Category Archives: Community Relations/Outreach

Ending Orphanage Volunteering (Webinar presentation – about 7 minutes)

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Sinet Chan of Cambodia shared her lived experience in a Cambodian orphanage, where she was placed when she was 10 years old after her parents died of AIDS in a presentation, about 7 minutes, that was given as a part of the “Beyond Institutional Care: Rethinking How We Care for Vulnerable Children” conference addressing the issue of care reform.

While at the orphanage, she was “badly neglected.” The orphanage was set up to attract foreign volunteers and donations, but the children rarely benefitted from this – children were denied food, medical care and education. She and other children were forced to do manual labor, and she and other children were regularly raped.

Sinet Chan’s own words are so powerful:

During this time, we had many volunteers and donors coming and going. We would always entertain them, singing them a song, and playing games with them, to encourage them to donate money… the volunteers were nice people trying to help us, but now I realize it was a form of exploitation: using children to generate funding.”

All the other children in the orphanage – they all had parents who were alive and they missed their families… all the coming and going of the volunteers and visitors then compounded our feelings of loss and abandonment. The love and affection we feel from the visitor initially feels nice. Some visitors and volunteers would come for one day, some for a few weeks, and some for six months or more. It was always very traumatic when it was coming time for them to leave. We would be very (unintelligible) and cry a lot. I think it is a trigger memory of the loss and separation we have all suffered already. Having adults coming in and out of our lives feels like we were constantly being abandoned. They would always say they were coming back but, they never come back.

I think the uncomfortable truth behind the reason why white people feel like they need to participate in voluntourism is they have a white savior complex. The white savior complex is caused by the unconscious belief in the incompetence of the people they are trying to help. That belief justifies why they feel they must come and do it for us, like building our house, digging our wells, saving our children…

So, in order to combat voluntourism white people must examine their unconscious bias and learn how to be a white ally instead of a white savior.

You can hear her entire presentation on YouTube:

Also see:

How to connect & engage with volunteers remotely – even when those volunteers work onsite

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Well before the COVID-19 pandemic, nonprofits, NGOs and other organizations that involve volunteers were leveraging a variety of tools to communicate with those volunteers, and understood that ALL volunteers are, at some point, remote: even if all of their volunteering service is provided onsite, much of the communications with them happens when they are in their homes or work places. For organizations that were relying solely on onsite meetings, physical bulletin boards in the break room and paper letters and paper newsletters, the pandemic meant they had to quickly catch up and implement new ways of keeping volunteers informed (not to mention engaged) and to hear back from those volunteers regularly.

How do you effectively communicate with volunteers remotely? It takes much more than email – though email remains oh-so-important:

Have a web site that has all the info current volunteers need.
Absolutely, you need information on your web site to entice new volunteers and a way for candidates to express interest in volunteering via that web site, whether via an application they can submit online or an email address of your manager of volunteers. But current volunteers also need information from your web site: the list of current staff members, the profile of your executive director, the history of your organization, evaluations of your programs, the latest news about your organization, etc. Volunteers need to have that central place they can go to for reliable, complete information about the program they support.

Keep your social media up-to-date & encourage volunteers to follow your accounts
Your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and other accounts shouldn’t be focused on just encouraging people to donate money; your social media channels should have regularly-updated information about upcoming events, the results of events that just happened, breaking news about your organization, etc. Your social media audience includes your CURRENT volunteers, and they need to be kept up-to-date about what’s going on so they can properly represent your organization while they are volunteering. Your social media should also talk about the cause: a nonprofit theater should be posting about how students involved in performing do better in school, a nonprofit animal shelter should be posting about studies that show how a family’s health can improve if they have a dog, etc. Again, this helps volunteers become better advocates for your organization, including in casual conversations with friends and colleagues.

Online Discussion Groups & Channels for Volunteers
Group emails are one-way communications and can result in replies from volunteers filling up your email in-box, with the same questions asked over and over. “Reply all” conversations become tedious and unwieldy. By contrast, using a private online group can allow you to communicate with all vounteers quickly and allow everyone to see the answer to a question they may have as well. This can include using Whats App, Signal or Similar Direct Messaging Apps in Volunteer Support & Engagement.

Building a team culture among remote workers
Coming together face-to-face, in the same room, does not automatically create team cohesion and a strong sense of team. Yet, many people think having online meetings automatically means it’s difficult for staff to have a strong sense of team. People feel a part of a team if they feel heard and included, whether online or off. And they will attend meetings and pay attention to those meetings if they feel the meeting is relevant to their work – on or offline. This resource offers ideas for live events, asynchronous events & activities that can build a sense of team among remote workers.

Recognizing Online Volunteers & Using the Internet to Honor ALL Volunteers
Recognition helps volunteers stay committed to your organization, and gets the attention of potential volunteers — and donors — as well. With the Internet, the Cloud, cyberspace, whatever you want to call it, it’s never been easier to show volunteers — and the world — that volunteers are a key part of your organization’s successes. This resource provides a long list of suggestions for both honoring online volunteers and using the Internet to recognize ALL volunteers that contribute to your organization.

Also see:  How to Immediately Introduce Virtual Volunteering at Your Program and Helping online volunteers stay engaged & energized.

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

If you want to learn even more about how to leverage online tools to communicate with and support volunteers, whether those volunteers are mostly online (virtual volunteering) or they provide service mostly onsite at your organization, and to dig far deeper into the factors for success in 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.

Facebook, Meta, Virtual Worlds – Benefits? Risks? Does Second Life offer lessons?

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a screen capture of a webinar that took place in Second Life, an avatar-based virtual world.

An online multimedia platform that allows people to create an avatar for themselves and “live” in an online virtual world. Avatars interact with places, objects and other avatars, exploring the virtual world, meeting other residents, socializing, having business meetings, hosting events, participating in group activities, building, creating, shopping, collaborating, even trading virtual property and services with one another.

Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaverse? No! I’m talking about Second Life, which launched back in 2003. The image at the top of this blog, and the image below, are of me, as an avatar, leading an event in Second Life for TechSoup back in 2014:

An image of Jayne Cravens as an avatar in front of a giant silde from her event within Second Life.

TechSoup was an early and passionate adopter of Second Life, hosting numerous online events there. If you do a search for Second Life on the TechSoup forum, you would find numerous references to the platform and TechSoup activities there over the years.

Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook (now Meta), said to much fanfare that he wanted to launch his own metaverse. The new virtual-reality app Horizon Worlds is Facebook’s first foray into the much-hyped “metaverse” for Facebook parent company Meta. Horizon Worlds, a beta version of which featured prominently in Zuckerberg’s announcement, launched Dec. 9 in the United States and Canada on the company’s Oculus virtual-reality platform and represents its first major attempt to deliver on his vision.

Were you on Second Life? Are you still on Second Life? Did you participate in TechSoup’s events on Second Life, or any other nonprofit-related activities? What do you think emerging virtual worlds, including Meta’s projects, can learn from Second Life? Comment below!

This article from The Duke Law Journal, The Development and Failure of Social Norms in Second Life, seems like something that the Meta folks should read. Its conclusion about Second Life:

Second Life is so thoroughly steeped in conditions that have impeded the development of successful social norms in other communities that any system of social norms in Second Life will ultimately fail. Because social norms will likely fail to successfully maximize resident welfare, regulatory schemes imposed both by the operators of the virtual world and by real-world governing institutions are needed to enhance the functioning of this particular alternative reality inhabited by millions.

Do you think Meta’s virtual world is addressing this issue? Do you think they need to plan for how to address such? And are you worried about safety at all with any online platforms? Comment below!

Nina Jane Patel was targeted with sexual harassment in Facebook/Meta’s platforms. “Within 60 seconds of joining — I was verbally & sexually harassed — 3–4 male avatars, with male voices, essentially, but virtually gang-raped my avatar & took photos…” The 43-year-old mother said it was such a “horrible experience that happened so fast” before she even had a chance to think about using “the safety barrier,” adding that she “froze.” She continued by confessing how both her “physiological and psychological” reaction was similar to it happening in real life. “Virtual reality has essentially been designed so the mind and body can’t differentiate virtual/digital experiences from real,” Patel wrote.

This is similar to assaults that happened in Second LIfe. Examples:

Horizon Worlds is supposed to be limited to adults 18 and older. In practice, however, very young kids appear to be among its earliest adopters. Some say the presence of children in Meta’s fledgling metaverse raises a grave concern: that by mixing children with adult strangers in a largely self-moderated virtual world, the company is inadvertently creating a hunting ground for sexual predators.

When new online forums arise that attract kids, sexual predators “are often among the first to arrive,” said Sarah Gardner, vice president of external affairs at Thorn, a tech nonprofit that focuses on protecting children from online sexual abuse. “They see an environment that is not well protected and does not have clear systems of reporting. They’ll go there first to take advantage of the fact that it is a safe ground for them to abuse or groom kids.”

More on safety for children in virtual worlds from the Washington Post.

Could nonprofits that engage in an online metaverse be putting their clients or others at risk by asking them to be there too? Comment below!

There’s one more consideration: accessibility. If you engage with people in a graphics-based environment, you are leaving out people who have sight-impairments. How will auditory displays work for graphics-based environments to address accessibility issues (I’m asking because I really don’t know)? Or is it a matter of ensuring you never limit your service delivery and volunteer engagement to only a graphics-based environment?

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

There is section devoted to virtual volunteering and avatar-based environments in The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook. The section offers some examples of nonprofits using Second Life to engage with clients and volunteers, and offers specific advice on how a nonprofit should get started using such environments, considerations to explore and pitfalls to avoid – all of which is relevant for any graphics-based virtual world. The rest of the book is easily adaptable to engaging with volunteers in graphics-based/avatar-based virtual worlds as well.

Looking forward to hearing your comments!

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.

9 tips to improve your DEI in communications

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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.

The Communications Network created an online resource to change norms and practices in communications for social good, with an eye towards greater inclusion and diversity. The resource was developed in partnership with M+R and We-Collab. The introduction says:

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.

It’s fantastic.

Also see these related blogs from me:

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. 

New episode in free video series to help recruit volunteer firefighters/first responders

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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.

View the PSAs, including the new episode, here.

You can also download them from Vimeo to incorporate into your department’s recruitment initiatives.

You can watch additional episodes of Ride With Us on the NVFC’s Make Me A Firefighter web site.

My other blogs and resources regarding volunteer firefighters and first responders:

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.

Videos Your Nonprofit Should Have Online

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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.

My latest resource on my web site offers advice on what videos your nonprofit, NGO, charity or other mission-based organization or community group should have online. Unlike other articles that offer such advice for nonprofits, I offer a long list of actual suggestions for content, including on micro-video-sharing sites like TikTok.

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. 

Focus on content as much as design!

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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).

Also see:

If you have benefited from this blog or other parts of my web site and would like to support the time that went into researching information, developing material, preparing articles, updating pages, etc. (I receive no funding for this work), here is how you can help.

Fun way to recognize a year’s worth of participation

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Reddit Logo

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:

A slide noting that in 2021, I scrolled the length of 35,494 bananas lying end-to-end, and proclaiing "The amount you scrolled is bananas."

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.

Also see:

If you have benefited from this blog or other parts of my web site and would like to support the time that went into researching information, developing material, preparing articles, updating pages, etc. (I receive no funding for this work), here is how you can help.

Recruit a volunteer or two to initially screen & help onboard new volunteers (volunteer screeners)

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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 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?

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

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.

Don’t over-invest in one social media channel (particularly Facebook)

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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!

Also see:

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.