Our Lady of the Manifest: the icon for a very particular community of online volunteers

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When most people think of the Afghan evacuation, they think of August of 2021, when crowds surged around Kabul’s airport, desperate and doomed Afghans clung to the sides of planes taking off, and a suicide bomber murdered scores of Afghans and 11 U.S. Marines, one soldier, and one Navy Corpsman. And they think the evacuation is over. But the evacuation of Afghans never ended. And neither has the volunteering by people all over the world trying to get vulnerable people out.

Jeff Phaneuf of No One Left Behind, the largest volunteer organization working to assist Afghans who served the USA as interpreters, has noted that when the organization surveyed its 16,000 contacts in August 2022, it found 180 clear instances of Afghans killed while waiting on a visa, with a 80 further possible murders they’re looking into. No One Left Behind estimates that there are close to 200,000 people still in Afghanistan eligible for visas from the USA set aside for Afghans and their family members who are at risk because of work they did for the USA. That doesn’t count the women’s rights activists other groups are working on. Those Afghans who do make it out often exist in an indeterminate legal space because of the inaction of governments to give them permanent status. Many of the people in Afghanistan that volunteers abroad are trying to help are literally starving: in August 2022, when No One Left Behind asked Afghans applying to leave about the conditions they lived under, only 5.5% reported being able to feed their families.

a doll with only its white face is visible amid its cover of blue and white fabric, like a chador. It holds a large, fake sunflower. It is hung on an otherwise bare, white wall.

This Time article profiles the work of people, most of them volunteers, who are still in contact with Afghans in Afghanistan and are continuing to try to get people, especially women, out of Afghanistan and to a safe country with official asylum status, and focuses on their macabre mascot, Our Lady of the Manifest, “She’s who we pray to, to get people on flights” – and how she’s helping volunteers facing mounting fatigue, frustration, depression and stress as they feel a growing helplessness to assist Afghans.

The article notes what everyone faces in trying to get at-risk Afghans out of Afghanistan:

You can get every necessary document in order, push your case through the sluggish and unresponsive refugee system, get every name of the family you’re working with on a flight manifest, and somewhere between that Afghan family’s home and the airport they can run into the “18-year-old with a gun” problem—a young Afghan running a Taliban checkpoint who doesn’t have much respect for international agreements or paperwork and who might be in a bad mood, or struck by how a woman is dressed, or acting, or who just doesn’t like the idea of a family who wants to flee the country. Everything can fall apart in a moment.

As the author of the article notes, “Sometimes, Our Lady feels a little less like an inside joke with these volunteers trying to get Afghans out, and more like a companion on a painful road.”

These volunteers work mostly in isolation. Even with online communities and interacting with others remotely, volunteers can feel very unsupported and alone, especially when friends and family are more than ready to move on and stop talking about this. I know, because I am such volunteer: I wrote about my efforts two years ago as a part of Digital Dunkirk: online volunteers scrambling to help endangered Afghans get visas & out of Afghanistan and the mental and emotional toll I could see it taking on others and myself. There’s no organization supporting me or guiding me in this role – myself and other volunteers are all pretty much making it up as we go along, because the guidelines and information about getting people out of Afghanistan and into an asylum program are ever changing. Most of us, including myself, have no training in interacting with people witnessing and experiencing violence, who have no safe haven from those acts – but we are interacting with Afghans, via WhatsApp, Telegram and Signal – that live in this daily reality and want our help. In addition, many of these volunteers, myself including, know that there are people – former colleagues, real people, with names and stories, who are in the photos we have of our time there – who qualify, on paper, to come to the USA, but are still languishing in a country run by terrorists 18 months later. As Laura Deitz of Task Force Nyx notes in the article, “I probably can’t underscore the toll that this mentally and emotionally takes on anyone who’s trying to help.”

And as I wrote in my earlier blog about this volunteering:

For the online volunteers trying to help, no certificate, no statistic on the monetary value of the time they contributed, no t-shirt, is going to serve as appropriate recognition for what they’ve done. There’s just one way we’re going to feel good about our virtual volunteering: getting people out of Afghanistan.

And I shall say it again, as I did two years ago:

Of course, the stress and frustration of online volunteers in this effort is nothing compared to the Afghans we’re trying to help. In addition to being terrified of the knock at the door that means the Taliban is there, to search the home, to take away boys and young men to fight, to take away girls for rape (there’s no such thing as “child marriage” – please stop saying that), to find files and data that could prove someone in the family worked with the USA, the UK, Australia, or some European country, Afghans are also running out of money and food.

I confess to having a very macabre sense of humor at times, and to gravitating to other humanitarian workers as colleagues and friends who also have such. It’s how I can face the absolute unnecessary absurdity of humanitarian work, whether internationally or just trying to help in my own community. This article provides a good profile of people who I think are like me – we don’t mean to offend. We’re just trying to stay sane.

I may print out a photo of Our Lady of the Manifest and put it on my wall.

If you have read this blog and are in the USA, I beg you to please write your US Congressional representative and both of your US Senators, as well as to the President of the USA, and ask them to please fulfill our commitment to our allies in Afghanistan, and to please put in the staffing and systems necessary to evacuate our allies and their families from Afgahnistan. They believed us – believe me – when we said they could and should pursue their education and careers, and they did so with the belief that we woud have their backs. We owe them this. And if you are in a country that worked in Afghanistan, whether militarily or in humanitarian interventions – Australia, the UK, Spain, Germany, Turkey, Japan, India, where ever – please do the same in your country regarding contacting your federally-elected officials.

Finding people, organizations & topics to follow on the Fediverse

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Mastodon logo

Nonprofits, non-government organizations (NGOs), community groups, government agencies, libraries and other mission-based organizations, as well as consultants for such, should always be ready to explore a new way to connect with people. You don’t have to try out every tool, but when a certain number of colleagues or clients start talking about using something, it’s definitely time to have a look yourself. And right now, you should absolutely be exploring the Fediverse – Mastodon, specifically. I’ve said so why here.

Fedi.Tips posts hints and tips about Mastodon and the Fediverse, and I’ve found it quite helpful. This is from a recent post by FediTips on Mastodon:

There are many ways to discover interesting accounts on here. How many of these have you tried?

1. Follow hashtags
2. Join groups
3. Follow people, they share posts by others
4. Use FediFinder to discover Twitter people who are also on here
5. Browse directories
6. Follow curators
7. Browse trending posts & hashtags
8. Use StreetPass for Mastodon to discover website accounts on here
9. Hang out on Local & Federated timelines

More info on how to do all of these.

My own guidance about that first suggestion, about following hashtags: the way it’s supposed to work is that you do a search on a hashtag you want to follow, the posts that use those hashtags are supposed to come up, and then you click on the little figure with the plus sign in the upper right-hand corner to follow it. But when I did searches on terms I wanted to follow as hashtags, nothing came up. Finally, I just made a post that listed the hashtags I wanted to follow. And then after publishing I went to the post and, voilà, all my hashtags were now converted, with links – all I had to do was click on each and then click the follow button:

#volunteer
#volunteerism
#nonprofit
#NGO
#Tech4Good
#CommunityService
#a11y
#Inclusion
#MakeADifference
#history
#motorcycle
#travel
#hiking
#camping

Are you following any links on Mastodon that relate to your work or volunteering with nonprofits, government agencies, libraries or community groups? Which ones?

Personally, I’m enjoying Mastodon, just like I used to enjoy my personal Twitter account. But professionally – for connecting with colleagues, people working in similar fields, building a professional rep that leads to clients – so far, it’s been quite a dud: can’t find many people to follow, professionally-related topics aren’t happening. What about you?

Also see:

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

For detailed information about leveraging online tools to support and involve volunteers, whether they provide their service onsite at your organization, onsite elsewhere, or online, get yourself a copy of The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook. Online platforms and social media channels come and go, but the recommendations here are timeless, and absolutely will work with social media platforms that have emerged since this book was published, like Mastodon and TikTok. You will not find a more detailed guide anywhere on this subject than than The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook. It’s available both as a traditional print publication and as a digital book.

If you have benefited from any of my 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.

What is meant by “safety policies” for volunteering programs?

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two primitive-looking images, like petroglyphs, one holding an umbrella over them both

Any organization that involves volunteers needs to have safety policies and procedures to protect both volunteers and those that they serve, and if the volunteers interact with vulnerable people or could be in one-to-one situations with ANYONE, there needs to be even more extensive safety policies and procedures.

What do safety policies look like?

Screening steps for volunteers could be the volunteer applicants:

  • providing real names (not just nicknames or screen names), residential addresses (not just a PO Box), phone number, etc.
  • providing the name of the volunteer’s current employer and previous two employers, or the name of where they are currently enrolled in school and how many hours they are taking.
  • answering the questions “why do you want to volunteer?” and “What do you hope to experience as a volunteer” and “tell me about a time you interacted with a person in crisis.”
  • providing professional and academic reference checks (employers, teachers)
  • providing personal reference checks (friends, family)
  • undergoing a criminal background check
  • undergoing a credit check
  • being in a probation period and extra observation at first
  • going through required training

Supervision for volunteers could be:

  • Volunteers required to use an email the organization has set up and know that ALL emails are archived and could be reviewed at any time.
  • Volunteers required to work in pairs or paired with a staff person.
  • Staff that created the volunteering role meeting with the volunteer once a month or once a quarter AND meeting with other volunteers and clients about that volunteer’s performance.

Policies for volunteers could be:

  • Never being alone, one-on-one, with another volunteer, a paid staff person or a client.
  • Never using any electronic communications avenues other than a specific email or online platform (no texting among volunteers, for instance).
  • A prohibition on a volunteer giving personal contact info to any client.
  • A mandatory reporting by the volunteer if a client gives that volunteer personal contact info or tries to contact that volunteer outside of agreed-to communications avenues (WhatsApp, TikTok, etc.)
  • Mandatory reporting to management of suspicions of inappropriate behavior relating to sex by volunteers and clients.

etc.

Again, these are just EXAMPLES. And what safety requirements a volunteer beach cleanup group is going to have is NOT going to be the same as what a mentoring program for young people will have.

But whatever you have at your organization, whatever you require, should be detailed on your organization’s web site – NO EXCEPTIONS. And if they are not, it has to be assumed you don’t have them. And if you are recruiting volunteers to work with vulnerable groups or one-on-one with anyone, your post is going to be deleted here unless you have info on your web site on the steps you employ to keep volunteers and those they were safe.

Safety in Service Delivery/Client Support by Online Volunteers.

Your right to turn away volunteers who won’t adhere to safety measures (& your right to refuse to volunteer at an unsafe program)

My wakeup call regarding risks in volunteering programs – a blog that may change your mind about how to think about risks in volunteer engagement programs

Letting Fear Prevent Volunteer Involvement is Too Risky” (a guest blog by me for Energize, Inc. and Susan Ellis)

Have you enabled a Larry Nassar?

Keeping volunteers safe – & keeping everyone safe with volunteers (includes a list of my favorite resources regarding safety in programs that involve volunteers and/or children; I consider many of these resources mandatory reading for managers of volunteers

If you have benefited from this blog or other parts of my web site or my YouTube videos 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. 

What I’ve learned working at Habitat for Humanity

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A photo of the author, Jayne Cravens, wearing a Habitat for Humanity plastic construction helmet with Habitat for Humanity on it.
Jayne Cravens

Since August 2022, I have been working the equivalent of two full days a week, sometimes a bit more, for a local affiliate of Habitat for Humanity International. I’ve been working in marketing and outreach, primarily social media and web site content, and also for three months, I helped onboard volunteers for home builds and home repairs, as well as looking at the volunteer onboarding, support and tracking processes at the Restore, Habitat’s thrift store, and making recommendations to make them better.

My primary goal in my job is to increase local awareness about this Habitat affiliate’s efforts to address affordable housing and about its efforts to help vulnerable homeowners with critical home repairs that allow them to stay in their homes. I also have a focus on increasing sales of the affiliate’s ReStore, which is a vital funding component for the local affiliate, as well as increasing awareness of the ReStore regarding its connection to Habitat for Humanity and as a recycle and reuse option. I would also like to see a LOT more diversity among Habitat’s volunteer engagement, and that’s going to require special, targeted efforts in messaging – putting a lot of my own recommendations to the test. I manage the Habitat affiliate’s web site and the local ReStore web site, and you can see examples of my online outreach via the affiliate’s Facebook and Instagram pages, the local ReStore Facebook and Instagram pages, and the affiliate’s Mastodon, Twitter and Reddit accounts. 

It’s been a fascinating, challenging experience. I’ve long been a fan of Habitat for Humanity’s model for engaging volunteers in home construction, as you know if you have attended my workshops related to volunteer engagement. Getting this behind-the-scenes look at all the various aspects of Habitat’s programming, which goes well beyond building structures, has been fantastic and inspiring. It’s also so wonderful to be in a small, frontline nonprofit, especially one serving a largely rural community: the affiliate serves a large, mostly rural area of less than 400 sq miles / 940 km2, much of it unincorporated and outside the Portland Metro Urban Growth Boundary (UGB), which bisects Washington County. The overall population of the area served by this affiliate is less than 50,000. The three argest cities in the service area have populations of about 26,000 people, about 13,400 people and about 3500 people, respectively. More than 10 percent of the population identifies as Hispanic or Latino.

In the time I have been at this Habitat for Humanity affiliate, here are some things I’ve learned – or relearned:

