Category Archives: Tech Tools

How TechSoup Helped Keep My Skills Sharp

Leave a reply


Among the various topics I train on is volunteer engagement – how to create opportunities for a variety of different kinds of volunteers (short-term, long-term, teens, university students, highly-skilled professionals donating their work pro bono, onsite, online, etc.), how to recruit different kinds of volunteers, how to measure success in a volunteer program, virtual volunteering, how to build the capacity of staff to involve volunteers, etc.

How do I keep my volunteer management skills and knowledge up-to-date so I know what the heck to say in a training or a blog? In addition to reading, reading, reading – not just materials specific to volunteer engagement, but also materials regarding telecommuting / work shifting, team-building, project management, human resources management, conflict resolution – I also volunteer frequently volunteer myself, and I try to have regular experiences as a manager of volunteers.

For five months – ending this week – I’ve been the interim online forum community manager for TechSoup. I approach online community management as volunteer management, and the TechSoup Community Forum is a perfect example of that: online community members are volunteers. They contribute time and expertise, and they aren’t paid for it. It’s the community manager’s role to:

  • encourage their participation,
  • create opportunities for their participation,
  • acknowledge their contributions and their feedback in a meaningful way, and
  • promote their accomplishments and feedback within the organization, making sure their contributions are valued within the organization, across departments and staff hierarchies.

It’s easier said than done, particularly when in an interim, part-time role: I don’t want to create any systems that the permanent person will inherit and hate. I don’t want to start a bunch of processes that the permanent person will decide aren’t what he or she really wants, and when done away with, leave people feeling like their time has been wasted. In an interim, part-time role, sometimes the best thing you can do is identify what the permanent, full-time person will need to focus on – although that can feel like, “Hi, here’s all the problems I found, good luck!”

These kinds of experiences provide the kind of reality check I need in order to stay sharp regarding volunteer management training. How can I blog, or get up in front of a room full of people in charge of volunteer engagement at nonprofits, NGOs, government agencies, schools and other mission-based organizations, and make lots of recommendations about volunteer engagement that I haven’t tested myself – and tested relatively recently?

This experience has challenged me on a lot of levels, as all these experiences do. It’s sent me running to re-read materials about working with highly-skilled, high-responsibility volunteers and how to deal with conflict online. But the experience has also confirmed a lot of what I’ve been writing about and training on, particularly about the importance of

  • written task descriptions for ALL volunteers, and ensuring expectations are understood
  • having an end date for EVERY volunteer role / assignment, and giving volunteers that are approaching that end date the opportunity to renew their role for a set amount of time (creating a new end date) or to withdraw from the role altogether
  • having various staff people work with/listen to volunteers, not just the volunteer manager
  • involving volunteers in the organization’s decision-making in some meaningful way (even if final decisions are not in their hands)
  • continuously cultivating new volunteers for leadership roles
  • encouraging long-term volunteers to change roles, even temporarily
  • encouraging long-term, high-responsibility volunteers to take breaks from their roles every few years
  • lots and lots of communication – including telling volunteers in high-responsibility roles what YOU are doing every week!

I could go on and on as well about what I’ve learned in this experience about remote staffing, remote management, workshifting/telecommuting, virtual teams, time management, staff time budgeting and project management! You can never know-it-all on those subjects…

As I review my experience over the last five months, a lot is on my mind:

  • what I would have done differently had I known I would be in the role for five months instead of three months, or had I been full-time instead of part-time, had I known a bit more about the overall mood and outlook of the volunteers when I started.
  • what I did that worked, and what didn’t.

It’s important to review that for yourself, even if you are in a permanent volunteer management position – do you do that for yourself after ever major project, or at least twice a year? You should! You can’t improve without that kind of assessment.

I’ve been involved with TechSoup since the early 1990s, when it was called CompuMentor and was focused on matching IT volunteers with nonprofits – I started off as a client, and most of my experience has been as a volunteer. It’s been fascinating to see the organization from this different point-of-view, as a paid consultant. In fact, this experience has renewed my desire to continuing volunteering to moderate one of the TechSoup Community Forum branches! Thanks, TechSoup, not just for the paycheck, but for the incredible learning experience!

