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Reflections on Virtual Volunteering in 2020 (& My Most Popular Blogs for the Year)

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When the end of a year approaches, I look over my visitor statistics for my blog and my web pages to see which of my resources were the most popular in the last 12 months. It helps me to know what topics resonated in that year – it’s always something different – and what promotion is most effective. It’s something your nonprofit or government agency should do as well, regarding your online resources (your web site, your blogs, etc.). It’s not just looking at numbers – it’s looking at when pages launched, what people clicked on to get to a resource, etc.

As is true every year, my blogs that got the most traffic are the ones that other people amplified, posting about them on their own social media channels, or referring to them in workshops they did, so if that’s you, THANK YOU. I hope my sharing of others’ material on my social media accounts was also helpful to colleagues and many people I admire as well.

In 2019, I wrote about communications, community relations and ethics in nonprofits far more than volunteer engagement. I had intended to do the same in 2020 – it’s not that I want to downplay volunteer engagement, or not to explore it anymore, but I find those other subjects just as interesting, maybe more, and I work professionally in those fields even more than I do regarding volunteer management. Plus, I just wasn’t sure what else there was to say about virtual volunteering, a subject I have researched and talked about since the mid-1990s.

But then came the novel coronavirus and the massive pivot by thousands of organizations for the first time to virtual volunteering – and suddenly, I was reviving lots of my previous work, filling lots of orders for my book on virtual volunteering, trying to keep up with requests to lead trainings and producing a lot of videos on YouTube to bring everyone up-to-speed about the history and basics of virtual volunteering.

I promote my blog, web site and videos through my Twitter account, my Facebook account, my LinkedIn account, some Subreddits, and some LinkedIn groups. I’m a one-person shop and create and promote these resources entirely on my own – and it’s getting harder and harder to get my voice out there amid a growing sea of competition for attention. Even in the area of virtual volunteering, lots of new “experts” have emerged (please remember that, to be an expert, someone should have experience engaging volunteers online and being an online volunteer themselves).

As I say each year, the blog visitor numbers are great – but the emails and comments on resources are what really keep me going, so please keep them coming!

What did I write that got people’s attention in 2020? Here’s (almost) all of my top 11 blogs for 2020:

How to Immediately Introduce Virtual Volunteering at Your Program: roles & activities a nonprofit, charity or other program could launch immediately to involve online volunteers.

Free training in virtual volunteering (involving & supporting volunteers using online tools): a list of my videos on virtual volunteering in 2020.

Ethics of Paying to Volunteer Online.

Systemic Exclusion in Volunteer Engagement and More: systemic racism in volunteer engagement.

Why qualified people get passed over for jobs.

Saying “no” to recruiting volunteers for certain tasks.

Three resources for your COVID-19-related volunteering.

You do not need to meet via video conference with every potential volunteer.

21 simple things to do while your programs are on hold during COVID-19 quarantines.

I also had a look at my most popular web pages. Some were quite a surprise. These aren’t in the exact order of popularity:

But the two big news items regarding virtual volunteering for 2020 aren’t necessarily reflected in these stats:

  1. I’ve now identified more than 100 research and academic articles on virtual volunteering (the announcement got shared and retweeted a LOT) and
  2. virtual volunteering becoming a necessity because of the novel coronavirus, surging in popularity and being embraced by organizations that have shunned it for decades.

Over the years, and until this year, I’ve made and appeared in many videos about working with online volunteers for nonprofits I’ve been working or volunteering with, but just one about virtual volunteering that wasn’t on behalf of someone else, back in 2012. By contrast, this year, 2020, I’ve made seven videos for my own channel, including a 36-minute introduction to virtual volunteering. In fact, I made 11 additional, private videos for a consultancy I did regarding a user experience related to online volunteering. You can see all my free trainings on my YouTube channel.

