Category Archives: Community Relations/Outreach

Feuds in the nonprofit/NGO/charity world

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I work with nonprofit organizations, international agencies and even government offices that don’t get along with each other. And it leaves me in an awkward position when I’m talking with such an organization about some activity or resources that would be oh-so-appealing to another organization. I know that, when I make the suggestion for collaboration, or even just an email update or event invitation from one organization to the other, a heavy silence will fill the air – or some quickly-made-up excuses will flow and the suggestion will be ignored.

Entire organizations hurt each other’s feelings all the time, just as people do – because organizations are made up of people. But often, what one organization views as a criticism or an act of conscious disrespect by another organization is actually incompetence or thoughtlessness – it’s not at all a deliberate act. It can be an email that doesn’t receive a response or a phone call that doesn’t get returned (They are ignoring me! They hate me!) or a duplication of activities (They *know* we already do an event like that! They did this to try to steal our thunder!) or an event that doesn’t get announced until late (They didn’t tell us about this earlier so we wouldn’t be able to participate!).

I know one organization that believes it’s in a feud with another organization – but that other organization has no idea there’s any hurt feelings! So while the Hurt Organization takes every action by Other Organization as an attack, a slight, an insult, etc., Other Organization is completely oblivious that Hurt Organization feels that way.

Sometimes, a feud is acknowledged by both organizations – but there’s no effort to get over it. And there always be an effort to get over it, because there’s no room in the nonprofit / NGO / charity world for feuds. Disagreements? Yes, those need to happen, and it may be you never see eye-to-eye about what the approach should be to homelessness, or women’s health care, or stray animals – but the disagreement can be acknowledged by both parties without a silent and/or nasty feud between them. Debates? Absolutely – we won’t evolve or learn if we don’t debate! But silent feuding? That hurts all of us and those we serve.

When I take on public relations/outreach activities for an organization, one of the first things I do is to look at the distribution list for press releases and announcements, invitation lists for events, etc., and I make sure every organization that has a similar mission and is working in the same area is on those lists. That can include groups that have publicly said they disagree with the organization’s mission. There might be some cringing from other department heads, even a closed-door meeting where I’m assured the overture won’t lead to anything positive, but I insist. And every time, maybe after weeks, maybe after months, there’s a thawing of relations: Someone has lunch with someone else. Someone attends another’s special event. A white paper is shared. Small steps.

Maybe the organizations will never like each other; but I don’t have to like you to work with you!

Also see:

How to handle online criticism

Community Relations, With & Without Tech

Don’t use stock photos; make your own photo archive

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One of the many online communities I’m on had a posting by someone from a nonprofit organization looking for stock photos of volunteers to use in a brochure they were producing.

And I cringed.

Stock photos are professionally-produced photos made available for companies and organizations to use to express a certain notion or idea. Stock photos are also of people who have no affiliation with the company or organization that uses them on their web sites, in their brochures, etc. You see stock photos in picture frames for sale.

A stock photo used by a nonprofit organization on its web site, in its brochure, or on a poster is obvious — and dishonest. To me, it screams, “These are professional models who don’t actually volunteer here/aren’t actually clients here!”

Unless the identity of your volunteers or clients needs to be protected (and that certainly does happen — for instance, with domestic violence shelters), you should have a folder on your computer system (on your local network, in the cloud, whatever) filled with digital photos showing genuine volunteers, clients, staff and others, ready for use in your marketing materials and fund-raising proposals.

The good news is that you can easily compile such a stock photo archive!

Begin by ensuring that you have a signed photo release for every volunteer at your organization. Volunteers should be asked to sign such a form at the time they attend the first orientation or volunteering session or with their completed volunteer application. If you intend to take photos at an activity or event where clients will be present, you will also need to get a photo release form for any clients (or anyone else) who might be photographed. You can find samples of photo release forms by typing in this phrase into Google.com or your favorite online search tool:
photo release form

Next, make sure every paid staff member, every unpaid volunteer, every client and every parent or guardian of a client knows your organization’s policies regarding taking photos in association with your organization’s activities (again, just type photo policy into Google.com or your favorite online search tool to find examples of such), and within the boundaries of those policies, invite them to take photos in association with your organization’s activities and to share these photos with your organization. With most smart phones and other handheld tech coming with a camera, your volunteers and clients may already be taking photos. Remind everyone associated with your organization, via regular meetings or regular online or print communications, both of these policies and that you would like such photos shared with you (people need to hear messages more than once in order to have them in mind).

Note in your event or activity announcements if photos might be taken. Whoever takes photos should identify him or herself to those being photographed. This should be a part of your photography policies that you have communicated organization-wide.

When photographing at events where people may not know me, I ask that whomever kicks off the meeting to announce that I’m taking photos that could appear on our web site or in printed materials, and that if anyone does not want their photo used, they should raise their hand any time they see me taking a photo they might be a part of so that later, when going through photos later, I will delete any photo of a person who is raising their hand, or crop them out of the photo. This worked really well when I took photos at community meetings in Afghanistan (more about Taking Photos in the Developing World, a resource I developed while working in Afghanistan in 2007).

Frequently encourage volunteers, employees and clients to share photos they have taken at your events or during volunteering activities with your organization (they need to hear this message more than once!). The best way to share photos is, IMO, via Flickr (photos can be shared with just your organization, without sharing them with the entire world) or via Drop Box (don’t accept photos via email – it uses too much bandwidth and will slow your emails down!).

As photos come in to you, create a folder on your computer or drive for photos you might want to use on your web site, in a brochure, in a fundraising proposal, etc. Look for photos that have at least one of these qualities:

  • shows action
  • shows smiles
  • shows diversity
  • teens
  • seniors

If you don’t have software or an operating system that allows you to organize and search photos easily, create a naming system for photos, sub-folders and files on your computer so you can easily find photos for certain kinds of images, such as photos that show:

  • female participation
  • senior/elder participation
  • multi-cultural participation
  • physical action
  • enjoyment/happiness
  • caring
  • etc.

If you can afford to use a professional photographer and have photo setups, where volunteers pretend to be in the middle of a service activity, or where staff pretend to be engaged in their work, great! It’s okay to set up a photo — just use your own folks, not professional models.

Stay genuine! That attracts people much more than even the slickest of stock images.

March 26, 2018 update: I was working on a very large PR campaign with a colleague. I wanted to solicit photos from various sources to use in our campaign, photos of people engaged in an activity that related to our campaign. She wanted to use stock photos. I relented for various reasons. A year later, I stopped at a gas station in Kentucky, and while inside, looked up at a poster about job opportunities with this particular company. There was a series of photos that I guess were meant to represent people that work for the company. And among that series of photos was one that we had used prominently in our own campaign, which had nothing to do with gas stations… I realize it’s unlikely that anyone else made the connection, and I certainly don’t dislike gas stations – I’m quite fond of their services. But it was a reminder of why using stock photos is often a very bad idea.

March 8, 2021 update: Here is a fantastic blog about a company that created its own photo stock library, using its own assets (it’s own offices). I think going round your building with a smartphone, taking snaps and adding insta filters will always trump purchasing stock images. What a great task for volunteers to undertake for your organization!

Harry Potter fans make a difference – as do other fan groups

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Back in the 1990s, when I was directing the Virtual Volunteering Project, I researched 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.

There are thousands of online communities for people who want to to share information and excitement about a particular television show, movie, sports team, celebrity, hobby or literary genre. And just as offline communities and groups will often “pass the hat” at their gatherings for a good cause, these Internet-based fan groups often come together online or in person to improve their communities, promote a cause or generate funds for a nonprofit organization. Often, these fans engage in philanthropy with no prompting from any charity or formal organization.

It’s been almost 15 years since I wrote that, and I’m pleased to see that this tradition is continuing. The latest example: The Harry Potter Alliance, a group 100,000 Harry Potter fans all over the world, has raised $15,000 for aid in Darfur and Burma and $123,000 for Haiti. Its Deathly Hallows Campaign is attacking hunger, bullying, child slavery and more.

We are an army of fans, activists, nerdfighters, teenagers, wizards and muggles dedicated to fighting for social justice with the greatest weapon we have– love.

Accio Volunteers!

Tags: outreach, networking, connections, friends, connect, network, volunteering, volunteers, community, engagement, volunteerism, social, business, Harrry Potter, DIY, books, movies, novels, fiction

It’s okay to say “no” to an online connection

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When the popularity of the World Wide Web exploded in the late 1990s and every individual and organization decided they each needed a web site, requests abounded for link exchanges:

I’ll link to your web site if you will link to mine.

At first, it was an always-say-yes proposition. But nonprofit organizations in particular realized quickly that it wasn’t a good idea to link to anyone who asked: what if the request was from a corporation engaged in activities that went against the mission of the nonprofit? or if the request came from an individual who had material on his or her web site that insults particular groups of people, or encourages people to break the law? Many organizations developed web link policies; for instance, a nonprofit would link to a web page only if its content was directly, obviously related to the mission of the organization.

Now, the popularity of online networking sites permeates our culture, with everyone, including many nonprofits, in a rush to build up their online profiles on various platforms and to build a high number of online friends. But is it really appropriate for you to accept every invitation to connect to your profile on an online networking site?

It’s not only your nonprofit that needs to think strategically its online networking presence – you, as a volunteer or employee at a nonprofit organization, need to think about the purpose of your own online networking as well. If you link to anyone, anytime, on any platform, with no criteria for what connections mean to you, don’t be surprised if you find yourself over time lacking motivation to network online, as linking becomes mechanical instead of influential, without any meaning behind your connections. Your links become just numbers, rather than real connections to with which to share and collaborate.

LinkedIn is a professional networking site. My Linkin connections are real connections: they are current and former co-workers and clients, volunteers I’ve supervised or worked with, people who have attended a workshop I’ve presented, classmates, and various other people I’ve worked with in such a way that I would be able to say something about them, people whose work I’m very familiar with, or people who are familiar with my work. That keeps LinkedIn connections of real value to me, rather than the online equivalent of a stack of business cards. My connections can view each other and know that these aren’t just a long list of names and email addresses I have no real connection to — these are my colleagues, in every sense of the word, and my colleagues are welcomed to leverage my connections for their own professional reasons.

By contrast, I’m not always comfortable with professional colleagues and fellow volunteers wanting to connect to me via social networking profiles. Do I really want former supervisors to get regular, automatic updates about my vacations, political causes with which I’m involved, and which Buffy: The Vampire Slayer character I’m most like? Of course, with sites like Google, it’s quite easy for anyone, including potential employers, to find out just about anything about anyone – but, IMO, there’s a difference in being able to find information about me if you go looking for it and are willing to dig awhile, versus getting an automatic electronic update about my political views.

Consider developing your own linking policy for your online networking activities – both those you do as an organization and those you do as an individual. What do you want your links on professional sites like LinkedIn to see about you, versus your connections on make-a-difference networks like Change.org, versus your online social networking on FaceBook? There have never been absolute lines in our lives where work and volunteering ends and social activities begin, of course, and you will always have gray areas, but it’s still worth thinking about, to keep your online connections true connections, with some kind of real value to them.

When you say no to an online connection, consider offering an alternative. For instance, to people who ask to link to me on Linkedin whom I don’t know, I offer the alternative of getting to know each other online professionally, inviting the person to:

  • friend me on my professional Facebook profile (as opposed to my personal one)
  • Follow me Twitter at @jcravens42
  • subscribe to my email newsletter, Tech4Impact, which gives nonprofits and other mission-based organizations byte-sized tips for getting the most out of tech tools, as well as offering a list of my most-recent blog posts.
  • Subscribe to my blog via RSS (not necessary if they do any of the above)
  • Share his or her blog address with me

As I’ve said many times before, the biggest value from the Internet is, and has always been, the ability to connect with people interested in an area similar to what you are interested in, and to be able to collaborate with and learn from these people no matter where you are on Earth. But when I say connect, I don’t mean just marking someone as a connection on LinkedIn or as a friend on FaceBook or whatever. When I want to actually connect with someone online:

  • I send the person an email or make a post to his or her blog, commenting on something that person has written or said. 
  • I post questions, answers and resources on an online discussion group with a membership that includes people I would very much like to know, and that I want to know me (and I still get way more value out of YahooGroups and GoogleGroups than I do LinkedIn or FaceBook).
  • I invite people to post comments on my own network in reply to my blog.
  • I refer someone to a person or resource, in response to something they have written online.
  • etc.

This does lead to real connections — people I end up collaborating with, recommending to others, co-presenting with, even working with or for, or hiring.

And one more thing: accept that there are two yous. Maybe even three yous. Maybe even more.

There is your professional, public you: the one that works at such-and-such company, went to such-and-such university, serves on such-and-such board of directors, lives in such-and-such city and uses your first and last name in your emails and online profiles, etc. This is the you that is easy to find by co-workers, potential employers, even the media. The public you is the one that comes up in the first pages of a Google search.

There is also your personal you: the one that engages in activities you wouldn’t necessarily want all of your co-workers or potential employers to know about in a readily-easy manner, the one that writes Harry Potter fan fiction, the one that is overtly politically-opinionated, and doesn’t use your first and last name in your emails and online profiles, etc. These activities may be easy to find online, but aren’t so easy to associate with you by co-workers, potential employers or the media even if they find it, because you don’t use your full first and last name, because you don’t list the city where you are, because you never mention your employer, etc.

You have to decide where each of your activities, online or offline, fall among these two — or more — yous.

Maybe you want to keep your volunteering activities and books you’ve read and so on in your personal you online activities. Or maybe you want to share even more in your public you profiles. The point is: you have control of the information you share online. Be deliberate, or at least thoughtful, in what you share and how you share information.

Tags: communications, personal, private, outreach, networking, connections, friends, connect, network, volunteering, volunteers, community, engagement, volunteerism, social, business

PowerPoint / slide shows: the antithesis of thinking

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I hate Microsoft PowerPoint users. I hate all slide show users, actually.

Hate. I’m a hater.

I hate slide show presentations because:

  • people stare at the presentation rather than listening to and hearing what’s being said
  • people stare at the slide show rather than looking at the presenter 
  • people think reading the slide show later, having missed the actual meeting, will provide them with all the information needed
  • the presenter often stares at the presentation instead of the audience

I’m not the only hater…  a Swiss political party wants to outlaw the software. I’m sure it’s a joke, but it is true when the organizers say that slideshow software (and unnecessary meetings and presentations in general) are boring employees and costing companies billions in lost work.

But the problem is much worse than boredom: T.X. Hammes’ blog Dumb-dumb bullets: As a decision-making aid, PowerPoint is a poor tool really struck a chord a few years ago, and it’s worth it to revisit. Hammes uses PowerPoint to mean any slide show, even though there is a range of software that people use to create boring slide show presentations:

(PowerPoint) is actively hostile to thoughtful decision-making. It has fundamentally changed our culture by altering the expectations of who makes decisions, what decisions they make and how they make them.

He continues

Before PowerPoint, staffs prepared succinct two- or three-page summaries of key issues. The decision-maker would read a paper, have time to think it over and then convene a meeting with either the full staff or just the experts involved to discuss the key points of the paper. Of course, the staff involved in the discussion would also have read the paper and had time to prepare to discuss the issues. In contrast, today, a decision-maker sits through a 20-minute PowerPoint presentation followed by five minutes of discussion and then is expected to make a decision. Compounding the problem, often his staff will have received only a five-minute briefing from the action officer on the way to the presentation and thus will not be well-prepared to discuss the issues. This entire process clearly has a toxic effect on staff work and decision-making.

If I didn’t know that Hammes retired from the Marine Corps after 30 years, I would swear, based on the above, that he, too, worked at the United Nations. Please read the entire blog. He’s so right on.

I do slide shows for my presentations because they are expected by whomever hires me, but, honestly, I don’t really need them, and I frequently forget to forward a slide because I’m too busy walking around and looking into the eyes of the audience and talking with them, listening to them, etc. I like for my presentations to be lively and to have a healthy dose of discussions, with the audience chiming in throughout the presentation with their own thoughts, even answering each others’ questions, instead of all answers and information coming from me. Slide shows kill this  interaction. They kill listening. Instead, audience see glowing colored lights, audience stare at glowing colored lights, audience no listen, audience no think.
And don’t even get me started on laptops and smart phones during presentations…
Next time you are asked to do a slide show for a presentation, think about what it is you are really trying to accomplish with that slide show. Is a slide show really the right mechanism to deliver your message? Are you relying on it WAY too much?
Tags: communications, presentations, teaching, training, software, presenter, trainer, consult, consulting, briefing, communicating, outreach, interaction, audience

Online community member? Supporter? Volunteer?

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Not much sets tongues wagging more among people that work with nonprofit organizations, NGOs, or other mission-based organizations, than a debate on who is and isn’t a volunteer.

I recently had a person responsible for a Second Life community assure me that those people involved in that community are not volunteers. In 2010, NetSquared, an organization I’m a big fan of, talked about how to encourage donors to contribute their time and/or talents virtually  – and never once used the word volunteers.

I’m firmly in the big tent when it comes to who is a volunteer: if you are doing something to support a nonprofit organization, and you are not being paid for it, you are a volunteer. I don’t care if you have been assigned community service by the court or a school, if you want to be called intern, if you are online or offline, if you will be the unpaid manager in charge of an entire department during your volunteer service, if you are doing a so-called micro-assignment and you are never ever going to do one again – I’m going to call you a volunteer.

The aversion to the term volunteer is astounding to me. I’ve had co-workers passionately try to explain to me why an intern isn’t a volunteer, despite the fact that that intern is NOT being paid. Or why an online community member, who helps other online members, and offers advice and feedback, isn’t a volunteer. Or a supporter who blogs and tweets about the organization regularly – and very positively – resulting in more publicity for the organization isn’t a volunteer. Or a board member isn’t a volunteer. My response to this: NONSENSE!

Part of the reason for the aversion to calling anyone and everyone who provides support to an organization, but isn’t paid to do so, a volunteer is because of how rigid so many staff members see their roles. If online community members are volunteers, who is in charge of those volunteers? Very traditional volunteer managers who see their role as being responsible for involving all volunteers, rather than supporting all staff in involving volunteers themselves, will balk at the increased (actually, just different kind) of responsibility. The program manager responsible for an online community of supporters, or the fundraising manager responsible for working with the board members and leadership committee members, may balk at the idea of having to be more internally-transparent about his or her involvement of such people and providing reports to the volunteer manager. It means approaching work and responsibilities more as a team, and many nonprofit, NGO, government and other mission-based managers just are not ready for that, terrified that it will diminish their manager or director role.

In addition, as I said in my blog on this subject back in 2010, I’ve heard some people say that they think the word volunteer conjures an image of very traditional people (whoever they are — I’m still not sure) doing traditional things like stuffing envelopes or handing out food at a homeless shelter. I’ve heard some people say that they think the term volunteer means someone who is merely providing free labor rather than free expertise, so they prefer to talk about pro bono consultants or executives on loan. Or online community member or supporter.

Does that mean all volunteers should be managed by the same person, or that they should all be screened, supported, recognized and supervised the same way? No. Volunteers’ level of responsibility, the amount of time they are donating, the length of their commitment, the nature of their work as a volunteer – all this and more will determine how they are screened, supported, recognized and supervised.

So, once again, I’ll be a rebel: I fully embrace the word volunteer. I’m going to keep using the word volunteer to mean when a person is donating time, talent and skills, whether onsite or online.

Tags: volunteer, volunteers, online, virtual, volunteering, community, discussion, supporters, members, fans, super

Do you fear online super fans?

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TechSoup recently held an online community meetup regarding building Super Fans. The event defined super fans as people online who demonstrate a particular brand of loyalty that, once recognized, stands to benefit your organization tremendously. Super fans are those individuals who are engaged with your organization above and beyond your average supporter.

In other words, super fans are super online volunteers – super-devoted, super-passionate online volunteers. And they usually emerge on your online community, in the comments section of your blog, in the comments section of your Facebook page, on Twitter (retweeting your stuff), etc.

As I said in the comments section of this blog recap: in this era when so many are claiming that most people only want micro-volunteering, just-whenever-you-might-have-time volunteering activities, it’s nice to read an article that acknowledges there are many people who want to be online volunteers with longer term commitments and much higher responsibilities, that want to be influencers, not just unpaid task-completers, and there are organizations that really do want such volunteers.

And as I also noted in my comments: I’ve found many nonprofits greatly fear “super fans” – they fear the intensity of their passion, their motivation, their loyalty and their energy. They fear the super fans unasked-for-suggestions and ideas, their independent tweeting and blogging, their spontaneous helpfulness to “regular” online community members… In fact, many nonprofits will shut down a super fan that they feel is too “super” – not for any policy violation or inappropriate behavior, but because of the perceived pressure such a fan can put on employees and other volunteers (when they “outshine” staff in an online community).

For the record: I fear not the super fan. I might make a suggestion to an online volunteer that’s a super fan, to make it clear they when they are speaking as an individual versus a rep of the organization, to change the wording on a blog or comment to make it more accurate, to let me announce something to an online forum first, etc. I might ask that super fan to join a formal committee to explore, in a more traditional manner, this or that program activity, outreach activity, etc. But I do not want to dampen that super fan enthusiasm! I have no idea how long it will last – will the person burn themselves out in a three months? Less? Super fans are never forever.

In fact, I’ve turned a couple of online super critics into super fans… but that’s another story.

I’ve also been a super fan myself, and most of the time it’s been super appreciated – but twice over the years, indeed, I was asked to curb my enthusiasm (“please don’t post to our online forum so much”) – both times by very traditional organizations that have been around a very long time.

So, why do some nonprofits sometimes fear super fans? Is it the unofficial or non-traditional nature of super fans that causes the fear? Is it that they fear anything they can’t completely control? How do you convince a nonprofit not to fear you, the super fan?

You can leave your comments here, or you can go over to the TechSoup forum thread I’ve started on this subject and post there.

Also see:

What is “too much” from an online contributor?

The dynamics of online culture & community

How to handle online criticism

Tags: volunteer, volunteers, online, virtual, volunteering, community, discussion, enthusiasm, enthusiastic, supporters, members, fans, critics, critic

Social media policies for mission-based organizations

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Social media policies. It’s a frequently-discussed topic on so many of the online discussion groups I follow. The main point of the participants in these discussions seems to be:

How do I keep our employees from saying something online that our organization could be sued for, that could lead to negative press coverage, or could make one of our donors angry?

I have to admit that I find most of the discussions about social media at nonprofits and other mission-based organizations annoying. I’m frustrated to see nonprofit organizations, NGOs, government agencies and other mission-based organizations much more focused on how to avoid upsetting anyone than on how to be bold in pursuit of their missions. Also, I’ve been hearing about this fear since around 1995 or so, and was appalled all those years ago to watch so many organizations wring their hands over this whole cyberspace thing while other organizations embraced it, ran with it and ended up doing amazing things for their clients and communities.

David Meerman Scott has been blogging recently about the conflict between legal staff and communicators when if comes to real-time media. Scott’s blog today links to his recent missives, as well as linking to three company’s staff guidelines to social media activities that he thinks are outstanding (I do too):

Also see this list of social media policies at six different companies by from BulletProof Blog – though many of these have WAY more legalease than I think is necessary – they come from a place of fear, and that’s never a good place to come from when talking about talking and working with the community.

Why don’t I panic more over what employees and volunteers might be doing online? Because I believe if an organization has a culture where every employee and every volunteer feels responsible for the organization’s reputation, and feels a part of that organization’s success or demise, where moral is high, internal communications are excellent and a sense of team is a way of working, not just a catch phrase for the annual report, that organization has nothing to fear about its staff’s online activities – if an online misstep happens (and it will), that organization will easily recover. For organizations that are oh-so-fearful of online activities: perhaps there’s something else you should be worrying about?

Also see:

Handling an Online Social Media Faux Paux (props to the American Red Cross!)

How to Handle Online Criticism

Evaluating Online Activities: Online Action Should Create & Support Offline Action

Using RSS for Media Monitoring

Social media: cutting both ways since the 1990s

Need a Social Media Policy? Maybe Yes, Maybe No.

Tags: policy, guideline, guidelines, staff, employee, employees, volunteer, volunteers, lawyer, lawyers, legal

TweetChat re: virtual teams on July 11

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TechSoup will host a TweetChat on 11.July at 10am Pacific USA Time regarding working with virtual teams.

Also known as distributed teams, virtual teams have come together for a day, a week, many months or even years to work on a project together for a nonprofit, an NGO or other mission-based organization. Your organization may already be involving a virtual team now and not even know it:

  • a committee with members who discuss and plan online rather than at onsite meetings
  • a mix of volunteers and employees collaborating on the development of a new online tool
  • a group of volunteers around the world working together to develop an HIV education curriculum

I’m particularly interested in this topic, as I’m currently revising the Virtual Volunteering Guidebook – specifically, I’m revisiting yet again this week the chapter that addresses the subject of virtual teams, a subject that did not appear in detail in the original book. I have been compiling resources and case studies on the subject for quite a while now, and want to make sure the chapter that includes this subject addresses all the fundamental elements required for virtual team success, no matter what online tools you may use with such a team. Woe to the volunteer manager – or any nonprofit professional – who does not know how to work with virtual teams!

You can watch the TechSoup event on Twitter as it happens on July 11 (and even participate!) or look in to the archive of the chat later. Here’s more info from TechSoup on how to participate.

I have more details about live tweet events here on my web site, on this page about using micro-blogging, in case you are wondering what this will event will really look like.

Follow me on Twitter @jcravens42, and follow @TechSoup as well, so you will stay up-to-date about this and other events to help build the capacity of nonprofits, NGOs, libraries, and other organizations that involve community members to meet their goals.

Tags: volunteering, volunteers, community, engagement, international, volunteerism, volunteering, collaborative, collaboration, virtual, teams, staff, employees

What is impressive, what is not

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Things I’m not impressed by:

  • How many Facebook “likes” or “friends” your organization has
  • How many times your organization “tweets” or your tweet has been retweeted
  • That your organization received an “award” from one of your VENDORS
  • That you “gave up” a corporate career to work in the nonprofit sector
  • How many hours your volunteers contributed last year
  • How many hours of overtime your organization’s employees work most weeks
  • That you are hiring a Rock Star-anything (Rock Star Membership Coordinator, Rock Star Social Media Manager) unless you are PAYING a Rock Star salary and providing Rock Star benefits.
  • Your web site’s use of stock photos
  • That your new web site is coming soon and all your descriptions of how great it’s going to be.

Things I am impressed by:

  • Online activities leading to offline action
  • How your organization handles negative comments on your Facebook page
  • That your organization was recognized by your Governor’s volunteering awards
  • That your tweet last week resulted in a $5000 donation (or more) than you wouldn’t have gotten otherwise
  • What your volunteers accomplished last year, in terms of tangible results (literacy among your clients increased, trees planted, perceptions changed, legislation passed, etc.)
  • Volunteers in leadership positions at your organization (leading a project, serving on an advisory board regarding marketing and outreach, producing a publication or online video, etc.)
  • Happy employees that love going to work and supporting each other, that love collaborating internally and sharing information and resources with each other
  • A competitive salary and benefits package for employees
  • Photos of your own organization’s actual volunteers or clients, however out-of-focus such may be
  • That your new web site is launched, on time, that it’s easy to navigate, that I can quickly find what I’m looking for without having to sit through a video or shut down your blaring audio that starts up automatically, that it works with any browser, and that you obviously incorporated the suggestions of others into the new design.