On a related note, here’s a profile of Exhale’s new strategy of turning over more decision-making and responsibilities to its leadership volunteers. Volunteers are capable of leadership roles, and this is a good example of that. It’s not always appropriate in every situation, it’s not always best for every organization, and I’m not at all commenting on my experience with TechSoup by posting this – rather, I’m trying to counter some comments I’ve seen online lately along the lines of, “But that role is too important for just a volunteer!.” I share this as a great example of an organization making a conscious choice to put volunteers in charge because the organization has realized it’s what’s best for the organization. If anything, this link is a comment for GIRL SCOUTS OF THE USA. And that’s another blog some other time…

Also see: Knowledge transfer – it’s more than a buzz phrase

Tags: project, program, programme, volunteer, volunteers, volunteering, engagement, involvement, management, community, stakeholders, charities, charity, NGOs, non-governmental, organizations, nonprofit, civil, society

How I Use Twitter / Microblogs

2 Replies

I’ve written a primer for mission-based organizations on using microblogs, including Twitter, so rather than repeat that advice on how to get started using such, thinking strategically about using such, etc., I’ll tell you exactly how I use Twitter.

I seek out Twitter feeds:

  • dedicated to activities that help women in developing countries have more control over their lives (it’s a priority issue for me), OR
  • dedicated to resources to help nonprofits, NGOs and other mission-based organizations use Internet, computer and other networking tools, OR
  • dedicated to resources to help mission-based organizations effectively engage the community/volunteers

AND

  • from organizations or individuals I want to follow and that/who share information I feel is a priority for me to receive daily or that’s mostly different from their Facebook page or email newsletter

If I already get all the information I want from an organization or individual via their Facebook page or an email newsletter or a blog, I don’t subscribe to their feed via Twitter as well. And I don’t follow every Twitter user that follows me, though I do check out every new follower. That offends some folks – they feel you should follow every person or organization that follows you, that you should follow every person or organization that you already follow on Facebook or via a blog or as a newsletter subscriber, etc. I don’t. I’m on information overload already; Internet tools, including so-called social media, is not just about receiving information – it’s about controlling it in such a way that it stays meaningful and essential to you.

In addition, I also follow certain phrases on Twitter. Some of these I search for daily, some I search for weekly. These include:

  • #volunteer
  • #volunteers
  • #VolunTweet
  • #microvolunteering
  • #nonprofits
  • #nonprofit
  • #ngos
  • #humanitarian
  • #ict4d
  • #TechWomen
  • #WomenInTech
  • #Tech4Good
  • #digitaldivide
  • #NP
  • #NPTwitter
  • #VirtualTeams
  • #distributedteams
  • #workshifting
  • #TechSoupDYB (for TechSoup microvolunteering projects; I helped relaunch this initiative earlier this month)

A term I follow, but doesn’t generate much information regularly, is #withoutvolunteers, a tag that allows someone to post a short message that says what the results would be if an organization didn’t involve volunteers. Sadly, most posts with this tage are phrases like “We couldn’t do what we do!” or “We would have to cut services”, both of which imply that volunteers are just unpaid staff and reduce the need for employees.

Lastly – your nonprofit, NGO, or other mission-based organization or department needs to make it clear to staff about who owns a Twitter feed – this story from the BBC does a good job of explaining why establishing ownership is essential.

Also see: my primer for mission-based organizations on using microblogs (including Twitter)

And, ofcourse, follow me on Twitter! I post a lot to my Twitter feed that I don’t share via Facebook.

Tags: microblogs, microblogging, Twitter, Tumblr, social, media, outreach, communications, marketing, public, relations, collaboration, community, volunteer, engagement

More women developing/promoting FOSS!

Leave a reply

Abel CAINE, OER Programme Specialist at UNESCO, in charge of coordinating the OER Community on the WSIS Platform, says in the online group for this community, “we had a discussion on how OER Initiatives should practice what they preach and use open software tools. For those of you who are interested in free and open source software AND would like to help in increasing the number of women who are developing or promoting FOSS, please join the new “Gender and FOSS Community” at: http://www.wsis-community.org/pg/groups/329964/gender-equality-in-free-and-open-source-software-foss/. The Community which is managed by the UNESCO FOSS Programme aims at creating a network of different institutions, networks and actors that deal with the Gender Gap in FOSS. Please contact my colleague, Mr. Davide Storti (d.storti@unesco.org) for more information.”

Also see this walk down memory lane: photos from the United Nations Volunteers (UNV) Telecenter at WSIS 2003 Geneva.

Tags: women, gender, woman, girls, ICT4D, UNESCO, WSIS, information, communication, communications, ICT, collaboration, community, engagement, OER, development, developing, FOSS, online, Internet, open, software, source, Africa, Asia, South America, Latin America

 

Transcribe & caption!

12 Replies
Captioning a video, or offering a transcription of a video or podcast, should be a priority for your organization. Why?
    • Many people that don’t have time to watch that video or listen to that podcast DO have time to read the transcript.
    • Many people are in an environment that would not allow them to listen to a podcast or online video (their surroundings are too loud, they would disturb people around them, they can’t use headphones or ear buds for some reason, etc.).
    • Many people want to quote from a video or podcast in something they are writing (and if that’s online, that quote will often link back to the original broadcast).
    • A person may just need very specific information, and a text search makes that information oh-so-easy to find.
    • Some people prefer reading to listening or watching (I’m one of those people); they are much more likely to access your information in text form than a video or audio.
  • And, of course, so people with hearing impairments can access the information.
In short, you greatly increase the number of audience members for a video or podcast, reaching more potential donors, volunteers, clients and others, by captioning a video or offering a transcription of a video or podcast. At minimum,
  • Any video or audio training materials you have should be captioned and/or transcribed.
  • All PSAs you want to be distributed widely should be captioned and/or transcribed.
  • Videos and podcasts that are part of your service delivery should be captioned and/or transcribed.
Think you don’t have the resources to caption or transcribe a video or podcast? You do: volunteers. There are online volunteers who would love to transcribe your audios and videos. These volunteers may have speech recognition/voice recognition software that they can use to convert spoken words to text, or they may be willing to listen and type. Either way, you will want volunteers checking up on other volunteers’ transcriptions and captioning, to ensure information is rendered correctly. Keep such volunteer transcribing assignments small: you might have trouble finding a volunteer to transcribe a two-hour-long panel discussion, but it might be much easier to find someone to transcribe just a 10 minute excerpt. If a video or podcast is particularly long, you could divide the transcribing or captioning job up among several volunteers. You might even be able to find a volunteer who would happily lead up the entire project for your organization – leadership volunteering opportunities are highly sought by many people these days! Recruit these volunteers from among your existing volunteers and their networks, via your web site, via VolunteerMatch and AllforGood if you are in the USA, Idealist and whatever resources are available in your country, or, if you are in a developing country or your NGO or nonprofit is focused on such: the UN’s Online Volunteering service. December 21, 2017 update: I recently created a five-minute pitch video for the OpenAIR hackathon – the Accessibility Internet Rally – for Knowbility, a nonprofit based in Austin, Texas (I’m in Portland, Oregon). I also used the YouTube captioning tool for the first time ever – I couldn’t believe how easy it was! If I can figure it out, anyone can – including online volunteers you might recruit to caption all of the videos your nonprofit has on YouTube already.
cover of Virtual Volunteering book with hands raising up various Internet connected devices
A reminder yet again that The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook provides detailed advice on creating assignments for online volunteers and for working with online volunteers, including volunteers that are going to transcribe or correct the transcriptions of your videos or podcasts. The book also has detailed guidance for using the Internet to support and involve ALL volunteers, including volunteers that provide service onsite, for ensuring success in virtual volunteering, and for using the Internet to build awareness and support for all volunteering at your program. Tech tools come and go, but certain community engagement principles never change, and those principles are detailed in this comprehensive guide. You will not find a more detailed guide anywhere for working with online volunteers and using the Internet to support and involve all volunteers. It’s co-written by myself and Susan Ellis. Tags: volunteering, volunteers, community, engagement, volunteerism, volunteering, online, micro, microvolunteering, virtual

Nonprofits & Tech Discussions – Jump In!

Leave a reply

Share a resource, ask a question, or offer your own thoughts about any of these hot topics relating to nonprofits, NGOs, libraries, schools and other community-focused initiatives over on the TechSoup Global Community Forum. Here are four threads on TechSoup that I’m watching in particular:

Tags: communications, public relations, engagement, engage, community, nonprofit, NGO, not-for-profit, government, library, libraries, school, schools, outreach, innovation, non-traditional, innovative, staff, employees, volunteers, civil society, social media, technology, microblogging, microvolunteering, micro, volunteer, volunteering

Social media realities for Friday

Leave a reply

logoSome resources, stories and events regarding social media that will help you balance all the hype with the reality of using such:

  1. TechSoup’s final live Twitter chat in its Nonprofit Social Media 101 (NPSM101) series is Monday, May 23 at 9 a.m. Pacific Time USA. Join in for a lively discussion on the value, ways to use, and best practices in tagging. Tagging is used in almost all major social sites, including 5 of the 6 TechSoup features in its newly launched NPSM101 wiki (Flickr, Delicious, YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook). Thinking about how to tag your messages and photos will substantially increase the number of people viewing your online activities – and, ultimately, getting involved in your organization. You participate in this TechSoup Twitter Chat by following the tag #nptagging on Twitter, and including that tag in any of your own questions or responses during the event. You can also follow on this Tweetchat.com link. A Twitter chat event an intense experience, but I have enjoyed my participation in two of the last three TechSoup events way more than I thought I would.
  2. Few charities are raising significant amounts of money via social media, says a recent study regarding such. Fewer than 3 percent of the survey’s 11,196 nonprofit respondents reported raising more than $10,000 through such tools. Does that mean nonprofits, NGOs and other mission-based organizations engaging in social media isn’t really worth the effort? No. But it does mean that we need to stop talking about social media the way so many talked about the web back in the 1990s – that just having a presence will be a financial windfall. Donations come from cultivation, trust-building and proven results that an organization is getting results. Social media needs to be used strategically, and should be integrated into a variety of other, OFFline activities.
  3. By posing as a savvy junior analyst or a graduate student seeking sources for a paper, some people have been successful at building relationships with employees at certain companies and getting those employees to divulge sensitive information, as this story relates. I find it amusing that people ask me endless questions about Internet security related to protecting their nonprofit organization from a hacker, or preventing volunteers from violating confidentiality policies while never wondering if paid staff might do the same, but they never think about this very real scenario: staff willingly handing over information in a kind of online seduction. Confidentiality is an onling training issue, one that needs to be revisited repeatedly at organizations, and this proves it.
  4. Social media will be used against you. That’s one of the statements by an organizer of the Social Media, Internet and Law Enforcement conference in Chicago. Police have been using social networking sites to identify and investigate suspects, but now criminals are using such sites to identify and investigate law enforcement officers, including undercover police. In addition, hostage-takers and suspects who barricade themselves in buildings are monitoring social media to track police movements in real time, and gang members are launching their own surveillance operations targeting police. Nonprofits, NGOs and other mission-based organizations often have activists working against their work as well, and need to remember that those program saboteurs are also online.
  5. The U.S. State Department has quietly abandoned its America.gov site to refocus its efforts on social media. And I think it’s a bad idea. Not the social media part, but the abandoning the web part. Embrace social media – but do NOT get rid of your web site!

Happy Friday, everyone.

Ever-Changing Landscape of Nonprofits & Technology

Leave a reply

What nonprofits are doing now with the Internet is not much different from what online nonprofits were doing in the 1980s and early 1990s – offering questions to their networks to see what answers they might get (crowd-sourcing), talking about challenges they are facing and offering each other advice, reaching out to current and potential supporters, promoting activities and events, working with volunteers, etc. You can read more about these early days of nonprofits and the Internet in the 1980s, through 1995.

By 1990, there were already several nonprofit organizations and many dedicated volunteers and aspiring consultants who were helping to promote nonprofit use of the Internet and computer technology. Some of these organizations helping nonprofits with Internet technology survived and some didn’t. Their networks of regional offices grew – and sometimes broke up, with individual members going off in new directions. Some changed their names, and some changed their missions.

One of the organizations that grew late in this movement, NPower, a national network of nonprofit technology consulting and training organizations, is now restructuring, and this article in the Nonprofit Times details this restructuring, as well as touching on the ever-changing landscape of support organizations for nonprofits and Internet technology. And it’s written by Tim Mills-Groninger, someone who has been immersed in the nonprofits and tech scene as long as I have (and that’s a frighteningly long time, relatively speaking), so it’s details are right-on.

I know this isn’t breaking news. But it’s important news, because nonprofit organizations, NGOs, schools, libraries and other mission-based organizations need to know where they’ve been in order to know where they are going. Mistakes that were made in those early days of tech are being made again as the Internet gets rebranded as the Cloud and online social networking, as episodic online volunteering gets rebranded as microvolunteering, and as people are starting nonprofits or social enterprises to do with Facebook or Twitter what many nonprofits were doing with USENET back in the 1980s. Let’s learn from those mistakes instead of repeating them!

Better life in rural communities with ICTs

Leave a reply

Sometimes, it’s a two-blog day…

I’ve already blogged today, about how training opportunities are all around you, but I have to blog again to note that today, May 17, is World Telecommunication and Information Society Day. The theme is Better life in rural communities with ICTs. It is the subject of NetSquard’s May Net2 Think Tank.

Some things I’ve written related to the subject of phones, smart phones, computers, Internet, etc. – improving lives in rural communities:

It’s a subject I’ve long felt passionate about!

The purpose of World Telecommunication and Information Society Day (WTISD) is to help raise awareness of the possibilities that the use of the Internet and other information and communication technologies (ICT) can bring to societies and economies, as well as of ways to bridge the digital divide. 17 May marks the anniversary of the signing of the first International Telegraph Convention and the creation of the International Telecommunication Union.

The WTISD web site has lots of free information you can download and use to help you promote the day, and the material is in a variety of languages (English, ????????, ??????, Español, Français, ?????????????? and no text). Too late for this year? No worries – start planning now for next year!

 

Tags: ICT4D, net2thinktank, NetSquared, access, ICT, United Nations, rural, communities, community

accessibility training May 17-19, 2011 in Austin

Leave a reply

John Slatin AccessU, a web accessibility training institute by Knowbility.org, is next week. AccessU “allows attendees to engage with world renowned accessibility experts to improve design skills and to understand both the need and the techniques for inclusive IT design. From the basics to the bleeding edge, AccessU will provide the resources you need.”

John Slatin AccessU
May 17 – 19, 2011
St. Edward’s University
3001 South Congress Avenue
Austin, Texa

Courses include:
Introduction to Accessible CSS
Advanced CSS for Accessibility
Social Media with Accessibility in Mind
Web Accessibility from the UX/Usability Perspective
Establishing a Corporate Accessibility Initiative: A Case Study
Planning a Usability Test with Disabled Users
Video Captioning
HTML5 and Accessibility
iPhone/iPad Web and App Accessibility
PDF Accessibility: Seeing the Forest Through the Tag Trees
Accessible WordPress Theme Development
Web Access: Legal Update
DreamWeaver Accessibility
Rebirth of Slick: Why Design Is Cool and Why It Will Make People Love Your Company
Accessible Office 2007
Everything You Know about JavaScript and Accessibility is Wrong
Success in an Accessible E-Learning Environment

 

Complete list of courses and presenters, and all info, here.

Putting it all on the Cloud

Leave a reply

The media and various consultants are breathless again with another new tech term. What’s gotten them all aflutter? THE CLOUD. Everyone’s talking about THE CLOUD. Everyone’s asking, Are you working in THE CLOUD?!

What’s THE CLOUD?

The Internet. Instead of saying the Internet, we’re now saying The Cloud.

Don’t you dare write me and say, no! no! The cloud is different!

When someone is talking about cloud computing, they are talking about information and software tools residing somewhere out on the Internet, on a server that may be across town or across the country or across the world, rather than on your desktop or a hard drive in your office. When you read and respond to email on a web site rather than your desk top, such as YahooMail or GoogleMail? That’s cloud computing. Also known as the Internet.

It’s not just email: more and more database software for nonprofits is cloud-based software, meaning that some or all of the software is online, and some or all of the information the software tracks – information about donors, volunteers, clients, etc. – reside on a server that isn’t at your office. You access and manage the information by going online.

Wikipedia has a good graphic that illustrates what working on the Cloud looks like.

Cloud computing is terrific – until it’s not. It’s great to read and respond to your email no matter what device you are using and no matter where you are – your laptop at work, your friend’s laptop in Barbados, your smart phone on a city bus – until you find yourself in a place where you have only a window of time for Internet access. Some airports give users just 30 minutes of free Internet access – that’s enough to download my mail to my laptop, but not enough to time to read and respond to it online.

Cloud computing is great for volunteer-tracking and volunteer-scheduling software, if volunteers can log in from anywhere and input their own information. It’s not so great when the Internet goes down and you need that information. And even in the USA, the Internet DOES go down…

Lack of consistent access isn’t the only concern: people and organizations have lost all of the information they have put out on the Cloud. GoogleMail and Flickr have deleted people’s ENTIRE accounts. Imagine losing ALL of your emails. Imagine losing ALL of your photos (with all those notes and tags and descriptions and what not).

Yesterday, I spent two hours editing a document on Google Docs – out on the Cloud. Google Docs supposedly saves your document every few seconds. After all of that work, when I closed the document, it disappeared. I logged in every hour for the rest of the day, hoping it would show up. 24 hours later, I logged back in and, yes, now the document is there – with none of my edits. Two hours of work gone forever. Someone recently made fun of me for always saving my Google Docs offline, and so I had stopped. I’ll be going back to doing that immediately…

And consider this: software vendors go out of business. I was contacted by a small nonprofit a few years ago that was frantic because the company they had used for a few years for all of their event registration was going under, and the company was not only not offering a refund on the nonprofit’s yearly subscription (which had JUST been renewed), but also, was going to take the systems offline before the nonprofit could find a way to transfer their information elsewhere. Their situation was heart-wrenching!

So, should your nonprofit or NGO go with the Cloud? Yes and no…

For your organization’s database that tracks donors, volunteers, clients and other vital information, Cloud-based systems are fine – as long as you have an offline backup of all of the information physically in your office, ready to access in case of emergency. Daily backups would be best, but even just a monthly backup would protect against disaster. When you are purchasing/subscribing to such software, ask the vendor how you will do these offline backups. If they say, “Oh, there’s no need for them!”, look for a new software vendor, especially if you are a mid-size or small nonprofit (such organizations have little recourse in cases of data loss, where as a large nonprofit may have the political clout to pressure a software vendor into spending the resources necessary to retrieve lost information – or to financially-compensate them for the data loss).

For your organization’s email, using the cloud is fine so long it also provides a way for individuals to also download their email when needed, write their responses offline, queue the email to be sent, and then send all the email at once when they get online access again. This is how my email works, and it’s proven essential for being able to work while traveling. For instance, I download my mail just before I get on the plane, I spend the ride reading and responding, and I send all that mail I’ve written (and download more) once I land. It was particularly essential while in Australia, where Internet access is surprisingly bad.

For organizations AND individuals: do online and offline backups of all your computer-based information. I use Mozy to backup my laptop information online once a week (in the middle of the night, while I’m sleeping). The first time you do an online backup, it’s going to take a looooooong time. But subsequent backups should be shorter, because only updated or new information will be backed up. I also have a hard drive that I use for my once-a-month onsite backups. And I sometimes burn my information onto a DVD or two, and give that DVD to a family member for safe keeping.

Don’t forget to back up your cell phone or smart phone.

So, in short: the Cloud is GREAT… until it’s not. Just like having all of your information on your laptop is GREAT… until it’s not.