It’s been exhausting to say, over and over in 2020: virtual volunteering is not new, it’s more than 35 years old. I’ve said it in my book. I’ve said it on the Virtual Volunteering Wiki. I’ve said it in a video. I’m exhausted from saying it. What I haven’t said is that I’m stunned that so many people from both the nonprofit and corporate world seem to have never heard of involving volunteers remotely, of using the Internet to engage volunteers, a WIDESPREAD, popular practice that’s more than 35 years old. It’s been disheartening to see just how many nonprofits, foundations and corporate social responsibility programs have kept themselves in the dark about virtual volunteering for decades – and I say kept themselves in the dark, because I know just how much, how often, the practice has been talked about in publications, at conferences and in presentations by nonprofits. It has taken a lot of effort on the part of these folks to ignore this well-established practice over the years. I hope that, at last, that has changed.

I’ve also had a very traumatic, challenging time professionally, one that I’m not ready to talk openly about yet. But I will say: please ask colleagues – co-workers, staff at partner organizations, volunteers you work with, etc. – how they are doing. Ask them what challenges they are facing. And ask about safety issues – bluntly ask, “Are you feeling safe in your work? Are you feeling safe online?” Be prepared to eventually hear, “No, I’m not okay. I don’t feel safe. And here’s what I’m facing…” And for anyone you know who isn’t feeling safe online, I have this page of resources regarding online harassment, defamation & libel. 

And thank you to everyone who has supported me this year – I learned this year just how many people have my back. My gratitude to you knows no bounds.

May you have a safe, prosperous, healthy transition into 2021.

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, for working with online volunteers, 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 – even after home quarantines are over and volunteers start coming back onsite to your workspace. It’s available both as a traditional paperback and as an online book. It’s co-written by myself and Susan Ellis.

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. 

My web site: online for 20 years!

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logoLast week, I celebrated the second anniversary of the publication of The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook, (available for purchase in paperback or as an ebook (PDF) by Energize, Inc.). But there’s another anniversary as well that snuck up on me:

It’s the 20th anniversary of the launch of my own web site. The first version of my web site was uploaded on January 4, 1996.

Wow. 20 years. That’s centuries in terms of the Internet.

I began creating and posting tips on database management for nonprofits and other tech-related suggestions to the soc.org.nonprofit USENET newsgroup back in 1994 (see A Brief Review of the Early History of Nonprofits and the Internet for more about the early days of nonprofits and the Internet). Back then, questions about how to build and manage databases of volunteers, donors, clients and others was probably THE hot topic on any online discussion about nonprofits – not marketing (the other hot topic was, of course, how to raise funds). Two years later, I created my own web site to post my growing materials and favorite links, focusing on how nonprofits were, or could, use computer and Internet technologies. The earliest version of my web site that I can still access is at archive.org, from 1998. Super, duper simple design – like most of the web back then.

The original spirit of the Internet was to freely give information, as well as to take it, to make accessing information oh-so-easy, and to collaborate with anyone, anywhere. I got really caught up in that spirit. I was quite the Info Superhighway cheerleader back then. I still look at the 90s as a golden age, when sending just a few emails could double the amount of people that attended an event, when emailing a reporter or government official meant he or she would call you back, and when web sites downloaded oh-so-quickly. I wanted my web site to be a reflection of that, as well to promote my expertise and services as a new consultant, but back in the 1990s, it was online discussion groups, like USENET newsgroups, that got me jobs and built my professional reputation, not the web.

Why “Coyote” Communications as a name for my web site? Because I am quite partial to canines, and I think the coyote is unique among them, with qualities I greatly admire. Coyotes are amazingly adaptable to ever-changing surroundings – efforts to control or exterminate the coyote and the massive garbage-production of modern humans have produced an animal that is even more alert, opportunistic, and able to survive, even flourish. They are uniquely American creatures, incredibly misunderstood animals, much smaller than most people think, and often blamed for destruction not of their making. Coyotes are surprisingly, sometimes shockingly, intelligent, have the reputation of being “tricksters,” work well in groups, love to play, and have boundless love for their families. At night, to hear the high quavering cry or the short, high-pitched yips of coyotes is the most beautiful song you can hear outdoors. My only regret in choosing the name for my web site is that it is very hard for non-native English speakers to say, let alone spell, and most people abroad don’t know the word.

So, here I am, online for more than 20 years, and celebrating my two-decade-old web site. And this occurs within days of my 50th birthday. Wow. I’ had real champagne, not virtual bubbly, in case you were wondering.

It’s official: my new blog home

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It’s official: this is my new home for my blog. Welcome!

Supposedly, posterous.com will be sending me all of my blog posts in a format such that they can be uploaded here at my new blog home. Time will tell… the blog is not pretty, because I’m still trying to figure out how to edit the template, and I am NOT a web designer.

So, to recap: when I got word in February 2013 that posterous.com is shutting down, I needed a new blog host STAT. The posterous announcement was really horrible news, because it meant I would have to change my blog home for a second time: I used forumer.com for years as my blog host, because it was simple and blogs on the site could be read by people using older operating systems. I was satisfied until my last year on the site, when customer service became non-existent and the site became wretchedly slow. So I switched to posterous.com, on the recommendation of a friend, and when Twitter bought the site, I thought, great, that ensures it’s not going anywhere! I was wrong… I have really loved being on Posterous – I still quite upset that it’s going away.

I loathe blogger.com / blogspot.com – I have a couple of personal blogs there, and I find these platforms extremely hard to use and inflexible in terms of design. I also hate how you have to have the very latest everything (operating system, browser versions, etc.) to access blogs on these sites.

I’m not a techie; I know basic .html, that’s it.

So I asked for recommendations on my Facebook page, my Twitter account and, of course, my posterous blog. It came down to a choice between Tumblr and WordPress. After some research, I went with WordPress because my blog can be hosted on my web site – my wonderful web host, HostGator, makes that unbelievably easy to do!

So, here’s my blogs new home – right on my own web site.

And, again, I second what this blog notes about blogs themselves: Businesses should always invest in a comprehensive website, and then use whatever social networks and other services they can find that will help promote the business and engage other people. Do not depend on any single network, and definitely don’t leave your unique content on someone else’s platform.

Thanks to everyone who offered suggestions! If any of you, as a volunteer, can help me to edit my blog template, give me a shout (I’ll be happy to edit your résumé or cover letter for you, or otherwise offer some pro bono consulting for you in return).

To know when this blog is updated:

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Hire me in 2013 – let me help make your organization even better!

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Blunt headline, I know, but it gets the point across: I’m available as a trainer for your organization or conference, or for short-term consulting, for long-term consulting, and, for the perfect opportunity, full-time employment in 2013!

As a consultant, I specialize in training, advising, capacity-building services and strategy development for not-for-profit organizations (NPOs), non-governmental organizations (NGOs), civil society, grass roots organizations, and public sector agencies, including government offices and educational institutions (altogether, these organizations comprise the mission-based sector).

Capacity-building is always central to any training or consulting work I do. Capacity-building means giving people the skills, information and other resources to most effectively and efficiently address the organization’s mission, and to help the organization be attractive to new and continuing support from donors, volunteers, community leaders and the general public. My training and consulting goal is to build the capacities of employees, consultants and volunteers to successfully engage in communications and community involvement efforts long after I have moved on.

My consulting services are detailed here. I can deliver both onsite and online services. Also, I love to travel (especially internationally!).

In 2013, I would love to create or co-create an entire course as a part-time or full-time instructor at a college university within any program training nonprofit managers, social workers, MBA students, aid and humanitarian workers, etc. I am most interested, and, I think, most qualified, to teach courses relating to:

  • public relations (basic public relations functions, outreach to particular audiences, crisis communications, how to address misinformation / misunderstandings, how to deal with public criticism, etc.)
  • strategic communications (systematic planning and utilization of a variety of information flows, internal and external to an organization or program, to deliver a message and build credibility or a brand)
  • cross-platform media and electronic media (using traditional print, synchronous and asynchronous online / digital communications, and emerging digital technologies effectively, and integrating the use of all information flows)
  • public speaking
  • community engagement (involving community members as volunteers, from program supporters to advisers, and creating ways for the community to see the work of an organization firsthand)

Would I consider giving up the consulting life and working just one job, either as a full-time consultant for a year or a full-time, regular employee? Yes! In that regard, I am looking for opportunities to:

  • manage/direct a program at a nonprofit, university or government agency.

or

  • direct the marketing, public relations or other communications activities for a major project or program at a nonprofit, university or government agency – a corporation that matches my professional values.

I have a profile at LinkedIn, as well as details on my own web site about my professional activities. I’m also happy to share my CV with you; email me with your request. If you have any specific questions about my profile, feel free to contact me as well. References available upon request as well!

Looking forward to hearing from you! Questions welcomed!

PSU Volunteer Management courses have started!

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Erin Barnhart has put together a “Volunteerism and Volunteer Management” course for Portland State University, and I’m thrilled to be teaching one of the modules! I’ll join her and Kathleen Joy of Oregon Volunteers to present a series of intensive classes focused on those who work with volunteers in any capacity – or those that want to.

This comprehensive course will cover topics ranging from core competencies and emerging trends and tools for building and sustaining a successful volunteer program, to understanding the broad-reaching impacts of volunteer service and effective volunteer management, to engaging individuals in innovative and accessible ways to serve in their local neighborhoods, via their computers and smartphones, and in communities across the globe.

Unlike a lot of other volunteer management courses, this course will full integrate online tools into all discussions (not just a module at the end), and will discuss the international volunteering scene.

This course is comprised of four all-day sessions: 9 am – 4:30 pm on four Wednesdays, June 22, 29, July 6 and July 13. It can be taken non-credit or for-credit. If you missed registering for this summer, contact Sharon Hasenjaeger at PSU Institute for Nonprofit Management, (503) 725-8221 or hasenjs@pdx.edu, to express interest in a future course. Grad students register for PA592 CRN 82727 through the PSU website. Noncredit students register thru the INPM office, using this noncredit registration form. Tuition is $495 for non-credit enrollment. Graduate credit is $945 plus $41 fee.

I love teaching. I try to give my workshops a lively, audience-oriented feel. I use case studies to illustrate points, focus on both what’s happening now and what is trending, encourage a lot of student participation, and develop activities that get class participants designing strategies they can use immediately. My goal in any training is to give participants a base on which to further build and improve long after a class is over. My schedule fills up very quickly. Contact me and let me know what kind of training you might have in mind!

 

 

Talking to Reps from NGOs & other orgs from all over the world

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Last week, I had the pleasure of presenting to a “class” of the US Department of State’s International Visitor Leadership Program. This was the third time I’ve presented to such a group since the mid 1990s – and this time, I got to spend more time with them than ever before!

These visitors represent NGOs and government agencies from all over the world, and are invited to the USA by arrangement of the Institute of International Education (IIE). The focus of the visit this year was how different organizations in the USA engage with volunteers, and I joined colleagues here in Portland to do a workshop on using social media to recruit and engage with volunteers (a very shortened version of the webinar for TechSoup, which is still available online). I was joined by Erin Barnhart and Martin Cowling (who just happened to be visiting from Australia!).

As you can see from this photo, I was thrilled to find an Afghan amid the group – Mr. Khir Mohammad Pazhwok of Ghori, the Program Officer with Integrity Watch Afghanistan. He seemed happy to meet someone who has been to his country (he was impressed that I still knew the Dari words for “Right”, “Left,” “Forward,” “Why not?” and “Thank you!”).

I presented to the 2010 group last year, leading an all-to-brief 30-minute panel of Portland agencies to talk about different models of volunteer engagement (long-term, episodic, diversity-focused, etc.). I presented to the group for the first time back in the 1990s in Austin, Texas – another all-too-brief talk about online volunteering (got into some trouble at that one when I started talking about Austin’s famous live music scene, which the group realized their State Department hosts would not be showing to them at all during the visit).

These representatives are highly focused on gathering as much knowledge as possible to take back to their respective countries. And they ask some of the best questions of any group I present to. What I love about presenting to this group is that they are ready to experiment – they do not fear new practices. They also never say what I hear too often by audiences in North America, Europe and even Australia: that’s not how we do things; I’m not sure we can change. If they hear a good idea, they are going to run with it!

I’m ready to do a workshop for YOU. I can also do workshops online. My schedule fills up quickly, so contact me soon with your idea!

What it is like to be a consultant

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A frequently-asked question to me is, “What is it like to be a consultant? How can I be one?”

I’ve offered what advice I can, like about how to telecommute/work from home and how to pursue a career in humanitarian activities, but today, I’ll share a Friday funny that shows what it’s often like from a financial standpoint to be a consultant (thanks to Martin Cowling for the heads up):

Video

Going too far

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A national nonprofit organization asked me to participate in a one-hour conference call this week to help them brainstorm something they want to do. I said sure, because I can make time available to do this, the topic is interesting to me, and I would like to contribute.

That same nonprofit then asked me to participate in a series of calls between now and the summer, contributing more than 20-30 hours of my time to a planning process. I said no. They wanted 20-30 hours free consulting from me, and from about a dozen other people as well, and seemed stunned that I (and at least one other person involved) found this request exploitative.

If I were running a store, would you walk in and say, “Hi, can you give me several hundred dollars of stuff for free?”? If I ran a restaurant, would you say, “Could I eat hear for six months every night for free? After all, we’re friends!”?

When does a request for donated time go from being appropriate, even welcomed, to being exploitive? When the organization forgets what they are asking for — for volunteering. Pro bono consulting is volunteering.

Time is a precious commodity. In today’s economy, asking for a person’s time can be the same as asking for money. If you are going to ask me to part with that much of my time, you had better have a highly-motivating reason for me to do so, because you are asking me to give you something that I normally charge for – and I have bills to pay, a household to support, and many things to pay for, just like you do.

This organization forgot what goes into recruiting volunteers. Which is shocking, since it’s an organization that is supposed to be focused on volunteering. Recruiting volunteers is never, “Here’s a bunch of work we need done. Please come do it. Because we’re a nonprofit.”

I volunteer a lot, with various organizations. How did these organizations recruit me to give so much of my precious time to them? Their recruitment messages focused on:

    • what their organization does, in terms of results for their target audience, and it inspired me or motivated me to get involved.
    • why volunteers are essential to what that organization does, but never in terms like, “We could never have enough money to pay staff to do this, so we involve volunteers” or “volunteers contribute $xxxx in services,” which implies money saved in having to pay people; instead, the messages focus on why volunteers are more appropriate to do the tasks than paid staff, for reasons that have NOTHING to do with money.
    • what the benefits will be for me in volunteering; Will I get to work with a target audience or regarding an issue I care deeply about? Will it be fun? Will I get opportunities that might help me in my professional work? Will I get some kind of incredible discount on something I would love to have?

I don’t wait for some free time to give these organizations; I MAKE time to help them. And these organizations also let me know that they appreciate my work:

  • They send me personalized emails when I finish an assignment, commenting on the work to show me that they actually read it.
  • They send me stuff: a pen, a t-shirt, a trophy.
  • Sometimes, someone writes me just to say “hi.”

In short, they treat me like a precious investor!

I cannot possibly say yes to every organization that wants my donated time. In fact, I say “no” more often than I say “yes,” even to organizations that have a great volunteer recruitment message, because, as I’ve said, I have bills to pay. In fact, even if I win the lottery and can afford to give away all my time for free, I will still have to say “no” often, because there are only 24 hours a day, and I’ll still need time for eating, sleeping, spending time with my family, etc.

Time is precious. Sometimes, if you really want it, you are going to have to pay for it – even if you are a nonprofit.