The Communications Initiative is a resource I rely on regularly. I cannot say enough fantastic things about it. Over the last several months, I have been unsubscribing from a lot of email newsletters and unfollowing a lot of pages on Facebook, trying to declutter my online life, but I continue to make time to read the Communications Initiative updates. If you work in any capacity regarding communicating with clients or the general public regarding your nonprofit, NGO or government agency, this is a must-use resource.
Your outreach seeks to educate, involve, and engage your organization’s stakeholders. Outreach that honors diversity, equity, and inclusion is no different, other than the intentionality of your decisions. It requires you to understand who your audience is beyond the data points. It requires you to know what their priorities are, and then to craft messages and engagements that are inclusive to them. DEI outreach goes beyond reaching out, it requires them to bring people in.
We’ve created these nine tips with the communicator in mind. It’s flexible, so use it as a checklist, a launching point for a discussion, or even an assessment survey to improve your DEI communications.
If you have benefited from this blog, my other blogs, or other parts of my web site and would like to support the time that went into researching information, developing material, preparing articles, updating pages, etc. (I receive no funding for this work), here is how you can help.
The National Volunteer Fire Council (NVFC)has partnered with Cottage Lane Productions to develop a new episode of the volunteer firefighter recruitment series Ride With Us. The series takes prospective volunteers into a firehouse to show them, as much as a video can, what it’s like to be a volunteer firefighter. These can be used by any fire station as a part of its own recruitment and onboarding of volunteer firefighters and first responders.
If you have benefited from this blog or other parts of my web site and would like to support the time that went into researching information, developing material, preparing articles, updating pages, etc. (I receive no funding for this work), here is how you can help.
Video continues to surge in popularity as a way to meet just about any outreach goal. And that means every nonprofit, big or small, needs to be thinking strategically about what videos it needs to produce and share – and where it should be sharing those videos.
Videos aren’t difficult to produce: if you have a smart phone that records video and/or audio, you can create videos to share online about your organization. That includes Androids, not just Apple devices. If any employee or volunteer has an Apple Macintosh computer, you have easy-to-use video editing software already on that computer: iMovie. Affordable video-editing software for non-Apple computers is easy to find online. Even if you have only photos, you can use them to create a video with audio for most of the proposed activities below.
As always: volunteers can be a GREAT help in producing these videos! If you don’t have an employee that can produce these videos, and cannot afford to pay a consultant, volunteers may be a great option – in fact, there are people actively searching for these kind of online volunteering tasks. Any volunteer that knows how to use iMovie or its equivalent can produce videos from you from any raw video you have from a smart phone, recorded Zoom meeting, camera, etc. Volunteers can also provide closed captioning and transcriptions of videos. Volunteers can also help you brainstorm ideas for videos your nonprofit should create.
If you have benefited from this blog, my other blogs, or other parts of my web site and would like to support the time that went into researching information, developing material, preparing articles, updating pages, etc. (I receive no funding for this work), here is how you can help.
When it comes to a successful web site for a nonprofit, an NGO, a government agency, a school or other mission-based, cause-based initiative, content is king. When I say successful, I’m talking about a web site where the people that organization is targeting come to that site, and those people find what they are looking for: through experiencing the site, people have an understanding how this program can serve them or their community, know if the program is successful, can sign up to volunteer and can easily make a financial donation.
I’ve seen beautifully-designed web sites that meet all accessibility and usability standards that never say what the organization really does, what programs they offer, why I should care, if they involve volunteers, etc. The organization invested in design, but not content.
Lizzie Bruce has a wonderful blog, “Why Do You Need a Content Designer? The Words Just Appear, Right?” that says so much of what I’ve been trying to stay for years. It’s comforting to know I’m not alone in trumpeting the need for focusing on content in developing a web site (or any other outreach tool, for that matter).
If you have benefited from this blog or other parts of my web site and would like to support the time that went into researching information, developing material, preparing articles, updating pages, etc. (I receive no funding for this work), here is how you can help.
I’m a Reddit user, and in addition to being a part of a LOT of Reddit communities, I also moderate four subreddits, as a volunteer: one regarding volunteerism, one regarding inclusion, a subreddit to discuss community service, and the TechSoup subreddit. I’ve also joined a LOT of Reddit communities and spend way too much time reading them (and sometimes commenting).
So I was one of many reddit users that got a customized slide show “year in review” that Reddit sends to users (community members). And it’s a super fun way to recognize program participants.
Among the slides is one that shows that, in 2021, I scrolled the length of 35,495 bananas lying end-to-end:
There’s also a slide showing my most popular post in 2021 – it was to a subreddit I don’t frequent, the one for Portland, Oregon, and was how volunteers were urgently needed at cooling stations set up to help people deal with our 116 degree days (it got 218 “up votes”):
There was also a slide that showed how many hours I spent in 2021 in various subreddits – yes, I really did spend 123 hours, at LEAST, in the volunteers subreddit. The TwoXriders subreddit noted is for women motorcyclists, in case you were wondering, and the Malicious Compliance subreddit – that you will have to check out yourself:
There’s also a slide showing how many new communities I joined in 2021, how many user awards I got, and how many karma points (as Reddit calls it, fake Internet points) I got (pictured below):
What a fun way to recognize participation! Good ideas for honoring program participants and volunteers as well.
And note: they never said, “Your volunteering hours were the equivalent of this much money!” Because that’s a really, really bad idea.
If you have benefited from this blog or other parts of my web site and would like to support the time that went into researching information, developing material, preparing articles, updating pages, etc. (I receive no funding for this work), here is how you can help.
One of the biggest complaints by people that want to volunteer is this: when they express interest in volunteering with a nonprofit, NGO, school, or any community initiative, whether they submit an email, submit an online application, use something like VolunteerMatch or call, they may never get a response, or by the time they do get a response, many weeks or months later, they aren’t available anymore.
On the other side of the equation, lots of people would like to volunteer in a more substantial role than a micro task: they want to really feel like they are making a difference, and they are ready to commit a regular amount of time each week to do that. But they would like to do that from home (virtual volunteering).
A great way to both better serve people that want to volunteer with you and to appeal to those folks looking for a way to volunteer online/remotely in a substantial role is to create a volunteer screening role for a volunteer – or a team of volunteers.
Volunteer screeners:
Respond to all applicants immediately, to each person who sends an email or an application to express interest. The volunteer screener responds to that email within 48 hours (two business days), asking the person to fill out the application (if the potential volunteers hasn’t already), and asking for additional information, if needed; asking a few follow-up questions via email is a great way to screen out people who aren’t ready to volunteer with you – if they don’t reply, it means they weren’t ready to volunteer.
Screeners can set up a time to meet initially with each applicant – though remember that you do NOT need to meet with EVERY volunteer applicant: insisting on a phone, web conference or onsite meeting can be an unnecessary barrier to volunteering.
Screeners can ask simple questions to an applicant, via a phone call, an email or a video meeting that helps the screeners gauge if those applicants really understand what the organization is all about, the basic requirements of all volunteer roles, the variety of volunteer roles, etc. The organization can give the screener the final say on whether or not the applicant goes to the next step (the orientation, which can be online, or the training for a particular role) or, the organization can give that power solely to the manager of volunteers, who reads through the profile/evaluation written by the screener and makes the decision (but that manager has to move FAST – lack of response, or a slow response, will result in the volunteer applicant moving on – and feeling like their time so far was wasted).
Screening volunteers should:
Have a solid understanding of the organization and its opportunities for volunteering, and be able to answer the question, “Why does this organization involve volunteers?”
Be enthusiastic about the programs of the nonprofit.
Be able to promptly, immediately input information in a database of volunteer applicant inforamation, even if that database is just a shared spreadsheet.
Have excellent written communication skills – ability to express ideas and facts clearly – and, perhaps, to also be able to have excellent speaking skills. They may also need excellent online speaking/presentation skills as well.
Comfortable promptly emailing with, texting with and making phone calls or video calls to applicants.
To get your screeners to that point, you should have a training and a mock interview or screening session, where they get to try out their skills and have a feeling for what interactions with volunteers can be like. And, absolutely, that training can be entirely online.
The organization always needs to know where any volunteer applicant is in the process, the date of that person’s application, the date the applicant was initially screened, etc., so they can know if volunteer applicants are being onboarded quickly. Having applicant information inputted into a shared database is crucial. I’m a board member and in charge of onboarding new applications, and I use a spreadsheet on Google Drive, with the names of every applicant, the date they applied, the date of their interview, if they were going forward after the interview or withdrawing, if they suddenly went incommunicado, etc., and share it with all the other board members, who can view it at any time.
Did you notice that I just described a virtual volunteering role?
And if you want to learn how to avoid the common pitfalls in virtual volunteering and to dig far deeper into the factors for success in creating assignments for online volunteers, supporting online volunteers, and keeping virtual volunteering a worthwhile endeavor for everyone involved, you will not find a more detailed guide anywhere than The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook. It’s based on many years of experience, from a variety of organizations. It’s available both as a traditional print publication and as a digital book.
If you have benefited from this blog or other parts of my web site and would like to support the time that went into researching information, developing material, preparing articles, updating pages, etc. (I receive no funding for this work), here is how you can help.
Did you discover last month that your nonprofit, NGO, government program or other cause-based, mission-based initiative is overly reliant on Facebook?
Sara Soueidan is a front-end user interface (UI) and design systems engineer / speaker / trainer and she tweets about usability and accessibility. On October 4th, when Facebook went down for several hours, she tweeted this:
While we’re at it: if you don’t have a Web site of your own and you’ve been blogging and creating content on third-party platforms, now might be a good time to reconsider creating one and owning your own little corner of the internet.
I completely agree. I am horrified at how many nonprofits, NGOs, government programs and other cause-based organizations have pretty much abandoned their own web sites and post only to Facebook.
Facebook is a for-profit company. If Facebook goes away tomorrow, there goes all of your data. By contrast, the address of your web site is yours, and if your web host were to go away, no problem – you move your site to a new host. Your address doesn’t have to ever change. You can move your web site to a different host is you decide you don’t like the host’s customer service or prices, or if the host goes out of business.
Facebook terms of service strongly imply that whatever you post there, Facebook owns, and that Facebook has the right to sell or give what you post to Facebook, even in your account profile, that you have marked as “private”, to anyone it wants to. By contrast, a web site is yours. The content and the address are yours.
Facebook content is only for Facebook users. If someone doesn’t have a Facebook account, they cannot see most of what is on Facebook. By contrast, a web site is public and anyone with Internet access can see it.
Your web site is your primary home on the Internet. Everything you do online, including on social media, should ultimately link back to your web site. Yes, you can use the Facebook events feature to announce events, but that event information should be on your web site as well. And remember that many of your clients, volunteers, donors and others use different social media channels. Have you asked them not only if they are on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or whatever the flavor of the month is, but also if they would want to interact with your program on these.
Your blog should be on your own web site as well. I use WordPress, which is free, but I use my own web site to host it. Twice, my blog host has gone under, and in both cases, neither was captured on archive.org. Luckily, one did give me enough of notice for me to download all of my blogs, so I could repurpose many of them here.
I even screen capture Twitter or Facebook interactions that are particularly memorable or worth bragging about, and upload them to Flicker and maintain a database of such, and all of my photos, on a hard drive.
Yes, there are people who are going to interact online with your initiative only via Facebook. Or Twitter. Or even only via email. None of those audiences are more important than another for your nonprofit, NGO, etc. Make sure all of your clients, volunteers, donors and others are reminded regularly of all of your various online communications channels – and your web address!
If you have benefited from this blog, my other blogs, or other parts of my web site and would like to support the time that went into researching information, developing material, preparing articles, updating pages, etc. (I receive no funding for this work), here is how you can help.
The entire membership of the Art Institute of Chicago docent program, all volunteers, are being let go by the museum in an effort to entirely revamp how art education for museum visitors is staffed and to make such staffing much more diverse.
It is a move that has hurt long-time volunteers and outraged right-wing media, but many say it’s the only way to dismantle a system that, intentionally or not, is designed to exclude many people from participating.
On Sept. 3, Veronica Stein, the AIC’s executive director of learning and public engagement, emailed 82 active docents, telling them the program’s current iteration would be coming to an end. Stein told the Wall Street Journal that the museum must move “in a way that allows community members of all income levels to participate, responds to issues of class and income equity, and does not require financial flexibility.” In the letter, Stein said the museum “had a responsibility to rebuild the volunteer educator program in a way that allows community members of all income levels to participate, responds to issues of equity, and does not require financial flexibility to participate.” The AIC told USA TODAY that the pause is part of a “multi-year transition” to a “hybrid model that incorporates paid and volunteer educators.”
“Rather than refresh our current program, systems, and processes, we feel that now is the time to rebuild our program from the ground up,” Stein said in the letter, noting that current docents would be invited to apply for the paid positions.
While the elimination of docents struck many as sudden, it had actually been in the works for years, according to artnet news: the AIC stopped training new docents in 2012, and has been discussing internally how to restructure the program since 2019.
The institute’s docent council sent a letter Sept. 13 protesting the pause of the program. The letter described the docents’ expertise, noting that volunteers had trained twice a week for 18 months, done five years of research and writing, and participated in monthly and biweekly trainings. “For more than 60 years, volunteer docents enthusiastically have devoted countless hours and personal resources to facilitate audience engagement in knowledgeable, relevant, and sensitive ways,” the letter said.
Gigi Vaffis, president of the AIC’s docent council, told USA TODAY that she and other docents felt blindsided by the decision and weren’t included in the decision-making. Even now, she said there are few details about what the AIC’s multi-year plan will look like.
Docent programs have long been mainstays of major museums. Docents are all volunteers and are beloved by museum visitors. Becoming a docent can be quite competitive: not everyone who applies is accepted, and docents that get into the program stay for years, even decades. And involving volunteers is a sign a nonprofit wants the community to be a part of the organization – not just as donors or clients but also as people delivering services. But docent ranks at museums are often skewed toward a certain demographic: wealthy white women. The intention of the Chicago Institute is to dismantle this traditionally very rigid system that, intentionally or not, is designed to include/favor one, very privileged group and to exclude others.
Museum equity consultants have long advocated for transitioning volunteer positions at museums to paid roles, to encourage more diversity, allowing people who could never afford to give the time current docents give without pay. Monica Williams, executive producer of The Equity Project, a Colorado-based equity, inclusion and diversity consulting firm, who is NOT involved with the Art Institute, said this shift will open the doors for people who cannot afford to work on weekdays or do a significant amount of unpaid work. If docent programs switch to paid positions, she said it will help museums move away from “a particular demographic of mostly white and wealthy.”
Mike Murawski, a museum consultant and author of “Museums as Agents of Change,” said in the USA Today article that there has long been a tension between equity efforts and volunteer programs. When the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum ended its docent program in 2014 in favor of an initiative for younger volunteers who often work for college credit, Murawski said there was an uproar with many saying the museum might as well close. But now, he said. “they’re doing just fine.” Murawski is one of many museum consultants that says the way forward is not about making changes to programs, but to completely dismantle them and start over, and that docent programs often have “long-standing legacies of how things are supposed to be” that can make them difficult to adapt.
A side note: the Chicago Tribune, a once-great newspaper which was recently bought by Alden Global Capital, a secretive hedge fund that gutted the staff at the newspaper, wrote an outrageous editorial that had this jaw-dropping and completely misleading statement:
Volunteers are out of fashion in progressive circles, where they tend to be dismissed as rich white people with time on their hands, outmoded ways of thinking and walking impediments to equity and inclusion. Meaningful change, it is often said, now demands they be replaced with paid employees.
This is just flatly not true and the Tribune should be ashamed of itself.
As for me and my opinion: I don’t think programs should always be overly-cautious and ever-fearful of upsetting current, long-term volunteers – quite frankly, I think some long-term volunteers can have an entitled attitude that can discourage, even kill, much-needed changes and innovations. But I also feel like there was a better way to handle this transition. Absolutely, there are MANY systems related to nonprofits, including volunteer engagement, that have been exclusionary. But couldn’t current volunteers, who have invested a great deal of time in their roles, have been involved in the decision-making process, and perhaps, even bought into it? Also, will there still be a way for people to volunteer for the Art Institute – will there still be a community engagement component that isn’t donating funds or attending events?
If you have an example of a museum that significantly revamped its volunteering program so that it was vastly more diverse, but without having to fire the entire volunteer corps, please note such in the comments. Also note if it continued to have a volunteer program of some kind.
With all that said – what do you think?
October 17 update: the Art Institute of Chicago is, apparently, STILL not involving volunteers at all. Below is a screen capture from its volunteer page that notes “the volunteer program is temporarily on pause, and we are not accepting applications at this time.”
Below are excerpts from THE SDG PARTNERSHIP GUIDEBOOK: A practical guide to building high-impact multi-stakeholder partnerships for the Sustainable Development Goals, Darian Stibbe and Dave Prescott, The Partnering Initiative and the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA), 2020. And, to me, it’s the heart of why approaching public online activities as community engagement, at a way to use technology to build community and grow an organization, makes sense, though it never mentions online tools:
Most of us work in operating environments that encourage a sense of competition and separation, rather than collaboration and cooperation. We are often told that there is a scarcity of resources, and that our job is to secure for ourselves, and for our own organisations, as much of the available resources as possible, and that if others lose out in the process then that’s too bad… for the most part it is a reductive way of thinking, because it limits the scope of what can be achieved together. It makes collaborative working difficult, especially if we have been told to work in partnership as a way to help an organisation to compete with others for funding opportunities.
Rather than starting from an assumption of competition and scarcity, what happens if we start with a different assumption:
All of the ideas, people, technologies, institutions and resources that are required to achieve the SDGs are already available, and the task is how do we engage them and combine them in new and transformational ways?…
What if we approached every single one of our encounters as opportunities to create new ideas, and what if the best and most interesting ideas emerged from the most unlikely sources? What new connections might emerge then?…
There are (at least) three levels at which to engage: You can think about how it relates to you as an individual and to your professional practice; you can think about how it relates to your organisation, and how your organisation collaborates; you can also think about how it relates to existing or new partnerships that you might be involved in. Effective partnering calls for great personal leadership: brave, risk- taking people able to operate in ambiguous situations while remaining outcome-focused.
In July and August, I have been teaching MGT 553 Using Technology to Build Community and Grow Your Organization, part of the MS in Nonprofit Management for Gratz College. I started designing the course in February, and I first blogged about the course May. My mantra, over and over, to these students who work, or want to work, in the nonprofits world has been that online tools are best used when their primary purpose is to build community, not just to market, not just to build awareness about an organization, and that such a focus enhances all other functions: program engagement, community participation, fundraising, volunteer engagement, partnership development and more.
The students, in turn, reminded me of something that I’ve long known: the biggest challenges to this happening are those thrown up by their own organizations’ systems, processes and culture – something the United Nations publication also notes. Senior management or long-term staff who fear change are the far bigger obstacles to using online communications tools than budget or lack of tech knowledge. The reluctance and fear comes from knowing only the negative stories, the worst-case scenarios. I have a fantasy about making a list of all the in-person meetings I’ve been present for and people deciding they should never meet anyone ever again.
I talk a lot about leveraging online networks to reach new volunteers and other supporters via The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook, co-written with Susan J. Ellis. The book also talks about using online tools to build community among your volunteers, cultivating information-sharing and shared learning among that particular group of supporters, as well as the detailed guidance you need to use the Internet to involve and support ALL volunteers, whether most of their service to you is online or onsite. And purchasing the book is far, far cheaper than hiring me as a consultant or trainer (though you can still do that)!
If you have benefited from this blog or other parts of my web site and would like to support the time that went into researching information, developing material, preparing articles, updating pages, etc. (I receive no funding for this work), here is how you can help.
It can be difficult for people to understand the difference in email, in social media and in online communities. They are different, but they do greatly intersect: email can be used to create an online community, and social media can be used to create an online community (Facebook Groups, for instance). And they all are people sending messages to people – so what, really, is the difference?
I realized, per an interaction with a student in my Gratz College course, just how much many people struggle with understanding the difference. So I tried to create a way to graphically represent the difference in email, social media and online communities for nonprofits, libraries, NGOs and other mission-based, cause-based initiatives. The differences in narrative form are also shown.
You can see how I did this here. Your thoughts, in the comments, are welcomed. How would you change the graphics or the explanation? What would your graphic representation look like?
If you have benefited from this blog or other parts of my web site and would like to support the time that went into researching information, developing material, preparing articles, updating pages, etc. (I receive no funding for this work), here is how you can help.
