Category Archives: Community / Volunteer Engagement

Time Magazine asserts there are no organized Atheist volunteers

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Time Magazine published a gross misstatement by Joe Klein recently:

“funny how you don’t see organized groups of secular humanists giving out hot meals.”

Hemant Mehta did a brilliant job of detailing just SOME of the organized groups of secular humanists that have helped after disasters. But Time refuses to apologize and continues the misstatements about these not-so-faith-based volunteers.

We hear so much about faith-based volunteers, and that’s fine, but let’s remember that there are not only also lots of secular humanists and atheists that volunteer, there are ORGANIZED groups that cater especially to those people, despite what Time Magazine and Joe Klein say. Volunteering is not just a Christian thing, not just a faith-based thing, not even just an American thing  – it’s a very HUMAN thing. 

Survey for EU online volunteers

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If your organization is based in the EU and works with volunteers, and any of these volunteers do any of their service online for your organization via their own computer, smart phone, tablet or other networked advice, I hope you will pass on the following survey information to them and encourage them to complete this survey.

If you are a citizen of any EU country and living in the EU, or you are an EU citizen but living outside of Europe, and you have engaged in any form of online volunteering / virtual volunteering / microvolunteering (not receiving any payment for this online work), I hope you will fill out this survey.

If you fill out this survey, your identity will NOT be made public, and will NOT be known by the researchers, if you do not provide your name and email address at the end of this survey (you are NOT required to provide this information!).

This survey takes 15 minutes or less to complete.

https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/R2PJHQK

This survey is for is a part of research by the ICT4EMPL Future Work project. You can read more about the project at this wiki.

EU agencies exploiting interns?

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Here we go again.

I blog about the exploitation of unpaid interns a lot – most recently just a few days ago when a US Federal judge has ruled that against the company that made the movie “The Black Swan” for not paying interns.

Now the spotlight is on various EU offices and their involvement of interns:

The European Commission offers some 1,400 sought-after five-month traineeships a year with a 1,074 euros monthly salary that is top tier… Yet the pay is well below the Belgian minimum wage requirement of 1,500 euros per month. Many other advertised positions offer monthly stipends of a few hundred euros and sometimes nothing at all.

Traineeships are supposed to provide training, but the line between that and actual employment is often blurred.

EU agencies, you have two choices:

  • pay trainees at least minimum wage and limit an intern to no more than four months in any internship at any organization, or,
  • create a mission (and a mission statement) for your volunteer (unpaid staff) involvement and live it: state explicitly why your organization reserves certain tasks / assignments / roles for volunteers (unpaid staff, including unpaid interns), to guide employees and volunteers in how they think about volunteers, to guide current volunteers in thinking about their role and value at the organization, and to show potential volunteers the kind of culture they can expect at your organization regarding volunteers. A commitment by the EU to involve volunteers would be a wonderful thing – allowing EU citizens to take on tasks and see first hand how an agency works that is meant to serve them, creating a sense of both ownership by citizens as well as a sense of transparency about the agency.

Either way, these internships, paid or unpaid, should be structured so that they provide real, meaningful learning experiences – that’s what makes them internships, regardless of pay.

And you best do it soon, because otherwise, EU interns may use the dollar/Euro value of volunteer hours that UN Volunteers, IFRC, ILO & others are promoting to sue you for back pay.

My previous blogs on this subject:

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

When to NOT pay interns, redux

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A US Federal judge has ruled that against the company that made the movie “The Black Swan” for not paying interns.

In the ruling, U.S. District Judge William H. Pauley III said the film’s producers should have paid the two interns because they did the same work as regular employees, provided value to the company and performed low-level tasks that didn’t require any specialized training. In ruling for the interns, the judge followed a six-part test outlined by the Labor Department for determining whether an internship can be unpaid. Under the test, the internship must be similar to an educational environment, run primarily for the benefit of the intern as opposed to the employer, and the intern’s work should not replace that of regular employees.

“Undoubtedly Mr. Glatt and Mr. Footman received some benefits from their internships, such as resume listings, job references and an understanding of how a production office works,” Pauley wrote. “But those benefits were incidental to working in the office like any other employees and were not the result of internships intentionally structured to benefit them.”

I tried to warn you! I did! I tried to warn you in my blog When to NOT pay interns and my other blog Are Interns Exploited?.

Note that this was NOT a matter of the organization being volunteered for being a for-profit. That this was a company, a business, rather than a nonprofit, NGO or charity, was NOT the problem for the judge. The problem was the nature of the work these unpaid interns (these VOLUNTEERS) were doing and the reason these tasks were done by volunteers (to save the organization money!).

Nonprofits, NGOs, charities: WAKE UP. This kind of lawsuit could happen to you. Especially if you keep harping on the dollar/Euro value of volunteer hours, the way UN Volunteers, IFRC, ILO & others are encouraging you to do.

Here’s a better idea: create a mission (and a mission statement) for your volunteer involvement and live it! State explicitly why your organization reserves certain assignments for volunteers, to guide employees and volunteers in how they think about volunteers, to guide current volunteers in thinking about their role and value at the organization, and to show potential volunteers the kind of culture they can expect at your organization regarding volunteers. It will also help to prevent exploitation – or perceptions of such – regarding your involvement of volunteers. Let it be an answer to this question: “Why do volunteers do these tasks rather than paid people” but without the answer, “Because we can’t afford to pay people to do this work.”

My previous blogs on this subject:

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

Finding out how many orgs are involving online volunteers

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A followup to my last blog, where I whined that so many organizations charged with measuring volunteering in a region or country refuse to ask any questions related to virtual volunteering.

As I’ve said many times: when I do workshops on virtual volunteering, and describe all the different aspects of what online volunteering looks like, including microvolunteering, someone always raises a hand or comes up to me afterwards to say, “My organization has online volunteers and I didn’t even know it!” or “I’m an online volunteer and I didn’t know it!”

If you ask organizations, “Do you have virtual volunteering / microvolunteering at your organization?” most will say “No.” But if you ask the question differently, the answer is often “Yes!”

How would YOU ask the question of organizations to find out if they were engaging volunteers online?

Here’s one idea:

In the last 12 months, did any volunteers helping your organization work in whole or in-part offsite on behalf of your organization, and use their own computers, smart phones, notebooks (Internet-enabled devices) from their home, work or elsewhere offsite, to provide updates on their volunteering, or the results of their volunteering?

What is your idea for ONE question? Please post it in the comments.

Challenges to getting answers:

  • There’s rarely just one person at an organization involving volunteers; often, several employees or key volunteers are involving volunteers, but there may not be one person tracking all of this involvement. So if you ask this question of just one person at the organization, you might not get an accurate answer.
  • The word volunteer is contested. People will say, “Oh, we don’t have volunteers. We have pro bono consultants, we have unpaid interns, we have executives online, we have board members, but we do not have volunteers.” That means someone who is advising your HR manager regarding the latest legislation that might affect hiring or your overworked marketing person regarding social media, and offering this advice unpaid, from the comfort of his or her  home or office or a coffee shop, won’t be counted as an online volunteer – even though they are. In fact, I talked to the manager of an online tutoring program who brought together students and what she called “subject matter experts” (SMES) together online for school assignments, but because it never dawned on her that the SMES were volunteers (unpaid, donating their service to a cause they believed in), she had no idea she was managing a volunteer program, let alone a virtual volunteering program.

This is not easy. I’ve been researching virtual volunteering since 1996 and, geesh, it’s still not easy! When does it get easier?!

Volunteerism research should include virtual volunteering!

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The NCVO UK Civil Society Almanac , published by the National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO), maps the the size and scope of the voluntary sector in the United Kingdom.

The Independent Sector does the same for the USA, as well as promoting the oh-so-dreadful dollar value of volunteer time (which does so much to reinforce the idea that volunteers are a great way to save money and replace paid staff). The Volunteering and Civic Life in America report from the Corporation for National and Community Service and the National Conference on Citizenship also provides stats on volunteering in the USA.

You can find statistics online for volunteerism in Australia.

Through these and other research organizations, you can find out about how many organizations are involving volunteers, or the demographics of volunteers in certain countries.

But here’s what you can’t find out:

  • how many organizations are using the Internet to recruit, screen and/or support volunteers
  • how many people are using the Internet as a part of their volunteering service
  • the demographics of people using the Internet as a part of their volunteering service
  • etc.

Why? Because, even in 2013, these organizations and other researchers are STILL not asking these questions as a part of their studies / data collection regarding volunteering.

Virtual volunteering – including microvolunteering – has been practiced as long as there has been an Internet – making it a practice more than 30 years old. The Virtual Volunteering Project did the first research regarding virtual volunteering in the last 1990s. References to using the Internet as a part of volunteering service are now common place in trainings, books and articles. Yet… these research organizations continue to ignore online tools as a part of volunteering.

I am regularly asked for data regarding online volunteering – how many organizations are engaging people online, who is volunteering online, etc. And I cannot answer those questions with hard data because, since the expiration of the Virtual Volunteering Project, there is no one collecting the data!

And it’s worth noting: back in 2012, myself and Rob Jackson drafted and circulated a survey regarding software used to manage volunteer information. The purpose of the survey was to gather some basic data that might help organizations that involve volunteers to make better-informed decisions when choosing software, and to help software designers to understand the needs of those organizations. We published the results of the survey here (in PDF). But we learned some things that had nothing to do with software.

We asked a lot of questions that didn’t related directly to software, like about how many volunteers these organizations managed, as well as what volunteers did. We expected the percentage of volunteers that worked onsite to be huge. We were very surprised, and pleased, to find, instead, that so many organizations that responded to our survey involved volunteers that:

  • worked offsite, with no direct supervision by staff
  • worked directly with clients
  • worked directly with the general public
  • worked online from their home, work, school or other offsite computer or handheld device
    (virtual volunteering, including microvolunteering)
  • engaged in on-off activities, like a beach cleanup – otherwise known as episodic volunteering

You can see the breakdown for yourself here.

Wouldn’t it be great if NCVO, the Independent Sector, CNCS, the Points of Light Foundation, universities, and anyone researching anything to do with volunteering anywhere would start asking questions related to online tools? Wouldn’t it be great if finally, in 2013, they finally understood that virtual volunteering is an established, widespread practice and is worthy of inclusion in all discussions and research about volunteering?

I guess I’ll keep dreaming. Or move to Canada. Because, OF COURSE, the Canada report on volunteering in that country includes statistics on virtual volunteering.

Spontaneous “online volunteers” after disasters

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When a big news story or disaster strikes, the result can be hundreds, even thousands, of people contacting organizations to offer help, including potential online volunteers. It could be a natural disaster, an act of violence, or a particular issue suddenly becoming the hot item on the news. A nonprofit organization, NGO, school, or other organization could suddenly be swamped with emails and phone calls from people who want to help in some way online.

Of course it’s appropriate for your organization to encourage these spontaneous online volunteering candidates to make an emergency financial donation to the organization — and be explicit about exactly what this money will be used for. But in addition, you should think about ways these spontaneous online volunteering candidates could engage in other activities to benefit your organization in a crisis situation:

  • Put up a page on your web site specifically for these people thanking them for wanting to help in this time of crisis or intense attention. Outline on that page all of the ways they can help your organization both as donors and online volunteers. Direct them to other organizations if there are ways to volunteer at these organizations in some way.
  • Encourage these spontaneous online volunteering candidates to subscribe to your email newsletter, your blog, your FaceBook account and/or your Twitter feed, wherever you are posting photos online, etc., to stay up-to-date on what your organization is doing to address whatever issue or circumstance is occurring.
  • Encourage them to repost your messages to their own blogs, their own status updates on online social networking sites, etc., to educate their friends and colleagues about what is happening. Direct them to where to find information about the online volunteering activities you have available.
  • Encourage them to write you if they see misinformation online about your organization and its work in this crisis situation.
  • Set up a YahooGroup or GoogleGroup only for these potential online volunteers, and tell them online volunteering opportunities will be announced on this group as soon as they become available. You could use the group to brainstorm with these potential online volunteers what activities they could undertake for your organization.

Some things these spontaneous online volunteers could do regarding this crisis or immediate high-profit situation:

  • Translate some of your existing web site material, flyers, blogs, Facebook status updates or new information into another language
  • Translate texts or blog comments coming into your organization from another language into English, so you can read and respond to such.
  • Monitor media reports and bring certain articles or information to your immediate attention.
  • Monitor online communities and blogs and bring certain information, and even misinformation, to your immediate attention (more on how to deal with misinformation).
  • Research what other organizations are doing that your organization might need to urgently know about, such as projects that are mapping eyewitness/on-the-ground reports of critical needs. For instance, following the Haiti Earthquake, OpenStreetMap created a crisis mapping project, mobilizing highly skilled online volunteers to layer up-to-the-minute data, such as the location of new field hospitals and downed bridges, onto post-quake satellite imagery. This data was made freely available by for-profit companies including GeoEye and DigitalGlobe. The digital cartography — informed by everything from Tweets to eyewitness reports — helped aid workers speed food, water and medicine to where it was needed most.
  • Create a smart phone application that is urgently needed. CrisisCamp mobilized hundreds of online and onsite volunteers in Washington, DC; London, England; Mountain View, California; and elsewhere to build and refine a variety of tech tools needed after the Earthquake in Haiti, including a basic Creole-English dictionary for the iPhone to help aid.

These are not just nice things for online volunteers to do in a crisis; they are critical services. Depending on the mission of your organization, you might want to consider including how to deal with spontaneous online volunteering candidates in your crisis communications plans.

The above information is from the revised Virtual Volunteering Guidebook, which will be published later in 2013.

Volunteer online ever? I’d love your photo!

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jayne at computer 2002Do you help, or have you ever helped, a nonprofit organization, non-governmental organization (NGO), grassroots organization, school, or other civil society organization (CSO) via a computer or smart phone, as a volunteer (that means unpaid, NOT as a paid employee or paid consultant)?

Maybe you volunteered onsite as well, but at least sometimes, you also volunteered offsite, designing a database or graphic or web site, editing a document, translating text, offering professional advice, moderating an online discussion group, tagging photos or mentoring someone.

Maybe it was called virtual volunteering. Or online mentoring. Or cyber service. Or microvolunteering. Or crowd-sourcing. Or cloud computing volunteering. Or Internet-mediated service.

Or maybe it was just called volunteering, plain and simple.

Whatever it was – or wasn’t – called, I want your photo! Why? I want to feature such photos at this Flickr Group, “Online Volunteers.”

Photos of yourself with a computer or tablet or smart phone would be great, but so would a photo of you with your dog. Or your kids. What’s most important is that you don’t just submit a photo; you also should describe what you do as an online volunteer, including either the name or a description of the organization(s) you support.

ALSO, please tag your photo “online volunteer” (use quotes in the tagging process).

Submit the photos directly to the Flickr group for online volunteers– which means you will need a Yahoo ID. If you don’t already have such, and don’t want one, you can send ONE photo to me, via email, however, please clearly note in your email who you are, why you are sending the photo, etc.; blank emails, or those with sketchy descriptions, will be discarded without viewing (to protect myself from computer viruses). Photos that don’t clearly represent online volunteers will be rejected – that’s why your description is SO important.

Please share this message to volunteers you work with, or anyone you think might be interested.

Goal: to show the diversity of online volunteers out there. The practice of online volunteering is more than 30 years old. I want to show just what a HUGE group of people volunteer online, and have been doing so for a long while now!

Looking forward to your photos!

Ugh – Slacktivism (I still don’t like it)

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UNICEF Sweden has an image that’s floating around the Internet and causing quite a stir:

“Like us on Facebook, and we will vaccinate zero children against polio. We have nothing against likes, but vaccine costs money…”

It’s part of a fundraising and awareness campaign by UNICEF Sweden that includes this video  (subtitled in English). The point is a powerful one: “liking” something on Facebook, or sharing a status update, or retweeting something, often has no impact at all beyond a momentary “Oh, that’s sad” moment for the viewer. By itself, it does NOT create any real impact.

Danny Brown, a blogger and author, doesn’t like the campaign; he thinks slacktivism or slackervism campaigns – where a person is encouraged to “like” something on Facebook and feel like he or she has made a difference – are terrific.

As I’ve said before, I LOATHE slacktivism. As a consultant and researcher that works with nonprofits every day regarding community engagement and fundraising, I see again and again just what little return on investment the vast majority of nonprofits get for investing in such campaigns. I also see the endless posts by young people on YahooAnswers who believe this is all they have to do – like something or click on something – to make a difference, and don’t understand why they have to actually volunteer or donate something to actually support a cause. These campaigns imply that actually donating money, volunteering, writing a letter to a politician or turning out for a demonstration aren’t really necessary – just click “like” and we’ll solve domestic violence, homelessness, hunger animal abuse, and on and on! It’s a misconception that is growing – and it’s creating generations of people who don’t see the point of actually investing time or money.

I note in detail in this blog from 2010 why slacktivism does NOT generate donations or increased awareness for most nonprofits or causes – and the blog also notes nonprofits CAN (and do) use Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites to create a real social marketing/health marketing campaign, with real impact (changed behavior, new awareness, etc.) – so I won’t repeat myself here.

And for those who want to accuse me of being a Luddite, or implying that the Internet isn’t an effective way to donate time and talent to a nonprofit, NGO, charity, etc. – I’ve been promoting virtual volunteering since the mid-1990s. Online action can have HUGE impact for a mission-based organization. But it takes more than just a “like” on Facebook. 

Also see: what ROI for online action really looks like.

Update on research re: virtual volunteering in the EU

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I’ve made LOTS of updates on the wiki for the research project I’m working on, regarding the state of Internet-mediated volunteering (virtual volunteering, online volunteering, microvolunteering, crowdsourcing, etc.) in the EU and how such is providing or might be providing opportunities for entrepreneurship and self employment, skills and social inclusion, and transition from education to employment for young people.

In addition to the home page for the blog, here are the contents as of today:

  • More about the overall project & researchers
  • About Internet-mediated volunteering
  • The information we are seeking / How to submit information
  • Challenges to this research (obstacles we’re facing in gathering information)
  • Case studies (Europe focus)
  • Resources and research related to Internet-mediated volunteering
  • Resources related to telecommuting, virtual teams and remote management
  • Resources related to volunteer engagement and volunteerism in EU countries
  • Online work sites for pay (rather than virtual volunteering sites, for no pay) – examples and studies
  • Información en español
  • Informations en français
  • Informationen in Deutsch

Here’s the previous blog about this project (though it’s the wiki that now has the most detailed info).

Huge thanks to everyone who has responded so far. Any help any of you can provide in getting the word out to charities and NGOs in Europe about this research project will be MOST appreciated; the results of this research could lead to more support for online volunteering-related projects in the EU!

To stay updated about this project: