Category Archives: Community / Volunteer Engagement

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Brilliant volunteer firefighter recruitment video from Germany

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

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

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

Also see:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Also see:

research on why NGOs recruit international volunteers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My other blogs related to voluntourism:

Research & Case Studies Regarding Virtual Volunteering

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At long last, I’ve updated this list of Research & Case Studies Regarding Virtual Volunteering, at the Virtual Volunteering Wiki.

In association with the The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook, I provide this compilation of research, evaluation reports and case studies regarding online volunteering / virtual volunteering, including studies on the various different activities that are a part of online volunteering such as online activism, online civic engagement, online mentoring, microvolunteering, remote volunteers, or crowd-sourcing, etc.  Note: these are not opinion or PR pieces – these provide hard data, case studies, etc.

Also note that sometimes articles do not call the unpaid contributors “volunteers.” There are also articles on virtual teams, which often involved paid staff; these research studies are especially applicable to virtual volunteering scenarios.

How do I compile this research? By search various keywords on GoogleScholar and Academia.edu. I wish I had more time to keep the list up-to-date but, unfortunately, I can do it only once a year or so.

Online volunteers help children & families separated by US Government / ICE at border

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An excellent example of virtual volunteering as digital activism: in this 25 June 2018 article, Wired.com notes how librarians and other humanities academics and geeks across the USA banded together to figure out where the government had sent immigrant children snatched from their parents at the border, to help their parents find them again and, eventually, reunite these families.

Excerpts from this Wired article:

Alex Gil was IMing with his colleague Manan Ahmed when they decided they had to do something about children being separated from their parents at the US-Mexico border… Gil, a father of two, knew they could be useful. As the digital scholarship librarian at Columbia University, Gil’s job is to use technology to help people find information—skills he had put to use in times of crisis before. Gil and Ahmed, a historian at Columbia, assembled a team of what Gil calls “digital ninjas” for a “crisis researchathon.” These volunteers were professors, graduate students, researchers, and fellows from across the country with varied academic focus, but they all had two things in common: an interest in the history of colonialism, empire, and borders; and the belief that classical research methods can be used not just to understand the past but to reveal the present.

You can read the latest news about virtual volunteering, including online microvlunteering, digital activism, crowdsourcing for good and more at the Virtual Volunteering Wiki – specifically, the section on news.

The Virtual Volunteering Wiki was developed in association with The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook, a book available from Energize, Inc.

Cuso International’s E-Volunteering Guide

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Cuso International is a non-profit international development organization based in Canada. Cuso places and supports highly-skilled volunteers from Canada and the USA in developing countries to support a variety of projects. It is similar to VSO in the UK, the Peace Corps in the USA, and the United Nations Volunteers program, part of UNDP.

Some years ago, Cuso International found that approximately 60% of the Cuso International volunteers who returned from their in-country placements continued to support their in-country program partners, usually NGOs, through various online activities. Cuso International established E-Connect program “to formalize and enhance this activity that is occurring already and lend further work experience credibility to the distance support provided by the volunteers.” Its E-Connect program is not limited to returning volunteers: many of its online volunteering opportunities are for any skilled person that meets the experience requirements, though most roles are limited to Canadian Citizens and Permanent Residents only.

Cuso International also produced the nine-page E-Connect: Cuso International’s E-Volunteering Guide. The guide offers an overview of the kinds of online volunteering Cuso International supports and a table of task-based support ideas for online volunteering. Online volunteers involved with Cuso International complete a Scope of Work document for each placement at the beginning of the assignment. This document outlines the overall project goals, planned tasks, and deliverables associated with the volunteer assignment. “Online volunteers complete different reporting documents at varying times during their e-placement to measure their project’s impact on their program partner over time as well as to monitor their own experience throughout their journey.”

In another guide for online volunteers, Cuso International makes this important observation about virtual volunteering, one that I’ve made for many years:

E-Volunteer placements may be perceived as “easier”, or not as commitment-intensive than in-country placements as you do not have to re-locate countries, follow a routine schedule, or perform the work in-person on someone else’s time. However, online placements can be just as rigorous and involved and volunteers may have to work harder on communication, assume a greater individual responsibility, and be more proactive to have a successful e-placement.

vvbooklittleThere are lots more suggestions and specifics about virtual volunteering, including task and role development, suggestions on support and supervision of online volunteers, guidelines for evaluating virtual volunteering activities, suggestions for risk management, online safety, ensuring client confidentiality and setting boundaries for relationships in virtual volunteering, and much more in The LAST Virtual Volunteering Guidebook, available both as a traditional printed book and as a digital book. There is also a great deal of information about online volunteers working directly with clients, as well as the chapter written for online volunteers themselves. The book is by myself (Jayne Cravens) and Susan Ellis.

Also see:

Summer Webinars on Volunteer Engagement

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My dear colleague Erin Barnhart (Effective Altruism) is organizing summer webinars on selected Fridays regarding expanding skills in volunteer engagement, some featuring my other dear colleague, Liza Dyer, and some featuring me! The webinars are in June and July and, if interest is high, we’ll keep doing them!

These webinars are intense, fun, interactive, an hour long (never more), affordable and each focused on ONE aspect of effective volunteer engagement. We designed these topics based on what we are all hearing from people working with volunteers, in any capacity, as well as our own experiences as managers of volunteers and as volunteers ourselves.

Here’s the schedule:

Friday, June 8: Social Media + Volunteer Engagement 

Friday, June 15: Rebooting Volunteer Roles and Opportunities (Reinventing Your Volunteer Program series)

Friday, June 22: Reimagining Volunteer Recruitment (Reinventing Your Volunteer Program series)

Friday, June 29: Revising Communications and Supervision (Reinventing Your Volunteer Program series)

Friday, July 6: Revisiting Support, Recognition, and Retention (Reinventing Your Volunteer Program series)

Friday, July 13: Building Stronger Staff-Volunteer Relationships

All webinars at 11 PDT (Los Angeles time) / 2 pm EDT (New York time).

Individual webinars are $25 each, or you can buy access to all four of the webinars in the Reinventing Your Volunteer Program series for $75.

Register for any individual webinar at the links above.

Questions? Email Erin Barnhart at erin@erinlbarnhart.com

Virtual Volunteering Wiki has moved

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The Virtual Volunteering Wiki was developed in association with The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook, a book available from Energize, Inc.

The purpose of this wiki is to share resources regarding virtual volunteering beyond what is available in the guidebook. The wiki is maintained by Jayne Cravens and Susan Ellis, the authors of the guidebook.

The wiki was launched originally in 2013 at http://virtualvolunteering.wikispaces.com, a year before the book was published, and it has been updated regularly since then. Unfortunately, as of September 2018, Wikispaces will be discontinued by its parent company. So the material has been relocated here, at www.coyotecommunications.com/vvwiki/.

Although it will no longer be, officially, a wiki – it will no longer allow all of the organizers to directly edit the pages – it will maintain its neutral tone, be updated regularly and will welcome contributions from anyone who has information about virtual volunteering – though, since I have no funding for this, I have to give my funded projects priority over updating it, so your patience is appreciated.

This wiki is still being refined at its new home – sorry for any issues with broken links. I hope these can all be resolved by August.

Some of the most popular pages on the Virtual Volunteering Wiki:

Volunteers should be talking about their experience online

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graphic by Jayne Cravens representing volunteersYour program’s volunteers talk online about their experiences with your organization.

YES, THEY DO!

Did you feel that chill in the air? It was generated by managers of volunteers at nonprofits, government agencies, schools and more going cold at the realization that there may be negative comments by volunteers on Facebook and Twitter about their frustrations with the organization, about program incompetence, and more. It’s a chill I always feel when I do workshops and I bring up the topic of volunteers and social media. And I admit, I am always amused by the reaction.

I love to read what volunteers write unofficially about their volunteering work. I don’t mean official blogs by volunteers done under the auspices of the organization (though I do often enjoy those as well); I mean the writing that the volunteer does on his or her own blog space or on social media, the posts where he or she isn’t doing a PR piece for the organization with nothing but glowy, happy thoughts, and maybe a vague, “It was challenging, but I learned a lot” comment.

I also go on Twitter sometimes and do searches for these phrases:

  • hate volunteering
  • bored volunteer
  • volunteer PDX
  • volunteer Portland Oregon

I find some rather interesting things when I do searches for those phrases. Here are some examples from looking for hate volunteering on Twitter:

Interesting stuff!

So, what if you tried it with the name of your organization, or your city, on Twitter or Facebook, or just Google or Bing in general?

How else do you know what is being said about your organization or yourself in the public spaces online — on blogs, in captions on Flickr photos, in newspaper articles, and in public online discussion groups?

My favorite tool for tracking what’s being said about an organization I’m working with, or even just me, is GoogleAlerts. This free service automatically notifies you if there is any new content online in a public space — including traditional print media that publishes their stories online — that mentions whatever phrase or phrases you want to track. It won’t tell you about email conversations, as those are private, or about postings on private online spaces (a private online discussion group, for instance, or someone’s Facebook profile that has all of its privacy settings on — so long as Facebook keeps allowing such privacy settings, which it may not always do).

You can use GoogleAlerts or similar tools to track:

  • Your name
  • Your organization’s name
  • Your executive director’s name
  • Another organization (your competition, a partner, an organization you aspire to be like, etc.)
  • A particular subject matter
  • Etc.

Start with two GoogleAlerts at first — one of just your name, and one of your organization’s name. Putting a name in quotes is best, so that you will get only exact matches (I don’t want every newspaper story that mentions Jayne and also Cravens, but specifically, Jayne Cravens, and that won’t happen unless I put my entire name in quotes, like this: “Jayne Cravens”). You will then receive an email when something is published online with your alert name, with a link to the mention. You can set the alerts to come as the mentions happen (for instance, when the blog is posted that mentions your name), in a daily summary, or in a weekly summary.

If you find anything being said about volunteering at your organization by doing these searches, you probably won’t find negative things – you are much more likely to find positive things, even heart-warming things. Whether negative or positive, remember that you don’t have a right to tell volunteers to not share such opinions, so long as they are staying within your organization’s confidentiality and security policies.

You can choose how to react to finding feedback about your organization online. If it’s negative, is it also true? Is the comment bringing up a management or training problem that actually needs to be addressed? If the comment is positive, could it be turned into something more official for your organization, like an official blog for your organization, or a testimonial to put in a newsletter or on your web site?

As for me, when I go searching for volunteer voices online, I love it when I find blogs where I hear about the fears, the frustrations and the mistakes by volunteers, when I hear about what they’ve learned and what they lack and what they wish was different. I also love the nitty gritty — not just, “I arrived at the site at 3” but “I had to bribe three officials to get into the work site.”

I go looking for these unofficial blogs from time-to-time. Here are two I found:

Here’s one I found via the volunteer forum on Reddit: a woman in Maryland is trying to volunteer once-a-week for a full year at a “one-time” volunteer event, every week from September 10, 2017 to September 9, 2018. She has set rules for herself: she can’t repeat benefitting organizations even if the event is different from one she’s volunteered for before, she can’t take time off specifically to volunteer, and she cannot mention this project in an attempt to be guaranteed a volunteer position at an event. She’s also a volunteer manager at a Meals on Wheels – imagine what she’s learning re: volunteer management! Her posts are super positive – at least the 10 or so I read. I wonder if any of the organization’s she’s helping know about these wonderful blogs.

I would love to find more of these types of independent blogs written by volunteers, not under the official auspices of the organization they are helping. I would love it if more volunteers produced these types of blogs: they are honest voices we need to hear.

What I would also love to see is more volunteers talking about their experiences with specific nonprofits on Yelp, probably the most popular web site for customer reviews of businesses. I would especially love to hear from volunteers who pay companies to volunteer abroad, sharing about their experience via Yelp. Finding organizations you can pay in order to participate in a short-term, feel good volunteering experience abroad is easy; finding out if they are credible is much harder. This situation will improve only if people who have paid to volunteer review the organizations they worked with in a public forum like Yelp, or on a blog of their own (More on volunteering abroad).

Here is an official blog by a volunteer, Jasmin Blessing, a UN Volunteer with UN Women in Ecuador. It is a really nice example of what effective volunteering abroad looks like. Surely YOU have a volunteer among your ranks that could offer their insights about working with your organization?

Also see:

Still Trying to Volunteer, Still Frustrated

How to Handle Online Criticism