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.

Crowdsourcing / Hive Mind – it’s been happening since at least 1849!

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Crowdsourcing is an open, public call for contributions from anyone to talk about a pressing issue, offer advice or data or to help solve a problem or challenge. It’s an open-call brainstorming session. While the term crowdsourcing was popularized online to describe Internet-based activities, there are examples of projects that, in retrospect, can also be described as crowdsourcing, without the Internet.

For instance, in, 1848 Matthew Fontaine Maury, an American astronomer, United States Navy officer, historian, oceanographer, meteorologist, cartographer and more, distributed 5000 copies of his Wind and Current Charts free of charge on the condition that sailors returned a standardized log of their voyage to the U.S. Naval Observatory. By 1861, he had distributed 200,000 copies free of charge, on the same conditions. The data the sailors provided was used to develop charts for all the major trade routes.

The Smithsonian Meteorological Project was started by the Smithsonian’s first Secretary, Joseph Henry, and in 1849 he set up a network of some 150 volunteer weather observers all over the USA. Henry used the telegraph to gather volunteers’ data and create a large weather map, making new information available to the public daily. For instance, volunteers tracked a tornado passing through Wisconsin and sent the findings via telegraph to the Smithsonian. Henry’s project is considered the origin of what later became the National Weather Service. Within a decade, the project had more than 600 volunteer observers and had spread to Canada, Mexico, Latin America, and the Caribbean. These remote volunteers submitted monthly reports that were then analyzed by a professor at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, and published in 1861 in the first of a two- volume compilation of climatic data and storm observations based on the volunteers’ reports.

The Smithsonian information in this blog is from a 2011 article “Smithsonian Crowdsourcing Since 1849!” by Elena Bruno, a Smithsonian intern who conducted research into how crowdsourcing could be integrated into mobile applications and making the Smithsonian experience, for those inside our Institution and beyond, more valuable and engaging.

I miss the crowdsourcing feel of the 1990s Internet, particularly via USENET newsgroups. My favorite was soc.org.nonprofit, for the discussion of nonprofit organization management issues. It was amazing to see someone post a question about how to reach a particular audience or databases or whatever and see knowledgeable people offer helpful advice on the subject within days, sometimes hours. There was lots of help and very little posturing – or trolls. Good times. Read more about the Early History of Nonprofits and the Internet (before 1996).

 

vvbooklittleOnline crowdsourcing is one example of virtual volunteering. Wikipedia is probably the most well-known example of online crowdsourcing, but there are many more. For advice on working with remote volunteers, or using the Internet to support and involve volunteers, whether in crowdsourcing initiatives or in more formal, higher-responsibility volunteering, check out The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook. It’s written by myself and Susan J. Ellis, and is the result of many, many years of research and experience.

Please vote for “Living & Loving Digital Inclusion”

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There are only a few hours left to vote for my proposed session at NTEN: Living & Loving Digital Inclusion!

Voting is open only through August 31. The 2019 Nonprofit Technology Conference will be held in Portland, Oregon, March 13 – 15, and I will be able to go if I get to present! If I can’t present then – let me be blunt: I won’t be able to afford to go.

Digital Inclusion means working to ensure ICT tools, resources and associated spaces are welcoming to the widest audience possible. Helping children in communities with rates of high poverty to access the Internet and gain skills might be the first thing most think of when they hear the term digital inclusion, but it’s also about accessible web and app design, providing safe, encouraging spaces for women and girls in community tech centers and hackathons, and being mindful of our language when promoting or talking about public tech initiatives. This energizing session will give attendees lots of ideas to consider and employ.

Learning Outcomes

  • understand what is meant by “digital inclusion” in practical terms
  • understand the benefits of making “digital inclusion” a priority
  • put into immediate practice activities that improve an organization’s “digital inclusion”

Update: “Although your session received a strong level of support during the voting stages it was not selected as part of this final process to balance out the overall range of topics in the related category.” That’s the final word from NTEN. Unfortunately, I cannot afford to attend the conference (it’s VERY expensive), so even though NTEN will be right in my backyard in Portland, Oregon, I won’t be there. Very sorry to miss out once again on NTEN.

