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.

VA: a culture of fear, silence & misplaced priorities

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It was my first six months at the large, well-known, respected organization. I was excited. I was nervous. I was full of passion. I was trying to do a great job – not just a good job. And I had to write an update about a project I was working on – the first of many. I wrote the report, following the guidelines I had been provided. I was clear, concise, and honest. I wanted senior staff that read the report to know what had worked, and to be proud of it, but also, what had not worked, and what needed to happen to address those challenges. I wanted my first report to make a SPLASH, to build trust by others for me. I labored for many, many hours, finished the report, and turned it in.

A few days later, I was called into a meeting with my boss and a member of senior staff. Their phrasing of their initial praise of the report was my first sign that something was wrong – I can always tell statements that are made just to soften the blows coming. I may even have said, after the canned positive comments, “But….” However it happened, they got to the real reason for the meeting: they wanted the problems I had identified excised from the report, because it would be available for our headquarters office.

They talked about how identifying problems could be “misinterpreted” and “could give the wrong impression.” They talked about how other programs would be emphasizing success – and only success – and I needed to do the same, because talking about problems could be used to rank the program below others. They talked about how this report could later be used to question any good performance review on my part.

I was flabbergasted. “But then how will we get the resources for these problems to be addressed? And what if the problems get identified by someone else – won’t HQ wonder why we hadn’t told them earlier? Doesn’t talking openly about these challenges, and how they could be addressed, show that we are on top of this program, that we truly understand it?”

Many “I understand why you think that way” comments followed, more false praise… but assurances that not talking about problems was the way to go, and that we would address these problems privately.

Another time, the entire company was told we had to take a series of online tests for HQ to prove our proficiency regarding Microsoft Office products. I had other priorities, much more important, primarily some dire problems with a web site product we were about to launch, so I put off doing the test. The head of HR visited my office to emphasize the importance of my taking the test at least 48 hours before the stated deadline. Why? Because senior staff wanted to be able to brag that they’d had 100% compliance 48 hours before deadline, to show what great managers they were. Again, I was flabbergasted – management problems were rife at the organization, in dire need of being addressed, but we were going to mask them with a statistic.

This all comes to mind as I watch the Veteran’s Administration fiasco – one that has been going on for YEARS – finally getting mainstream media attention. That culture of hiding problems doesn’t come from hearts prone to evil – it comes from a culture where talking opening about problems is seen as weakness and causes people that report such to be demoted or marginalized. Where meaningless statistics are used to measure management performance, and skew it to look more positive than it might be. Where fear of being seen as weak and being passed over for promotion drives people to hide problems in dire need of being addressed. It’s a culture I abhor. And, therefore, probably why I tend not to last very long in large bureaucracies…

Most managers fear asking their employees: “What are the five biggest challenges this company is facing regarding the quality of our work?” Most managers fear hearing what they have to say. And it’s why situations like what’s happening now regarding the Veterans Administration (VA).

So, what’s the culture like at YOUR organization? Be honest…

Also see:

Incorporating virtual volunteering into a corporate employee volunteer program

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A new resource on my web site:

Incorporating virtual volunteering into a corporate employee volunteer program 
(a resource for businesses / for-profit companies)
Virtual volunteering – volunteers providing service via a computer, smart phone, tablet or other networked advice – presents a great opportunity for companies to expand their employee philanthropic offerings. Through virtual volunteering, some employees will choose to help organizations online that they are already helping onsite. Other employees who are unable to volunteer onsite at a nonprofit or school will choose to volunteer online because of the convenience. This resource reviews what your company needs to do, step-by-step, to launch or expand virtual volunteering as a part of your employee volunteering program.

Inspired by my recent webinar with Kaye Morgan-Curtis, of Newell Rubbermaid for VolunteerMatch: Virtual Volunteering: An Untapped Resource for Employee Engagement.

Anger motivates volunteers as much as sympathy

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For years, during my workshops on volunteer engagement, I have half-jokingly said I have never volunteered out of the goodness of my heart or to be nice – because I’m not at all a nice person – and have, instead, volunteered because I’m angry about something. I have used this as a way to introduce audiences to the plethora of motivations of volunteers, to help them create better recruitment and engagement schemes.

Now, I have some science to back me up!

Someone sent me this link today: “Anger motivates volunteers as much as sympathy.”  The authors of the study are Dr. Robert Bringle and his students Ashley Hedgepath and Elizabeth Wall at Appalachian State University.  

And it’s not the first study that’s said this: Ilana Silber published “The angry gift: A neglected facet of philanthropy” in 2012. 

It’s a mistake to think that all volunteers are motivated only by kindness or selflessness. There are all sorts of motivations for volunteering. People volunteer because they:

  • like the idea of being associated with the particular organization or activity
  • want experience to put on job applications
  • want to meet people, as friends or for their social or business connections
  • think the activity looks fun
  • like the people that have invited them to volunteer, or like the people volunteering
  • are curious
  • are bored

and, yes, because they are angry about something – about how many discarded pets are at shelters or women’s lack of access to reproductive health information or domestic violence or barriers to girls in STEM-related careers or the condition of the environment and on and on.

And all of these are GREAT reasons for volunteering. Do you welcome all of these volunteers at your organization?

Also see:

Making certain volunteers feel unwelcomed because of your language

Do you welcome people with your language?

Screening Volunteers for Attitude

Mission statements for your volunteer engagement

Welcoming immigrants as volunteers at your organization

Advice for unpaid interns to sue for back pay

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The outcry against unpaid internships continues. The latest is from HuffPost College:

Four Ways You Can Seek Back Pay For An Unpaid Internship

Amid its advice is this:

New York has also taken a stronger stance against internships at nonprofits. Federal rules say unpaid internships in government agencies or nonprofits are “generally permissible,” but New York (PDF) says nonprofits still must pay their interns except under limited circumstances. Namely, certain nonprofits may have unpaid interns enrolled in educational programs, as trainees receiving formal instruction, or as volunteers who do completely different tasks than paid employees. The state has an even stricter 11-part test (PDF) for internships at for-profit companies.

Nonprofits and NGOs: you need to be paying attention to this controversy. You need to be thinking about why any task at your organization that is being done by a volunteer – and that includes unpaid interns – beyond “We don’t have money to pay someone to do that.” You need a mission statement for your volunteer engagement and you need to be talking about the value of volunteers far beyond dollar/Euro or other monetary value for their hours!

My other blogs on this controversy:

Note that the links within these blogs may not work, as I moved all of my blogs from Posterous to WordPress a few months ago, and it broke all of the internal links. Also, some web pages on other organization’s sites have moved since I linked to such, and I either don’t know or haven’t been able to find a new location for the material.

ICTs, Employability & Social Inclusion in the EU

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(note: if any URL does not work, cut and paste it into archive.org).

In my last blog, I talked about how, at long last, my paper, Internet-mediated Volunteering in the EU:  Its history, prevalence, and approaches and how it relates to employability and social inclusion, had been published. My research was for the ICT4EMPL Future Work project undertaken by the Information Society Unit of the Institute for Prospective Technological Studies at the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre.

The ICT4EMPL Future Work project aims to inform policy of new forms of work and pathways to employability in the European Union mediated by ICTs – Information and Communications Technologies. The ICT4EMPL research project is in the context of of implementation of the Europe 2020 strategy and the Digital Agenda for Europe. For more information, see Skills & Jobs, Digital Agenda for Europe.

The ICT4EMPL Future Work project developed, produced overview reports on the state of play of crowd-sourced labour, crowdfunding, internet-mediated volunteering and internet-mediated work exchange (timebanks and complementary currency). These activities were explored in relation to key themes of opportunities for entrepreneurship and self employment, skills and social inclusion, and transition from education to employment for young people.

In addition to my paper, here are other papers published as part of the ICT4EMPL Future Work project, and almost all of them talk about volunteering in some way:

Wish they had a way people could comment on the papers. Online discussions about these topics would further our learning about them.

Internet-mediated Volunteering in the EU (virtual volunteering)

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paperAt long last, Internet-mediated Volunteering in the EU:  Its history, prevalence, and approaches and how it relates to employability and social inclusion, has been published. 

My research was for the ICT4EMPL Future Work project undertaken by the Information Society Unit of the Institute for Prospective Technological Studies at the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre, and consumed most of my 2013.

As part of this project, I created a wiki of all of the various resources I used for my research, and it includes a list of online volunteering-related recruitment or matching web sties that are either focused on or allow for the recruitment of online volunteers from EU-countries, and a list of more than 60 organisations in EU countries that involve online volunteers in some way. The wiki offers many more resources as well, not all of which made it into the final paper.

I also blogged about what I learned from researching virtual volunteering in Europe, such as how much virtual volunteering is happening all over Europe, how Spain is, by far, the leader in Europe regarding virtual volunteering (particularly in Catalonia), how little the French seem to be doing with regard to virtual volunteering (tsk tsk), and that traditional volunteer centers in Europe are pretty much ignoring virtual volunteering – if it’s mentioned at all, it’s talked about in terms of being new and rare – which the research firmly established is not at all the case.

It would be amazing if this paper lead to significant change in the EU regarding volunteering: if volunteer centers – from the city level to the international level – fully acknowledged virtual volunteering at long last, and if detailed materials regarding how to create virtual volunteering tasks was written and published in all the various languages of Europe. It would be great if employers in Europe started valuing volunteer experience on people’s résumés, something they don’t seem to do currently. What would be particularly awesome would be the establishment of online discussion groups for managers of volunteers in European countries., something that, as far as I can tell, only exists for the UK (UKVPMs) and, to a degree, in Spain (E-Voluntas). People are hungry for virtual volunteering activities – particularly, but not limited to, people under 40 in the EU. I hear European-based NGOs and charities complaining about not being able to involve young people as volunteers – and then balk at the idea of creating online volunteering assignments. THIS HAS TO CHANGE.

Also, as a result of this and other research, I have a list of people based in Europe that I consider experts in virtual volunteering – in the U.K., in Spain (of course – mostly in Catalonia, in fact), in Germany, in Italy (met her after the research was turned in, unfortunately) and Poland, and if you are a researcher, journalist, or organization interested in virtual volunteering, and want to talk to an EU-based consultant, give me a shout and I’ll give you my list of contacts.

Also see this review of the paper by Ismael Peña-López.

Citation:

folklore / text messaging interfering with development, aid/relief & public health initiatives

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I’ve recently updated a resource I started back in 2004:

Folklore, Rumors (or Rumours) & Urban Myths Interfering with Development & Aid/Relief Efforts, & Government Initiatives (& how these are overcome)

Folklore, rumors (or rumours) and urban myths / urban legends often interfere with relief and development activities, and government initiatives, including public health initiatives — even bringing such to a grinding halt. They create ongoing misunderstandings among communities and cultures, prevent people from seeking help, encourage people to engage in unhealthy and even dangerous practices, cultivate mistrust of people and institutions, and have even lead to mobs of people attacking someone or others for no reason other than something they heard from a friend of a friend of a friend. And now, with cell phone text messaging and social media, it’s easier than ever to spread such misinformation.

This resource has examples of this happening – in developing countries but also in the USA – and how to prevent or address such. And I’ve had the opportunity to update it recently. It’s a project that I would love to devote more time to, but I really need that time funded.

When Words Get in the Way (Like “Virtual Volunteering”)

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This blog originally appeared at the TechSoup blog space in March 2014:

At the start of any workshop I lead related to virtual volunteering, I ask the audience, “How many of you are engaging with volunteers virtually?” If few or no people raise their hands, I ask the question again at the end of my workshop. And the numbers always change.

Take for example the webinar I did recently for TechSoup’s audience on the best assignments for online volunteers. As usual, I ask a few minutes into the workshop how many people were involving online volunteers. The results:

Yes: 32%
No: 68%

So I went through the workshop and then, at the end, asked the question again. This time:

Yes: 58%
No: 42%

The term “virtual volunteering” is a contested term. Some people define oh-so-strictly: remote volunteers who never come on-site at an organization, and all of their service is conducted online. That means people who translate documents wouldn’t be considered online volunteers, because they aren’t actually using the Internet for their service, they are using their skills. So often, organizations are involving online volunteers – they are engaging in virtual volunteering – but because of the definition they’ve decided upon before the workshop, they have no idea they are engaged in the practice.

That’s why, at the start of any workshop, after the first poll of the room or the webinar attendees, I offer my definition of virtual volunteering:

Volunteers completing tasks, in whole or in part, off-site from the organization being assisted, using any Internet-connected device (computer, smart phone, etc.). 

That means a volunteer could perform most of his or her service for an organization on-site, but if he or she is doing some of the service from home – designing a logo, tagging photos with keywords, writing an article for a newsletter, participating in an online community of fellow volunteers – that person is also engaging in virtual volunteering.

Offering that broader definition at workshops makes people realize that, indeed, they are engaging with volunteers online, and a workshop about virtual volunteering isn’t going to help them introduce the practice; it is, instead, going to help them expand what they are already doing.

In Digital Engagement branch of the TechSoup Community forum!

Comparing schools with high & low volunteer engagement

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The local edition of The Oregonian recently published an article comparing local schools here in Forest Grove with high volunteer involvement to those with little or no volunteer involvement. The article focused on parent-teacher organizations (PTOs) and their ability to fundraise to support school trips, teacher support (buying materials), playgrounds, etc. The local schools here in Washington County with high volunteer involvement are flourishing; the schools without such are struggling.

I loved the article because it really drives home just how vital volunteer engagement is, not to just get work done, but to create community investment in an organization.

I feel really bad for the schools without high parental involvement – and when you look at the makeup of the schools, it’s pretty obvious as to why the schools don’t have a PTO at all, or the one it has is barely surviving, at least in my opinion:

  • the parents in the schools with little or no volunteer involvement lack the education levels and work experience of those in the high-performing schools (it’s hard to lead a fundraising effort if you have no project management experience or no public-speaking experience),
  • the parents in the schools with little or not volunteer involvement often don’t speak English or don’t feel confident about their English skills (and often don’t feel confident about public speaking),
  • there’s no tradition among the parents in the school with low volunteer involvement of volunteer involvement in the schools (it’s a very new idea for many),
  • the parents in the schools with little or no volunteer involvement don’t have the child care resources that parents in other schools have,
  • those charged with volunteer involvement in the school, or should be charged with such, don’t understand the basics of volunteer engagement.

Volunteers aren’t free. There are ALWAYS costs associated with involving volunteers. And sometimes, an organization – a nonprofit, a school, or otherwise – needs much more than someone saying, “We need volunteers.” But will corporations and governments step up to the plate and fund the staff and resources necessary to increase parental involvement in struggling schools?

A side note: the article quotes a representative from PTO Today, a company that specializes in volunteer engagement resources for schools, and it’s worth noting that the site has free resources in Spanish to reach out to Spanish speaking parents, like lists of reasons to get involved in school, lists of reasons to join the school parent group, a sample volunteer thank you letter, and more.

Also see, from me:

How I ended up at a Philly Tech4Good event

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When I get to travel for work outside of my home near Portland, Oregon, I do a search on Google and Twitter to see what people and organizations might be worthwhile to connect with while in a particular area. I look for volunteer centers, international nonprofits, nonprofit development/support centers, nonprofits focused on computers and the Internet in some way, and academics that have done research or teach regarding nonprofit management or international aid work. I write each of those organizations, departments or people and ask if we could meet, just so I can hear about their work and so I can offer any advice or resources, in an informal setting.

Sometimes, my schedule fills up quickly, and I get to meet face-to-face with people I might never get to meet otherwise. Other times, I get confused email responses from people that find this old-fashioned “networking” idea as oh-so-strange.

Last week, I went to Philadelphia to present for the Mennonite Central Committee (MCC)’s  US National Thrift Shop Conference, about trends in volunteer engagement. I also contacted a few nonprofits, university offices and government offices to see if they would like to meet. The organizers of Philly Tech Week said yes (thank you, Brian James Kirk and Corinne Warnshuis!).

Philly Tech Week featured an event on the campus of Temple University while I was in the area:  Exploring Civic Volunteering With Technology: Kickoff for Commit Service Pledge. The event was to launch the Commitpledge.com web site that asks Philadelphia-area nonprofits to post tech-related volunteering opportunities, and for volunteers to offer their expertise through the web site to help with those opportunities.

The event also featured a panel discussion by Jeff Friedman, the new Director of eGovernment Business Development at Microsoft and recently a part of the Philadelphia Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics, Mayo Nissen, a New York-based designer who has been involved in urban improvement initiatives involving technology, and Anthony Pisapia, Associate Executive Director of Tech Impact, the nonprofit behind npCloud and VolunteerConnect.

The panelists talked not just about how tech helps nonprofits, but also how it helps governments better engage and support citizens – too many of tech-for-good initiatives leave out government programs, IMO, so this was great to hear.

Some good questions were asked, including:

  • How can big data help more in helping citizens?
  • How do we make products that result from hackathons sustainable?
  • How do we better address the disconnect between tech and who it should serve?

A moment I loved was when, in response to several panelist comments about how to find out what the community needs, an audience member said “Go to city council meetings!” She’s so right – nonprofits and individual citizens are being loud and clear about their needs, in government meetings, in their own meetings, on newspaper Facebook pages, on government program Facebook pages, and on and on. Quit wondering and start reading and listening!

My favorite moment, however, was when Anthony Pisapia said “Nonprofits are geniuses at innovation, but maybe not at technology.” I’ll be quoting this again and again! He’s absolutely right: nonprofits have expertise, and their staff and volunteers do amazing things with very little resources. In fact, they have as much, if not more, to teach the corporate, for-profit world as the other way around! Too many tech folks think nonprofits are incompetent or inefficient; in fact, nonprofits are some of the most innovative entities around.

There was also the inevitable questions of “What’s the difference in a social entrepreneur and a volunteer? Actually, what is a volunteer? Is our goal that, eventually, everyone gets paid for their work?” As I was an observer and outsider, I didn’t enter into that discussion during the event, but afterwards, did my best to answer the question one-on-one. That may turn into a blog…

If you will be in the Portland, Oregon area, and want to meet with me, contact me! Just tell me who you are, what your area of work is, and what you would like from me in terms of a face-to-face discussion.

I write a LOT about tech-related volunteering. Here are some of my resources: