is in development, that no people with actual expertise in this issue are involved in this supposed nonprofit effort. (3/5)

It’s great that folks from the corporate / business / tech world want to help with community issues. Your involvement is vital. But just as you have to do your homework before developing an app for consumers, you have to do research before you develop an #app4good#CSR (4/5)

Years of experience in the tech sector doesn’t prepare app creators for addressing homelessness, hunger or street harassment, or navigating mass transit, or working in emergencies. You must talk in-depth with the experts: nonprofits & their clients. (5/5)

I’ve written a LOT about how folks from the corporate world, from executive directors to app developers, don’t talk to nonprofits before they develop tech tools for their clients. Here’s more:

And then there is this brilliant tweet from World Bank Water, an initiative of the World Bank:

To paraphrase a comment I wrote in a previous blog, it’s wonderful to see so many tech4good / apps4good / hacks4good initiatives anywhere in the world, but I see way too much attention being spent on their launch, on their promise, and not nearly enough researching if this is really what clients or the community wants, let alone evaluating their impact and sustainability after launch. And if we don’t focus on those things, then they are just tech fluff.

Please share about your experience working with online volunteers

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!

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

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

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