I have already developed the workshop and hope I will get a different opportunity to deliver it.

Would you like for me to speak at your conference or train at your organization? Here’s is more about my presentations and trainings. Also read more about my consulting services.

the first steps for a nonprofit dream

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Some years ago, I worked with a very specific community – I prefer not to say which one nor where it was – that wanted its own cultural center. The community members envisioned a place where they and their families could celebrate their unique culture, host activities that could help address the needs of community members (job training, skills development, counseling, etc.), host events that could educate people about their culture’s history and challenges, offer low-cost childcare for pre-K children, offer after-school activities for teen members of their community, offer activities for elders in their community, offer legal clinics, and on and on.

The challenge I faced in trying to help this community reach their goal is that, in talking about the community center, they wanted to focus only on what the building would look like. They wanted to talk about the kinds of rooms it would have, how it would look on the outside, the murals that would be drawn inside, etc. They even spent time talking about what the logo would look like. And, indeed, those conversations were important, but what was so much more important in starting to talk about the center was their answering these questions:

  • What documented data do we have that shows who makes up our community, in terms of their ages, their backgrounds, their most critical needs and their desires regarding the programs offered via a cultural center? What data do we still need to gather and how might we gather that information?
  • What programs might we launch at first, and which might we want to have later? What data do we have that shows we are prioritizing our initial programming correctly?
  • How do we envision the staffing for our initial programs – by volunteers? If so, what tasks might these volunteers do? Could the tasks be divided into different roles: leadership roles, one-time group activities, short-term individual roles, online volunteering, university classwork, etc.? And what might the costs be to involve such volunteers (recruitment, screening, support, etc.)? Or will we staff these initial programs by paid employees or consultants? If so, what might these roles look and what would the costs be?
  • What will the decision-making and leadership of the center look like? How will the board of directors be chosen? How long will each member serve? How will their fiscal responsibilities and other oversight responsibilities be defined? Will there also be an advisory board?
  • What could we do in terms of programming without our own physical space? Could we leverage church fellowship halls, library meeting rooms, other cultural centers, arts spaces and other existing facilities to offer our own programming until we get a physical space of our own?
  • What would success look like in the first year of our operations? How would we collect data that proves our success?
  • How much would all of the above cost for the first two-five years?
  • What would we need to have in place to get fiscal sponsorship or become an independent nonprofit, and how would we get those things in place? What would the timeline look like?
  • When would we be ready to start accepting financial donations for our efforts and what avenues could we accept those donations (how would we accept and track checks, online donations, even cash donations)?

Altogether, the answers to these questions create both a business plan and all of the information a group needs for a funding proposal. All of these activities create a cultural center without anything having to wait for a building to be built or a rented and, at the same time, make funding an actual building all the more attractive.

Sadly, the cultural center, as a building, didn’t happen, and efforts to offer these programs in other spaces have come and gone over the years. I think community members still dream of a magical mega donor descending into the area and offering them millions of dollars to make this happen.

I think about this situation frequently as I am asked by so many people, “How do I start the nonprofit of my dreams?” The steps are all neatly listed in my blog, but the reality is that it’s messy in execution. None of these steps are easy, but I regularly see new nonprofits flourish after diligently completing each.

If you have an idea for a new organization, a new program or a new project, I recommend you have a look at this UNESCO project planning tool. It’s developed for youth and the projects they want to undertake, but it’s something that a lot of adults could use as well. This can be a good tool to use in a group exercise with the core leadership of your effort to establish a new program or organization.

Also helpful is this free NGO Capacity Assessment Supporting Tool. It can be used to identify an NGO’s strengths and weaknesses and help to establish a unified, coherent vision of what an NGO can be. The tool provides a step-by-step way to map where an organization is and can help those working with the NGO, including consultants, board members, employees, volunteers, clients, and others, to decide which functional areas need to be strengthened and how to go about to strengthen them. Share the results of your using this tool in your funding proposals – even on your web site. The tool was compiled by Europe Foundation (EPF) in the country of Georgia, and is based on various resources, including USAID – an NGO Capacity Assessment Supporting Tool from USAID (2000), the NGO Sustainability Index 2004-2008, the Civil Society Index (2009) from CIVICUS, and Peace Corps/Slovakia NGO Characteristics Assessment for Recommended Development (NGO CARD) 1996-1997.

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Brilliant volunteer firefighter recruitment video from Germany

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A brilliant volunteer firefighter recruitment video from the station in Meldorf, Germany (Freiwillige Feuerwehr Stadt Meldorf): a man drives by a training exercise by volunteer firefighters in his village. The popups in the video show what professions the volunteers come from: IT professional, farmer, chimney sweep, lawyer, clerk, caregiver, student, etc. It’s meant to say that a variety of people can be volunteer emergency responders (and are needed as such).

A big difference between Germany and the USA re: firefighting is that firefighters aren’t EMTs. Instead, for emergency medical calls, there are ambulance corps throughout the country. That definitely makes it much easier to recruit volunteer firefighters in Germany than in the USA, and as a result of the model used in the country, Germany has the highest number of volunteer firefighters per capita in the world.

Still, this is a terrific recruitment video, one that firehouses in the USA that involve volunteers should consider re-creating for their own communities. Don’t have the video shooting and editing skills to make it happen? Consider recruiting volunteers with such skills from nearby universities and colleges – even high schools.

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Some people think they aren’t perfect enough to volunteer with you

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Meridian Swift has a terrific blog about the impression our volunteers-in-action photos might give, unintentionally. She imagines this scenario:

Yvonne took in the photos of volunteers working together, triumphant smiles on their busy faces. She imagined how dynamic these volunteers must be, and here she was, shy, insecure, and full of doubts. She wasn’t like them. They were so…amazing and who was she kidding, she was just stumbling through life. With a wistful sigh, Yvonne closed the tab and moved on.

She’s right, and not just about photos: when we celebrate volunteers on the organization web site or in a press release or at a ceremony, we celebrate things most people cannot do: volunteer for more than a decade at the same organization, in the same role, or volunteer 100 hours or more in a year. That isn’t to say that those volunteers shouldn’t be honored, but what about honors for the most tenacious volunteer, or the volunteer who made a big impact with a small project?

As Meridian says in her response to volunteers who may be thinking they aren’t perfect enough to volunteer, per the perfect-volunteers imagery:

You may think we want you to be perfect. What do we want? We want to do some good in this crazy world and we don’t have all the answers. We’re not looking for perfection. We’re looking for you.  

It’s something to keep in mind as you recruit and welcome new volunteers at your organization.

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can volunteer engagement cultivate innovation?

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Can volunteer engagement cultivate innovation within an organization where volunteers serve? And what conditions are necessary for such innovation by volunteers to happen? This paper explores that question: Beyond Service Production: Volunteering for Social Innovation by Arjen de Wit of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Wouter Mensink of The Netherlands Institute for Social Research, The Hague, The Netherlands, Torbjörn Einarsson of Stockholm School of Economics, Sweden, and René Bekkers of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

It was first published online on October 12, 2017 and was published on paper in the Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly by ARNOVA.

Abstract:

Building on theories from different fields, we discuss the roles that volunteers can play in the generation, implementation, and diffusion of social innovations. We present a study relying on 26 interviews with volunteer managers, other professionals, volunteers, and one former volunteer in 17 (branches of) third sector organizations in eight European countries. We identify organizational factors that help and hinder volunteer contributions to social innovation… This rich, explorative study makes it a fruitful start for further research on the relationship between volunteering and social innovation.

In short, their research question was: Which organizational factors help and hinder volunteers to contribute to social innovations in third sector organizations?

You can download the paper for free.

I found the paper because I’m quoted in it. And if you are a manager of volunteers, this is one of those rare academic papers on volunteerism that is actually worth your time to read (sorry, academics, but so often, your papers aren’t what practioners need).

By social innovation, the paper’s authors mean new solutions – products, markets, services, methods, models, processes – that lead to new or improved capabilities and better use of assets and resources by a nonprofit, NGO or other volunteer hosting organization that address its mission and serve its cause, directly. I define social innovation as something that is transformative for the organization and those it serves. Certainly volunteers that introduced mission-based organizations to the Internet were social innovators. Volunteers connecting an organization to new communities and people very different from those the nonprofit usually works with can be seen as social innovators as well.

Here are “a few illustrative examples” the paper identifies as social innovations introduced to nonprofits by volunteers:

a telephone service in a nonnative language (Swedish Red Cross), a School of Civic Initiative where people are educated to make them more active in public life (Hnutí Duha, Czech Republic), first aid education for partially sighted and blind people (German Red Cross), a bicycle campaign (Greenpeace Denmark), and a shelter for illegal male immigrants (Salvation Army Netherlands).

Examples of innovations occurring on a larger scale and introducing system-level changes that the paper cites are:

the lobby for new government policies (Czech branch of the Salvation Army) and a network to connect entrepreneurs in the field of environment with investors, publish their innovative work, and promote a financing network (Fundación Biodiversidad, Spain).

The paper delivers on identifying organizational factors that help and hinder volunteer contributions to social innovation. From the paper’s conclusion:

Organizational factors that may enhance volunteer contributions to social innovations include a decentralized organizational structure, the “scaling up” of ideas, providing training and giving volunteers a sense of ownership. Factors that may hinder volunteer contributions to innovations include a lack of resources and a reluctant attitude within the organization, for example, when a new project does not fit within the organization’s strategy. By identifying and exploring these mechanisms, this article adds insights on a new perspective for third sector research and offers useful tools for volunteer managers to improve the innovative capacity of their organization.

Terrific stuff. Kudos to the authors. This paper is worth your time.

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Team building activities for remote workers

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I’ve explored the topic of building a team culture among remote workers in a previous blog, but I’ve been compling even more examples of live events and asynchronous events that can build a sense of team among remote workers.

Some of the additional ideas:

Have team members share baby photos with one team member, who then shares them without identification to the team and asks them to guess who is who.

Have team members share a recipe that is either their very favorite food or is representative of their culture. Randomly assign different team members each others’ recipes. They have two weeks or a month to make the dish, take a photo of the end result, and get ready to share their thoughts on a particular day.

Have a non-work-related question of the week or month, such as favorite vacation spot, what their career goal when they were 8 years old was, their favorite actor, their favorite movie, etc. Questions can be personnel but not anything that any team member wouldn’t want others to know.

Have members take a photo outside somewhere – anywhere – that is not at all work related (photo in a garden, at the beach, next to a sculpture, under a tree, on a swing) and share it with each other on a particular day.

Have conversations with team members about what success will look like for themselves within a project and for an overall project.

Have team members draw the process of them working together from start of the project to finish, showing how each team member plays a role. Share these and look for similarities and differences.

Have a hat day, where everyone is supposed to wear a hat at the start of one of your video web conferences.

Be careful in that you don’t want any team building exercises that make someone feel LESS a part of the team. For instance, asking people to share wedding photos or prom photos – and there are team members that aren’t married, didn’t go to the prom, etc. Or if your team is international, remember that cultural norms can vary hugely among different team members, especially with regard to what is appropriate to talk about or take a photo of.

vvbooklittleFor more advice on working with remote volunteers, or using the Internet to support and involve volunteers, check out The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook. Successfully working with people remotely is a very human endeavor that people who are amiable, understanding and thoughtful tend to excel in. Even if you are working with remote paid staff and contractors rather than volunteers, you will find this book helpful in supervising and supporting remote workers. And if you work with volunteers who are providing service primarily onsite, this book will help you to think about ways you can support those volunteers online as well, and invite them to provide service online as well.

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A history of “Smart Valley”

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I recently wrote (and published on my web site) a history of Smart Valley, a 1990s initiative in Silicon Valley, California to create an “information infrastructure” to benefit people, communities, governments & businesses.” Smart Valley was an initiative of Joint Venture: Silicon Valley. It was a 501(c)(6) nonprofit organization focused on creating an “information infrastructure” in Silicon Valley, California – Palo Alto, Mountain View, Sunnyvale, Cupertino, San José, Santa Clara and the surrounding area.

Smart Valley’s many activities included coordinating SmartSchools NetDay II and PC Day in Silicon Valley, creating an Internet Technical Guidebook for Schools, leading a Smart Voter campaign to help people learn about upcoming elections by leveraging online sources (one of the first of such initiatives), creating and supporting the Public Access Network (PAN), hosting Connect 96: The Global Summit on Building Electronic Communities, promoting telecommuting, hosting a monthly series of lectures, Smart Talks, that featured “leaders of the growing information infrastructure”, and hosting the annual Smart Valley Corporate Executive Forum “to touch base with the senior executives of our member companies to review the year’s progress and to explain our plans for the future.”

Among its affiliated projects, many of which originated at Smart Valley and were spun off as independent initiatives:

  • ABAG, Association of Bay Area Governments
  • BAMTA, The Broad Alliance for Multimedia Technology and Applications
  • BADGER, The Bay Area Digital Geographic Resource
  • CommerceNet, “the premier industry association for Internet Commerce”
  • Plugged In, one of the first digital divide efforts, working to bring “the tremendous technological resources available in the Silicon Valley to youth in low-income communities” in East Palo Alto (you can see archived versions of this initiative at archive.org by searching pluggedin.org before 2012)
  • SV-PAL, the Silicon Valley Public Access Link, is a non-profit volunteer organization which brings Internet access to the South Bay community including local schools, organizations, businesses and individuals.

Why do I care about the history of Smart Valley? Because I was the internal communications manager for Joint Venture in 1995-1996. Smart Valley is one of Joint Venture’s pioneering initiatives that has disappeared from the Internet and is rarely referenced these days, which is a shame, because it was a pioneering effort. I wasn’t involved with Smart Valley, but I really admired what it was doing.

I would have written the Smart Valley history at Wikipedia, but I’m worried it will just get deleted by some guy who decides it isn’t worthy of a Wikipedia entry…

Also see:

  • Early History of Nonprofits & the Internet
    The Internet has always been about people and organizations networking with each other, sharing ideas and comments, and collaborating online. It has always been interactive and dynamic. And there were many nonprofit organizations who “got” it early — earlier than many for-profit companies. So I’ve attempted to set the record straight: I’ve prepared a web page that talks about the early history of nonprofits and the Internet. It focuses on 1995 and previous years. It talks a little about what nonprofits were using the cyberspace for as well at that time and lists the names of key people and organizations who helped get nonprofit organizations using the Internet in substantial numbers in 1995 and before. Edits and additions are welcomed
  • Lessons from NetAid and onlinevolunteering.org
    Some key learnings from directing the UN’s Online Volunteering service from February 2001 to February 2005, including support materials for those using the service to host online volunteers.
  • United Nations Tech4Good / ICT4D Initiatives
    a list of the various United Nations initiatives that have been launched since 2000 to promote the use of computers, feature phones, smart phones and various networked devices in development and humanitarian activities, to promote digital literacy and equitable access to the “information society,” and to bridge the digital divide. My goal in creating this page is to help researchers, as well as to remind current UN initiatives that much work regarding ICT4D has been done by various UN employees, consultants and volunteers for more than 15 years (and perhaps longer?).
  • Al Gore Campaign Pioneered Virtual Volunteering
    Back in 2000, when Al Gore ran for president, his campaign championed virtual volunteering by recruiting online volunteers to help online with his election efforts. I’ve tried to present some of what his campaign did – this pioneering effort deserves to be remembered, as do some of the lessons from such.

research on why NGOs recruit international volunteers

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I am a frequent blogger about voluntourism – mostly to say, “Don’t do it – don’t pay to volunteer for two-weeks abroad. It’s not only ineffective, it’s potentially, sometimes actually, harmful.” Most recently, earlier this year, I blogged about volunteers themselves speaking out about voluntourism. I so appreciate these honest accounts of people who have paid to volunteer abroad and found the experience lacking in terms of actually helping local people or the environment – and even found it to be harmful.

My consulting colleague, sometimes presentation partner and all-around amazing human Dr. Erin Barnhardt wrote about her own experience as a pay-to-volunteer-abroad experience in her 2012 PhD thesis, Engaging Global Service: Organizational Motivations for and Perceived Benefits of Hosting International Volunteers. She notes in the introduction to her research:

While my experience in Jordan was on the whole overwhelmingly positive, I was surprised and somewhat disappointed to discover that I was in fact a largely ineffective volunteer. I knew that staying for only two weeks meant that my contributions would be severely limited and that my lack of Arabic language skills would further hamper my impact, but I’d assumed that coming in with a professional expertise meant that I could make some kind of lasting contribution during my very short tenure. What I discovered though was, despite having gone through a reputable volunteer-sending organization to an organization that regularly hosted international volunteers, the infrastructure to put me to work was minimal and somewhat ad hoc. I came to the Jordanian NGO with a genuine interest in helping out, only to discover that there was in fact little for me to do.

I so appreciate Erin’s honesty – and the honesty of all those who have paid-to-volunteer abroad and are now speaking out about their negative experiences.

Erin’s academic research after her Jordan experience came from her desire to know why some NGOs recruit volunteers from other countries. Erin’s research started with an initial survey of 248 NGOs that are not based in the USA and host international volunteers – people from outside of country of the location of the host NGO. Then she conducted a more in-depth survey of 31 NGOs from that group or 18.8% of the original 248. I wish she had limited her research to what I’m most interested in: those programs where volunteers are required to pay a fee to a volunteer-sending organization or to the host NGO – perhaps someone else will do that. Erin’s research was much broader: she looked at a range of NGOs, including those that do NOT charge any fees from volunteers. In fact, a majority of NGOs that responded to Erin’s surveys do not charge fees from volunteers, only 13.3% partnered with a volunteer-sending organization and just 8.5% had international volunteers placed with them by other kinds of partner organizations such as universities and faith groups. In addition, just 37.1% of responding organizations said international volunteers pay them a fee to volunteer with their organization. In addition, the survey was limited to NGOs who had registered on the Idealist.org web site, which means these NGOs are quite tech-savvy and independent – two qualities I don’t think are had by most local NGOs that host international volunteers in pay-to-volunteer-abroad schemes.

With all that said, the research is worth reading, to see how Internet-savvy, independent NGOs view international volunteers and the services they provide. I see these NGOs in Erin’s research as the kind of organizations that I recommend DIY volunteers abroad try to partner with when they want to travel and do good.

Here are some items from her research that are especially interesting – at least to me, because I think that these three findings would very likely be true of research that was limited to programs where international volunteers are charged a fee for their service:

  • Just over half of respondents – 50.4% – reported that they began hosting international volunteers only within the past five years, while 78.3% of respondents began hosting international volunteers within the past decade.
  • Overall, respondents reported that shorter terms of service were more common for their international volunteers than longer terms. For example, while 69.2% of respondents reported that international volunteers almost always or occasionally served for between 67 two weeks and one month, just over half as many reported having international volunteers almost always or occasionally stay for over one year.
  • Types of volunteer projects and roles varied widely with, by far, the most common type being teaching, classroom assistance, tutoring, and/or community education (61.3%). The next most common types of volunteer projects were construction and/or infrastructure development or improvements like painting, installations, etc. (17.8%), technology tasks like building websites (15.6%), and research, data collection, and reporting (12.4%).

I so hope someone out there will do similar research specifically on programs where volunteers are required to pay a fee to a volunteer-sending organization or to the host NGO. I hope they will take the research even farther and find out:

  • who identifies assignments for international volunteers (does the NGO define the assignment, do potential volunteers say “Here is how I would like to help and what I can do,” or does the volunteer sending agency say, “Here are volunteers and how you will use them”?)
  • not only if applicants need to meet minimal skills requirements, but how those requirements are verified
  • if the programs have written policies and procedures regarding sexual harassment and safety
  • what percentage of overall applicants that have the ability to pay are rejected from service by the agency, and what the reasons for those rejections are
  • how many of these agencies have conducted formal evaluations with resulting documentation regarding the impact these volunteers have on the agency or those that the agency services – not just satisfaction surveys among volunteers.

I would also love to know more about the process local NGOs must go through to request long-term international volunteers from

There is such a thing as effective short-term international volunteering. There is such a thing as quality program where volunteers need to pay a fee to the host organization. In fact, there are volunteering abroad programs where volunteers pay nothing, such as UN Volunteers, VSO and PeaceCorps – but such programs require a much, much longer commitment of volunteers than a few weeks.

My other blogs related to voluntourism:

Wizard Activist School & A Leadership Academy

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Back in the 1990s, when I directed the Virtual Volunteering Project, I researched and wrote about the phenomena of online fans of TV shows, performers and sports teams using the Internet to organize volunteering, donations and other support for various causes and nonprofits. I thought it was such a splendid example of both online volunteering and DIY volunteering. Fans of The X-Files, Buffy: the Vampire Slayer, Star Trek and various sports teams were engaging in largely self-driven activities to raise money for certain nonprofits and raise awareness about what those nonprofits were trying to address. Often, these fans started engaging in philanthropic activities with no direct prompting from any charity or celebrity.

More than 20 years later, this kind of fan-driven philanthropy is still happening – so much so that I long gave up trying to track it. But some initiatives still stand out, and one of those is the Harry Potter Alliance (HPA). I’ve written about them before, back in 2011, but one of their more recent efforts deserve attention: they now host an online Wizard Activist School. This online school allows enrollees to complete modules to develop skills regarding effective activism, including:

  • Elevator Pitches
  • Goal Setting
  • Mission Statement Development
  • Member Engagement
  • Hosting an Event
  • Conflict Resolution
  • Leadership Styles
  • Social Justice 101
  • and more.

This may be the most ambitious project by a fan-based philanthropic group I have ever seen. I absolutely will be taking it – I know how to do all this, I’ve led workshops in many of these subjects myself, but I want a Wizard Activist School certificate!

My only criticism: lots of “click here” links on the web site. The web site needs to be accessible, and that starts with descriptive links.

In addition, the Harry Potter Alliance also sponsors the Granger Leadership Academy, an annual onsite event now in its fifth year. The next one is in Philadelphia, March 21-24, 2019 and it is limited to just 200 people. “if you’ve ever wondered what your own heroic tale would look like, this is your moment.” The Academy brings in experienced activists and leaders to provide attendees – most, but not all, women – with training based on the kinds of dynamic, collaborative, strategic leadership Hermione Granger exhibited in the Harry Potter books.

One of the reasons I find all of this fascinating is that there are constant laments that younger generations aren’t volunteering, aren’t joining traditional civic groups like Rotary, Optimist, Lion’s, etc. And all I can say is that younger generations ARE volunteering, ARE getting involved in their communities – but they are doing it in different ways. Maybe the local civic group didn’t bother to create any social media channels to talk about their work, haven’t updated their web site in years, and have spent more time complaining about declining numbers than trying to do an honest assessment of why that is happening.