  • There’s nothing like testing your recommendations made as a consultant in real-world settings. It’s one thing to write a blog or a book or hold a training; it’s another to actually apply those strategies yourself. I’ve always been proud to be able to tie what I recommend in a workshop to what I’ve actually done.
  • Working with people in rural Oregon really isn’t that different from working with rural people in Afghanistan: people want a safe, stable place to live, most especially a place of their own, and in most cases, if you give them the opportunity to work for that, they’ll embrace it – and their neighbors will help. Political and economic obstacles in nonprofit work are shockingly similar across countries.
  • Some of the most important work you do as a communications manager is getting what people know in their heads into a form that can be read and referenced by others. Often, employees aren’t that aware of all their fellow employees are doing. When a key employee or volunteer leaves, and their work and knowledge isn’t documented, it can bring some work to a standstill. Plus, what is in people’s heads and what they experience in their work is fantastic for blogs and grant proposals.
  • The people with whom most customers interact should be regularly briefed on program activities, on upcoming events and on important dates. The cashiers of the ReStore regularly get questions about Habitat programming from customers, and since my office is right next to checkout, if the cashiers don’t know the answer, they will grab me to talk to the customers with questions, something I welcome. And they listen to what I say and sometimes comment later, “I didn’t know any of that.” Everyone is a spokesperson for your nonprofit, whether you like it or not. I’m now working to make sure they know how to answer our organization’s most frequently asked questions, and how to direct people who need detailed answers. I’m working to make sure they know they can use their smart phones to pull up our organization’s web site, right then and there, and read answers to customers with questions. Have a look at When some nonprofit employees & volunteers don’t really understand what the nonprofit is trying to address & why for more on what I suggest to ensure everyone is representing your nonprofit appropriately.
  • Just because you work for an agency with a well-known name does not mean people really know what it does (including some employees and board members!). So many people think Habitat for Humanity gives away houses – it doesn’t (it partners with families for affordable mortgages – the families DO make payments for the house). I didn’t know Habitat did critical home repairs for vulnerable home owners until I started working there.
  • Online tools aren’t enough to market an organization: executive directors and board members have to get out into the communities. You have to show up at the big events of other organizations. You have to present to city councils and county governments. You have to immediately respond to every call from the media – especially in this age of fewer and fewer newspapers, and fewer local radio stations and TV stations. You have to leverage banner placements over key streets and doorways, buy ads in newspapers (if you are lucky enough to still have a newspaper), put flyers up at grocery stores, and rely on other marketing tools many said would go away with the Internet. You have to be at farmer’s markets and the super popular food cart pod on a Friday night. And the opposite is true too: just going to onsite events and relying on traditional paper postal mail and onsite displays isn’t enough; you have to regularly use and update online tools.
  • People love social media posts that have photos of LOCAL PEOPLE in them. You can, therefore, never have enough photos of local volunteers and employees “in action.”
  • People also love social media that’s fun. And dinosaurs are terrific props.
  • Bureaucracy can be wonderful. Rules, regulations, protocols, official messaging – these are NOT automatically bad. Official policies and procedures MATTER because when they are based in reality, understood and followed, it keeps everyone on the same page and it prevents missteps. I loved that, at the United Nations, I could always find the policy, the manual, the official statement, that I could use to justify something I wanted to say or do. The same has been true of Habitat: their official policies regarding communications, safety and volunteer engagement have made my job easier! And what a joy to see Susan Ellis, my mentor and guru, quoted in Habitat’s official guidance for staff regarding volunteer engagement. It’s also been great not to have to agonize over how to phrase something – I can usually find exactly what I need in official Habitat materials, some public, some on our extensive national intranet/knowledge base.
  • People don’t like change. I’ve known this for years, and I’m relearning it yet again. And if I hear, “But that’s the way we’ve always done it” one more time…
  • There is a delicate, difficult balance in an organization that fights poverty hosting a gala event.
  • Contacting TV stations an hour away 48 hours before an event can sometimes get them to cover it during a slow news week. It’s always worth trying.
  • I’m not the only over-40 woman in my area that has so much professional experience I scare potential employers when I apply for jobs – and it’s amazing how many Generation Xers I’m now encountering on their third or fourth careers.
  • It’s still not easy to create group volunteering roles – things that three or more volunteers could do together, just once (though it’s usually 10 or more people). The agency could have three of these every month and not meet volunteer demand.
  • People are willing to travel outside of their area to volunteer for a day. As noted earlier, I’m in a county that’s half rural and half urban. The Habitat that serves the urban area can’t as easily accommodate groups of volunteers, or specialized volunteers, as we can, so we end up with volunteers from the opposite side of the county, often from groups of employees from very large employers – and that’s fine with us!
  • As I wrote on a blog in 2016 called “If no one is complaining, we don’t have to change how we do things”, “Often, when I do a little digging myself, talking to people that wanted to volunteer at the organization but didn’t, or to current members, or to former clients, and on and on, I find that, indeed, there is dissatisfaction among a few, maybe even more, but no one says anything to the organization itself… they don’t say anything about something they would like to see changed or improved because there is a culture within the program or the entire organization, that discourages complaints or suggestions.” No further comment.
  • Everyone that works with volunteers should have some training on how to work with volunteers. Period.
  • It’s so still oh-so-easy to recruit volunteers for online tasks and onsite, short-term roles. People are so, so hungry for those kinds of roles! I remain confused by people who struggle to recruit volunteers for short-term roles or online roles. I’ve put up three such assignments VolunteerMatch and had to take them down in just a few days because I had enough great volunteers to do them. I’ve recruited online volunteers to update our contact list of every community of faith and every nonprofit in the area, as well as to update our list of and contact information for every elected official that represents any part of our area. It’s not too late for you to get up-to-speed on virtual volunteering!
  • It’s really hard to recruit new volunteers for longer-term, ongoing roles, and people under 50 have zero interest in coming to a ReStore even twice a month to help in an ongoing role. And that’s not a criticism of these generations – I think they would volunteer if we built a relationship with these folks, if we enticed them with short-term gigs and gave them a really worthwhile experience.
  • Online sales requires a dedicated staff member who can spare the role several hours of every week – it can’t be done as a simple add-on to an existing role, something attended to just a few minutes a day.
  • Bicycling to work is awesome except when it’s icy outside. Just like in Germany! But it’s brutal in the increasingly over-headed summers we now get.

This experience has also affirmed my belief that, if you want to work abroad in humanitarian endeavors, you need deep experience working for nonprofits in your own community, as an employee, consultant or volunteer. And any Habitat for Humanity affiliate and its ReStore are great places to start.

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. 

For Executive Directors: It’s Time for Mandates Regarding Volunteering Engagement.

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graphic representing volunteers at work

Volunteer engagement is not going to expand, nor be worthwhile, at any nonprofit unless senior management does more than pay it lip service.

Nonprofit executive directors: you cannot keep treating volunteer engagement strategies from the point of view of “Wouldn’t it be nice if…” You can’t keep crossing your fingers and hope it somehow happens or that problems somehow work themselves out. Because none of that is going to happen on its own. You can’t just encourage volunteer engagement – it’s time for you to REQUIRE it.

Executive directors must MANDATE certain activities regarding volunteer engagement at their organizations, with some or all staff, or it won’t happen – or it won’t be successful and may, in fact, create frustration, disappointments, public relations problems, even safety and safeguarding problems.

What mandates regarding volunteer engagement look like:

  • Nonprofit executive directors include requirements for volunteer engagement in certain paid job roles – meaning certain staff have to include a goal of involving volunteers in their work. And when performance review time comes around, executive directors must look at how well each manager has – or has not – involved volunteers in their programs, and take necessary corrective action.
  • Nonprofits must provide regular training for all staff expected to work with volunteers and must provide time for staff to take part in workshops and to read about different aspects of volunteer engagement (screening, recruitment for diversity, safeguarding, etc.). And those expected to work with volunteers should have official opportunities to provide feedback to judge how well the executive director is supporting these capacity-building activities.
  • Nonprofits must have a systemic, well-thought-out process, IN WRITING, for onboarding volunteers, training volunteers, supporting volunteers, getting feedback from volunteers, and tracking information about volunteer engagement, as well as a way to generate performance reports on all of the aforementioned.
  • Executive directors must address volunteer engagement problems directly and as immediately as possible, like managers not following the official process to onboard volunteers, or managers not responding to questions or requests from volunteers in a timely manner – and that includes reviewing the performance of managers who are volunteers themselves.

I can feel the aversion from some readers. MANDATE volunteer engagement?! That’s not nice! It’s so harsh! Gee – we require staff to follow accounting procedures, we require staff to follow human resources policies, we measure staff performance on how well they communicate their work with management and other staff, how well they get along with other staff and clients, etc. and take corrective action when they come up short… Why have requirements for other business processes but NOT for volunteer engagement?

I’m not saying every staff member at a nonprofit has to involve volunteers. It’s not appropriate nor realistic for every staff member to involve volunteers. But if you, the executive director, do not mandate volunteer engagement in the job roles of those staff members you DO want to involve volunteers, and if you don’t support staff members in engaging and supporting those volunteers, volunteer engagement isn’t going to happen – or it’s going to be substandard and may, in fact, create something more than just frustration at your program.

If you are a nonprofit executive director and you need to learn more so that you can be a better manager of volunteer engagement at your organizaton, start with reading From the Top Down: The Executive Role in Successful Volunteer Involvement. I consider it mandatory material for any nonprofit executive director. It’s worth every minute you spend reading it.

You can also peruse my own materials on the essentials of volunteer engagement (free).

And if you think engaging volunteers is easy and that your staff should be magically better at it, consider that your board of directors is made up entirely of volunteers. How much support do YOU need to work with your board members, even to just manage a meeting? Why do you think your staff needs less time and support for working with volunteers than you do with the board? No mandates work without providing appropriate support.

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. 

Volunteering, or that meeting you are going to host, must sound enticing & compelling or people won’t care (our post-pandemic reality).

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image of a panel discussion

People are going on vacations again. They are going to restaurants again. They are going camping in droves. They are even attending work-related conferences again. But they have not returned to many onsite activities they might have done before the COVID-19 pandemic, like attending community meetings and volunteering.

Why?

I surmise it’s because people got very used to being home and they really don’t want to be away from home except for something they really enjoy or something that’s exceptional, something that is compelling. There’s so much great stuff at home – streaming services, that new pizza oven you bought during COVID, your couch… so if a person is going to leave it, it better be for a fantastic reason.

Before the pandemic, a lot of people attended meetings without deeply thinking about why they really, really wanted to – but now, post-lockdowns, we’ve thought a lot more about our time and our priorities. Going to an event before or after work requires organizing child or pet care, driving to the event, finding a parking spot, etc. – and in return, you might be bored, or intimidated, or under-valued and feel like your time is wasted. Plus, there is a vast amount of fantastic shows on TV that promise a lot of compelling stories and fun – and frequently deliver on that promise. Volunteering and in-person meetings? Not so much.

Many of you had to learn to run effective, even fun, virtual meetings to keep your nonprofit supporters engaged. It took a lot of effort on your part to learn do that and to actually do it. You are going to have to put in that same effort to rethink your onsite events, including your volunteer engagement.

“People who became leaders during the pandemic haven’t learned how to create irresistible in-person meetings,” said Cynthia D’Amour, MBA, mentor and leadership strategist at People Power Unlimited, in this article How to Re-Engage Members in Chapter Events from Associations Now. The article is about how it is now essential to “design programs that have energy and take advantage of the face-to-face location.”

I can’t tell you just in one blog everything you can do to make onsite meetings and onsite volunteering more enticing and inviting. And what works for one group might not work for another. I also don’t want to sound gimmicky – there’s not a magical icebreaker or theme that will make a meeting exciting or compelling. This is something you all need to think about at length, and you are going to have to experiment at length.

Here are some general ideas to get you started on your journey to learn how to change your onsite meetings and onsite volunteering to bring people back:

What was the last really enjoyable community meeting or volunteering you experienced – even if it was before the pandemic? What made it enjoyable? Ask all of your staff this question, about what they have experienced, first hand. They are likely going to say things that you can’t manage: my favorite band played or we all got an incredible swag bag or we made and baked our own pizzas. But amid that are going to be some things you can consider:

  • there were free sodas in the break room.
  • the meetings always start and end on time and are really well-organized – my time is never wasted.
  • they served really good food.
  • the ideas we offered at the first meeting had been implemented the following month.
  • the manager is really welcoming and makes it clear she’s happy we’re there.

Also consider that many people have a profound fear of rejection. Some think that younger generations take statements far more personally than older generations, but maybe they just aren’t as willing as older generations to put up with personal insults or being neglected. Either way, you have to make sure you have deliberate, ongoing activities to make volunteers feel welcomed and valued. Are you encouraging their questions and responding promptly to their questions and concerns? Does all of your staff show know how you are listening to volunteers? Do you believe no complaints means everything is okay?

Finally, you don’t want volunteers asking themselves why am I putting myself through this? And they will if their time is wasted, if they feel intimidated or devalued, or if they see no purpose or result in their volunteering. Are you regularly addressing those concerns with volunteers even if you haven’t gotten an indication that volunteers are asking themselves that question?

So many of us in the volunteer management training world have been sounding the alarm for years that nonprofits and other organizations that involve volunteers MUST change their ways regarding volunteer onboarding recruitment, onboarding, engagement and value or they will risk all of their current volunteers dying out. The pandemic has created an urgency: if you aren’t addressing the new realities of volunteer engagement, your organization is doomed.

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. 

Also see:

The problem with volunteer matching platforms isn’t a software issue

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I get a version of this message regularly from an IT or corporate person:

With today’s technology, it seems to me that it should be easier for both volunteers and nonprofits to find appropriate matches online.  

An illustraiton that is drawn like cave paintings - one image is of a figure holding a smartphone, the other is of a person at a computer.

Sigh. The problem is not DATA. It’s not a data issue. It’s not a tech issue. It’s not a software issue. The issue is that the vast majority of nonprofits, and staff charged with recruiting and involving volunteers, have no training in how to do so, and they start with volunteer recruitment when, in fact, that’s the LAST step.

Nonprofits, NGOs, community groups and other initiatives that want to involve volunteers – or that do currently – need to have training in:

  • How to create appropriate tasks and roles for volunteers.
  • How to create a variety of tasks and roles (short-term, long-term, for highly skilled, for low-skilled, for high responsibility roles, for micro/episodic volunteering, etc.)
  • How to create accessible tasks and roles (that welcome refugees, that welcome people with disabilities, etc.)
  • What screening is required for different roles in order for volunteering to be safe and in order for appropriate volunteers to be screened in and inappropriate volunteers to be screened out.
  • What support volunteers need in their roles.


That’s all of the many things that are needed BEFORE RECRUITMENT HAPPENS. And such training is getting harder and harder to find, instead of easier. And that doesn’t even get into all the other training that’s needed, like how to evaluate and report the effectiveness of volunteer engagement. Or other things that are needed, like policies and procedures, particularly around safety, and software to track volunteers time and impact, to schedule volunteers, etc. – most nonprofits can’t afford such (in fact, they can’t even afford the time to explore such).

Why is all that lacking? Because there’s no funding for it. Corporations and foundations refuse to fund “overhead”. That means they won’t fund training, they won’t fund the purchase of books or subscriptions to sites like Engage.

I could go on and on. And I do. And I have, many times, as the “also see” links below show. And I’ll keep doing it until funders, particularly, techie companies, “get it” – and are ready to pony up the funds needed to increase the number of people engaged in volunteering and to improve the engagement of volunteers.

Also see:

Abilities you need to work in humanitarian development successfully

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image of a panel discussion

I’ve been working on this for a while: a list of abilities that I believe a person needs to work in humanitarian development successfully – including to work at the United Nations. For my purposes here, I define such success as meeting the requirements of your job and the goals of your program and getting along well with others while also staying personally satisfied.

These are the skills I’ve seen that have made the difference in success, as I have just defined it, for oh so many people – and myself. Many would call them “soft skills.” These skills usually won’t be listed in job requirements. You can’t major in any of these skills at a university; you get them from working, volunteering and collaborating on anything with others (co-workers, neighbors, family…), and you can do all of that (and gain these skills) no matter where you live.

Also, it’s good to approach at least some of these as job interview questions: “Tell me about a time when you needed to adapt and improvise regarding a strategy you had planned out but you realized wouldn’t work as planned…” or “tell me about a time when you broke down a process into smaller steps so that it was easier to understand by co-workers or community members…”

To work in humanitarian development successfully, you need the abilities to:

  1. read large amounts of text, and to understand what you have read and apply it to your work.
  2. memorize.
  3. manage time effectively.
  4. speak comfortably in front of audiences, including those that may be hostile to your subject matter.
  5. shut up, listen and learn from others (and I am using “shut up” because too many don’t understand “listen quietly”).
  6. adapt and improvise when you realize a strategy has to be altered or something unexpected happens.
  7. negotiate.
  8. write words to educate, persuade and influence others.
  9. cultivate trust quickly and on an ongoing basis with others.
  10. make decisions based on facts and not on emotions or just your “gut” – and be ready to do that despite what you wanted to believe in your gut.
  11. break a process down to smaller steps.
  12. reframe complex ideas into plain language.
  13. delegate tasks appropriately and frequently with an eye to building the skills of others.
  14. build the skills of someone to eventually take over a process you currently undertake.
  15. guide without micromanaging.
  16. work with co-workers, community members and others you don’t like.
  17. know how to quickly tell your boss what you are doing and why you are doing it, what you are achieving and what is challenging you – and make sure your boss’s boss knows all of this too.
  18. not let an insult of you derail the work you need to do.
  19. read the room, to be aware of the feelings and opinions of those you are talking to, and to be able to alter your approach if you realize it’s not going to work or be inappropriate in that circumstance.
  20. keep trying and experimenting, and learn from failure.
  21. do self-analysis and let go of ideas when it’s clear they won’t work.
  22. stay positive and hopeful – and get that back when you lose it.
  23. understand what others feel, even if you disagree with their values.
  24. ask for advice and help and know how to seek and find the expertise you don’t have.
  25. recognize situations that are unnecessarily dangerous or when you are personally at risk and react to keep yourself safe.
  26. process your own stress, anxiety, and other negative feelings, and address feelings of loneliness in a healthy way.
  27. balance priorities with personal needs and know when it’s time to take a break.
  28. pick your battles.
  29. know when to ask for permission and when to do it without prior approval and be ready to ask for forgiveness.
  30. own your mistakes.
  31. know who you are working with that has your back and those who do NOT.
  32. how to get back up when you stumble and fall.

No one person can have all of these abilities all the time, by the way.

And, yes, it’s helpful to have abilities like being able to learn another language so that you can work in a language other than the one your own family and neighbors speak – your native language. And you need the abilities to obtain a university degree and a lot of work experience and on and on. But you need these “soft skills” as well – and just as much.

For those of you who have worked in international development, what abilities would you add – abilities that might not ever be named in a role’s Terms of Reference?

Also see:

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UN Volunteer requirements – but with no guidance?

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I’ve been reviewing open positions in developing countries from United Nations Volunteers. It’s something I do when I want to do a bit of dreaming about maybe going overseas again… and also to see what’s up with my former employer. Recently, I noticed that many of postings have a standard set of additional requirements, no matter what the role is (IT manager, sanitation communications, microenterprise development, etc.).

I smiled when I saw the requirements, because I was one of the first people, if not the first person, to develop these type of additional requirements on UNV terms of reference (TORs): back when I was working as a part of the UNV UNITeS initiative, focused on promoting volunteer engagement in ICT4D initiatives, there was a program manager for a particular region who would come to my office, hand me the TOR for the volunteer placement and say, “UNI-Tize this.” What she meant was this: add in required skills and responsibilities that justify this being done by someone under a UN Volunteers contract, rather than another type of UN contract that would require the payment of more money to the person that fills the position and the designation of that person as a consultant or staff member. When that UNV program manager gave me the TOR to “uni-tize,” I went through and added responsibilities regarding

  • building the capacities of local counterparts regarding whatever it was he or she was doing, with an eye to this UNV position becoming unnecessary as local people take over. I treated every UNV placement that was “Uni-Tized” as one that would eventually be taken over by a full-time, paid local person NOT under a UNV contract, and for that to happen, local capacity had to be built.
  • creating at least one, local event that could help build the skills of community members regarding some aspect of computer and Internet use: where to find information about current market prices for agricultural products, where to find reliable maternal health information, how to evaluate the credibility of online information, etc. In this case, “Uni-Tize” meant to evangelize regarding ICTs for various development activities (ICT4D).
  • suggestions to involve local volunteers in their work in some way, reaching out to students at nearby universities, or at home on leave from university, to help them gain experience that would help in their future careers. In this case, “Uni-Tize” meant to get local volunteers invested in the work of UNVs in some way.
  • suggestions to make particular efforts to reach out to women, girls, religious and ethnic minorities and people with disabilities in any of the above aforementioned activities, to take all of the tasks beyond merely getting tasks done.

Here we are all these years later, and here are the requirements UNV now puts on many UN Volunteer TOR. If you’ve read the aforementioned, they will sound familiar. However, for each of these requirements, I have some questions that I really hope UNV answers for candidates it chooses for these roles:

UN Volunteers are required to:

• Strengthen their knowledge and understanding of the concept of volunteerism by reading relevant UNV and external publications and take active part in UNV activities (for instance in events that mark International Volunteer Day).

Seems fairly straightforward. Requires a volunteer to volunteer UNV on social media and read that social media regularly, read web updates, etc.

• Be acquainted with and build on traditional and/or local forms of volunteerism in the host country.

And HOW does one become acquainted with local volunteerism in the host country, let alone build on it? Most people aren’t acquainted with local volunteerism in their OWN country. UNV did away with the World Volunteerism Web, so there’s no online source now to do this. And what does “build on it” mean? Are UN Volunteers supposed to involve volunteers in their work? Or are they supposed to promote volunteerism, as a concept, in general? What does that look like for an IT manager or a microenterprise developer? I could write an entire manual on just this subject, because I’ve done it – and it’s NOT an easy thing to do.

• Reflect on the type and quality of voluntary action that they are undertaking, including participation in ongoing reflection activities.

UN Volunteers aren’t undertaking voluntary action; UN Volunteers are under a contract called “UN Volunteers”, but they aren’t really volunteers. UNVs receive an excellent stipend. International volunteers receive a stipend that’s equal to the regular pay for local government workers. The pay is enough for housing, food and local transportation – some “stipends” are enough to support a small family.

• Contribute articles/write-ups on field experiences and submit them for UNV publications/websites, newsletters, press releases, etc.

Reasonable requirement.

• Assist with the UNV Buddy Programme for newly arrived UN Volunteers.

Link to the UNV Buddy Programme? What is it? How does it work?

• Promote capacity development activities and transfer of skills to national personnel during the assignment.

Excellent requirement. Building local capacity is at the heart of international UN Volunteer engagement. But where’s the guidance on how to do that? I felt like I was pretty good at it when managing communications activities in Afghanistan and Ukraine – where I worked for UNDP but was not a UN Volunteer – but I’ve seen other UN workers who never made this a priority, or weren’t very good at it and needed a LOT of guidance.

• Promote or advise local groups in the use of online volunteering or encourage relevant local individuals and organizations to use the UNV Online Volunteering service whenever technically possible.

It’s really great to see this as a requirement – but where is the UNV guidance on how to develop online roles, how to support online volunteers, how to evaluate online engagement, etc.? It’s not on the UNV web site – UNV reduced, then shut down the online volunteering service a few years ago, and before that, removed support for those that wanted to involve online volunteers (I archived what I created for UNV about online volunteer engagement here). Or what about giving volunteers copies of The LAST Virtual Volunteering Guidebook and helping make them experts in virtual volunteering?

Would love to see UNV’s responses to these questions… but I doubt that will ever come.

Also see:

Make volunteering transformative, not about # of hours.

Resources from my time at United Nations Volunteers.

The United Nations Information Technology Service (UNITeS).

United Nations Volunteers says, when it comes to onsite & online, “They are ALL volunteers”.

Misconceptions re: VSO, UNV & Peace Corps.

New UN Initiative seeks “Information Volunteers”.

United Nations site for people with disabilities is inaccessible.

Thoughts on new UN paper re: Volunteering Practices in the 21st Century.

I’m thrilled with UNV’s 2015 State of the World’s Volunteerism Report – Transforming Governance.

History & Evaluation of UNV’s Early Years

Initial feedback on UNV plan to integrate volunteerism in development.

A blend of international & local volunteers can “decolonize” humanitarian development.

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.

Should you leave Twitter & Facebook for the fediverse?

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It’s a mouthful, but bear with me:

The non-profit, distributed, community-oriented fediverse might be something you need to check out and use, for your personal and professional activities – and maybe the nonprofits you work for.

More and more users are leaving Facebook and Twitter to join such communities because they are uncomfortable with the corporate policies and the owners of the companies. Some nonprofits feel that they have an ethical duty to NOT be associated with such.

Most folks are staying on Facebook and Twitter, but creating profiles on other platforms, including the fediverse, just in case they decide to change their social media patronage altogether.

The fediverse is similar to social media networks like Facebook or Twitter, but it’s not controlled by any one corporation. To you, the user, it will feel like any social media channel, but how it is set up and organized in the background is very different from for-profit platforms.

The fediverse is a network of social media servers that share one another’s content. If I set up my account on one server and you set up your account on another server, we can still see and repost each other’s content because the servers are part of a “federation.” To the user, it feels just like, say, Facebook – you see all the content of those you follow – you will have no idea they are signed up via a different server than you unless you really look for it.

The only challenge you will probably ever face as a user on a fediverse is when you sign in – you have to remember the address of your server. I do this the same way I track my passwords. But, again, otherwise, a fediverse feels just like any other social network.

The most famous example of a fediverse is Mastodon, which is a lot like Twitter. When you join Mastodon, you have to join via one of its servers. Most people join via the “social” server – it’s the first one you see when you go to the site to create an account. Each Mastodon server has its own policies and administrators. If you do not like a change in policies on the server you have joined, you can leave one for another without losing followers. Most servers follow the Mastodon Covenant, which requires a basic level of administrative service as well as active moderation against various forms of hate speech. But, honestly, as a user, you probably won’t ever have to deal with ANY of this.

An added bonus: “Mastodon’s robust REST APIs are based on ActivityPub, a W3C standard”. That means Mastodon has a commitment to accessibility!

This article in InfoWorld by Andrew C. Oliver offers the best argument I’ve seen for creating a Mastodon account and for thinking very seriously about the consequences of supporting Facebook, Twitter and Instagram with your content.

As for me: I am on Mastodon and am using it more and more. I still have an account I use for professional reasons on Twitter, a Facebook professional and a personal page, and a mostly-personal Instagram account. But I like having alternatives – especially Mastodon and Reddit (and I’m getting more and more benefits from Reddit – including lots of traffic for my blog and two consulting jobs). I haven’t deleted my personal Twitter account but I use it primarily to encourage people to follow me elsewhere (difficult to do, since the Twitter algorithms now seek out such content specifically to downgrade it and keep it from being viewed by most followers).

For the nonprofits I work for, including TechSoup: I do have profiles for them on Reddit, and was able to reclaim TechSoup’s Reddit group, and posting there has resulted in some traffic here on the TechSoup community. But I still haven’t put any of them on Mastodon – mostly because I know that, in the case of one of the nonprofits I work with, none of their clients or donors are on it. But that could change… and I need to be ready.

What about you and the nonprofits you help/work for? Are they exploring other social media platforms with an eye to not over-relying solely on just one channel? Remember: no social media platform is forever. Eventually, the one you love most will go the way of AOL communities, MySpace, Friendster…

Also see:

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

For detailed information about leveraging online tools to support and involve volunteers, whether they provide their service onsite at your organization, onsite elsewhere, or online, get yourself a copy of The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook. Online platforms and social media channels come and go, but the recommendations here are timeless. You will not find a more detailed guide anywhere on this subject than than The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook. It’s available both as a traditional print publication and as a digital book.

If you have benefited from any of my 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.