Tag Archives: internet

Volunteer online with TechSoup

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I’m doing some work with TechSoup, a nonprofit based in San Francisco, and I’m recruiting online volunteers to help in two roles:

Wiki Contributor/Editor – online opportunity
This is in support of a wiki regarding Online Community Engagement. The goal of the wiki is to provide essential information and links related to online community engagement, particularly regarding the cultivation of communities of practice / knowledge networks. Please visit the wiki to learn more. We’re looking for one – three online volunteers ready to help with proofreading (correction of spelling, checking links, etc.) and adding resources. Volunteers should have excellent writing skills, be an expert at finding resources online, and be ready to see a task through to its completion.

Online Community Forum Subject Expert
Offer advice to nonprofits via the TechSoup online community forum regarding software use, database choices, using tech tools to engage and support clients, remote staff and volunteers, FOSS options, accessibility, building staff capacities, community tech center management, IT security – whatever your area of tech expertise! Frequent community forum participants may be invited to become community moderators, committing for at least three months (with possibility of renewal) to ensuring various forum branches have fresh information every week. Volunteers should have excellent writing skills and an understanding of how nonprofits use at least some aspect of computer or Internet tools.

These are virtual opportunities, and it’s not just for two volunteers – multiple volunteers can help in each of these roles.

Want to apply? In addition to the requirements already stated, you should also have a good understanding of how people and organizations communicate online, have excellent, reliable Internet access, commit to at least two hours a week (10 hours a month), and commit to at least three months in this role.

To apply, click on the volunteer role title and express your interest (via VolunteerMatch).

I’m happy to sign off on any paperwork a volunteer might need for a class. And if you want to call it an internship, I’ll be happy to call it such.

So, why have these roles been reserved for volunteers? Why do I want volunteers to help in these tasks?

  • Fresh ideas from volunteers – there’s just nothing like them. They are unfettered ideas. And such ideas are needed!
  • More involvement of volunteers means more opportunities for people and organizations to participate in decision-making – and this can create more ownership by the community TechSoup seeks to serve.
  • It provides opportunities for professional development; many people are looking for activities that will look great on their résumés, or for a university-level class that requires a practicum. This is a way to help a few folks in that quest – just as many of us have been helped along the way.

Here’s more about justifications for involving volunteers – something I think any organization to do before recruiting volunteers.

Share! Spout! Debate! Discuss!

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You’re work or volunteer at nonprofit or an NGO or a government agency – some sort of mission-based organization. Or you want to.

Therefore, you have things to say, or ask, about the Internet, or computers, or smart phones, or any tech that plugs into those. YES, YOU DO!

There are some terrific threads on TechSoup awaiting your comments and questions, like:

GooglePlus – forcing users to use it?

UNV campaign: #actioncounts

Scheduling Volunteers for Therapeutic Riding Center

Library computer system needed for equipment reservations and checkout

Bohemian broadband & fossmaker culture

small nonprofit seeks affordable, reliable automated reminder call service

How to start a computer distribution program for low-income/needy people

Will Facebook kill your web-based online community?

Writing for the web

Which apps would people like?

what video conferencing tools have you really used.

Or start your own thread! You have things to say, to discuss, to share, to whine about when it comes to how you use the Internet, or computers, or smart phones, or any tech that plugs into those. YES, YOU DO!

You can also:

View the TechSoup community by subject matter/branch

View the TechSoup community by latest post

 

Fear of Wrestling

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You probably won’t hear any well-known social media guru talking about it, you probably won’t hear about it in any social media workshop (except mine, of course), but do you know who is getting the MOST out of social media when it comes to community engagement?

Wrestlers.

Check out 110 Trending Topics in 5 Hours: How WWE Wrestlemania Body-Slammed Social Media:

Behind strong pushes on Twitter and YouTube, WWE Wrestlemania XXVIII laid the smack down on social media last weekend, teaching a digital engagement lesson to the sports entertainment world.

Heck, Wrestlemania taught a digital engagement lesson to the nonprofit world, to ANY world, if those sectors will listen. Also see: How the WWE Is Making WrestleMania More Social Than Ever.

But will you click on those links? Or are you already lifting up your nose at the mere mention of the word wrestling?

Professional wrestling – or, as my people like to call it, rasslin’ – is unbelievably popular world wide. I’ve been stunned at how many wrestling shirts I’ve seen all over the world, including in Kabul, Afghanistan. In Kabul, there are (or, at least, in 2007, there were) gyms in the city that had the images of wrestlers from Wrestlemania in front of their businesses to draw people in (don’t sue, Wrestlemania, just don’t). I couldn’t understand why USAID wasn’t employing stars from Wrestlemania to create public service announcements for Afghans about whatever it is we’re trying to get Afghans to do (support women in microenterprises, support girls going to school, grow wheat instead of poppies, drive on the right side of the road, employ proper water sanitation practices, etc.). I’m totally serious, USAID!

But we cringe at the thought of… sniff… wrestlers being involved in anything noble or high-minded or community-focused like that.

I worked with People Magazine once upon a time to do a pilot online mentoring program with kids in Washington, D.C. – and the People folks wanted celebrities to be the online mentors. At a classroom we visited in the basement of a school (where it was easily over 100 degrees on that stifling hot day), there were probably five kids wearing Wrestlemania t-shirts. I talked to the kids while the rest of our visiting party stood across the room, as far away from the students as possible, and when I asked the students what kind of celebrities they admired, they didn’t name rap stars – they named wrestlers. I was thinking, hey great, we’re getting wrestlers for these kids as online mentors! Later that afternoon, in our followup planning meeting in an air-conditioned room of a then dominant Internet provider in Virginia, a room so cold I needed a sweater, People Magazine staff balked at the idea of wrestlers. They said they were thinking of celebrities such as Martha Stewart and Charleton Heston as possible mentors for these teens. I kid you not – that’s the two people they named in that meeting as examples of proper online mentors for inner-city teens.

It’s worth noting that the first virtual volunteering by a celebrity I have been able to find has been by…  A RETIRED WRESTLER. Mick Foley is a an online volunteer with RAINN (Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network), the largest anti-sexual assault organization in the USA. He talked about his experience as an online volunteer on a November 2010 episode of The Daily Show with John Stewart. In a RAINN web video, Foley says, “I cannot think of a better way to spend a few hours a week than helping someone who needs RAINN’s services.” Learn more about volunteering for RAINN’s Online Hotline.

(Yes, I just burned a bridge with People Magazine. So much for my bid to be one of their most beautiful people. Ah, well.)

Let’s be clear: I actually don’t watch wrestling. Well, now, anyway – when I was 8, I loved watching Bill “Superstar” Dundee on TV. I also loved roller derby in those days. But, indeed, I have moved on. I could not name a modern-day wrestler. I’m not as hip as you might think.

But I haven’t become too sophisticated to say, way to go, Wrestlemania. I’ll happily learn from Wrestlemania and wrestlers when it comes to virtual volunteering, online mentoring, and online community engagement, I’d love to invite your participation in any community engagement activity I’m a part of, and I’ll even use examples of your online activities in my workshops – even while other social media experts and nonprofit management trainers rolls their eyes and cringe.

But I still might call it rasslin’.

Consulting services by Jayne Cravens.

 

Excuses, excuses

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Here’s a conversation I had this week as a member of a certain city’s citizen’s committee regarding bicyclists and pedestrians:

Me: “I’d like for this link to the state agency name redacted web site to added to this web page on the city’s site. I’ve sent two emails requesting it, but no one has responded.”

City representative: “We don’t have money in the budget to do that.”

Me: “You don’t have the money to add a link to a web page?!?”

City Rep: “Actually, it’s because the decision makers need to review that change first.”

Me: “Okay, who are the ‘decision makers’?”

City Rep: “Oh, we don’t have a policy yet on how those decisions will be made.”

THIS IS WHY I DON’T BELIEVE IN CONSPIRACY THEORIES INVOLVING THE GOVERNMENT.

This is also a perfect illustration of the change of mentality that’s needed for effective online communications. Using web pages and social media has nothing to do with budgets or policies – it has to do with mindsets.

Fear-based management – it’s a customer service KILLER.

Benefitting from Internet Use Requires a Change in Mindset

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Ever since reading the Cluetrain Manefesto back in the 1990s, I’ve known that embracing the Internet as an interactive tool – not an online brochure or a press release distribution system – takes a changed mindset. Same for online volunteering – the key to success is a changed mindset that thinks about volunteers very differently than free labor that comes in, does things no one else wants to do and leaves.

On that note is this excellent blog about “strategic digital communication” – it’s tips are of value for all nonprofits, NGOs, government agencies and other community-focused organization, not just arts organizations.

So if you think you might be ready to re-build your website, stop. Think about digitally engaging your constituents instead. And if you’ve hired a website redesign shop or a technology shop, put them on hold: you need to work with a digital communications firm instead.

Or, if not a digital communications firm – which many of the nonprofits I work with could never possibly afford – start bringing together volunteers and clients and asking them how they use the Internet for fun, for their work, and regarding subjects that are essential to them. And thinking about what activities online outreach should inspire/launch/grow.

The Internet hasn’t changed. Not really.

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The Internet hasn’t changed much since its invention more than 30 years ago. Not really.

Oh, fine, wave your arms and jump up and down and say, “No! No! It’s now interactive. It’s now social. Now people crowdsource problems.” It’s cute when you do that.

But the Internet has always been interactive. It’s always been social. And it’s always been about crowdsourcing. It’s why I fell in love with it, via USENET newsgroups, back in the 1990s.

What has changed about the Internet over the last 30 years? It has a lot more graphical interafaces, and there are many, many more people are using it. That’s it.

Consider the Cluetrain Manifesto, published in 1999 and which immediately became my guide for thinking about the Internet: the authors asserted back then that the Internet is unlike traditional media used in mass marketing / one-to-many marketing, and transforms business practices radically:

A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed.

Even the Atlantic Monthly believes the Internet hasn’t changed much in 15 years. It spotlighted a high-school handout from 1996 explaining the advantages and disadvantages of using the newfangled Internet everybody was talking about – and it sounds exactly like what people say today.

I started using the Internet in 1994, when a colleague printed out Munn Heydorn’s guide to nonprofit organizations on the Internet. Even in 1994, it was a document of many, many pages. She suggested I explore some of the resources recommended, as she was too busy to do such (and was only interested in emailing her college friends). Somehow, soc.org.nonprofit jumped out at me most in that long list of resources, and I joined as soon as I could figure out how to do so. The World Wide Web seemed so boring to me then — it was just online brochures — whereas USENET was interactive, and its newsgroups felt like communities. As email groups via ListServ and Majordomo proliferated, and then along with YahooGroups, nonprofits on the Internet flourished.

Sure, there were nonprofits then – and for-profit businesses, for that matter – who used their new web site as an online brochure, and email as one-way communication with customers and constituents. In fact, there are a lot of companies still doing this. But these have never been the norm when it comes to Internet use.

So let’s stop talking about the Internet as something new and, instead, start looking to what’s worked, and what hasn’t, over the many years. There are some fantastic case studies from the 1990s – even the 1980s – about virtual volunteering, online mentoring, crowd-sourcing and microvolunteering via newsgroups, and so much more – that are still relevant today. Mistakes that were made in those early days of networking 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!

Also see The Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted.

Who IS that person in charge of your social media?

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There is a large international organization I follow on Facebook and Twitter, and I’m sorry to say that its been making major missteps via these social media tools.

In the last four weeks, whomever is in charge of social media at this organization has posted a message that, in my opinion, was completely inappropriate and put the organization in a very bad light, as well as repeatedly posting inaccurate information relating to the mission of this organization and not responding to most online questions and criticisms. But no one seems to be noticing at the organization – the mistakes keep happening, and when I made inquiries to two people who work for the organization, they had no idea what was going on online (in fact, they weren’t sure who was in charge of social media activities). 

It’s painfully obvious that there is no strategy regarding this organization’s use of social media. Perhaps the job has been handed over to an intern or two – after all, if you are in your 20s, you are just automatically an online social media expert, right? It’s also obvious that no one in senior management is following the accounts regularly – because if they were, these very public missteps wouldn’t have gone on this long.

It brings to mind a long, long time ago, way back in the 1990, when a lot of marketing directors at nonprofit organizations handed over web site development and management to the person in charge of IT – the person who kept the computers running. These marketing managers saw the Web as technology, rather than as outreach. Web sites for these organizations often were packed with flashy web features, but light on information, and answers to basic questions that someone goes to a web site for – where the organization is located, the nearest free parking, the nearest mass transit stop, hours of operation, upcoming event information, how to volunteer, etc. – were oh-so-hard to find. Many marketing directors were oblivious to the web site’s shortcomings – they never looked at the site beyond a unveiling of such (at which pizza and soda was served in the break room and a good time had by all).

Back in 90s, I worked at an organization where I was the internal communications manager – but ended up in charge of all Internet outreach. The marketing director (to whom I did not report) thought the Internet was a fad and said he wasn’t interested in it, so I was in charge of building the organization’s web site, and in undertaking all online outreach via email and online discussion groups. He never had any idea what I was doing, and was never interested in sitting down and learning. After several months, he realized his mistake, as what was happening online was being talked about by people and organizations we were trying tor reach much more than our print materials.

I said it back in the 1990s, I’ll say it again now: everyone has a role in an organization’s outreach, online and offline. The receptionist needs to see the organization’s main brochure before it goes to print, or the web site before it’s launched – she or he knows the primary reasons why people call the organization, and she or he can make sure these publications include this information. The people that deliver the organization’s programs or interact most with the public, as well as senior managers, including the head of marketing, need to follow the organization’s social media profiles, and their feedback about such needs to be listened to. Everyone at the organization needs to have copies of print publications and, if they have a comment about the usability of an online tool or how the public is responding to the organization online, senior management needs to listen to them.

Just as importantly, your organization needs a fully integrated social media strategy, a plan that puts a reason behind every Facebook status update and every Tweet, one that answers the questions What are we going to accomplish today with our social media use? What are we going to accomplish this week with our social media use? Three months from now, how are we going to measure social media success? Does the head of marketing have a written outreach plan, and are online tools fully-integrated into such – not just mentioned? Does the head of programming have a fully-integrated plan for using online tools, including social media, in his or her written strategy for the coming year?

And, finally, make sure whomever is posting those messages to Facebook or Twitter or GooglePlus or whatever on your organization’s behalf is fully supervised. That person needs to be sitting in on every marketing meeting and every public event. That person needs to be presenting a briefing on what’s happened in the last week – and not just number of tweets, number of Facebook status updates, number of “likes”, number of “friends”, etc., because numbers really mean nothing. And senior management needs to be following what this person is doing online in real time.

Delegating social media tasks doesn’t mean senior management stops participating online. Too many nonprofit organizations, international aid agencies and other mission-based organizations forget that.

CNN Recognizes Virtual Volunteering; Do You?

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Virtual volunteering in all its forms – long-term service, online mentoring, online microvolunteering, crowdsourcing, etc. – has been around for more than 30 years, as long as the Internet has been around, and there are several thousand organizations that have been engaging with online volunteers since at least the late 1990s. While directing the Virtual Volunteering Project, I gave up trying to track every organization involving online volunteers in 1999, because there were just too many!

Virtual volunteering – people donating their time and expertise via a computer or smart phone to nonprofit causes and programs – has been talked about in major media, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, the Associated Press, Deutche Welle, the BBC, even the Daily Show, for more than 15 years (I know because I’ve been quoted in a lot of those stories!).

But virtual volunteering has remained thought of as a fringe movement, or something brand new, by many, despite it being so well-established. Virtual volunteering still isn’t included in national volunteerism reports by any national or international body, such as the Points of Light Foundation, the Corporation for National Service or the Pew Research Center, Volunteering England, or Volunteer Australia.

Perhaps the last holdouts regarding virtual volunteering will finally give in and accept it as mainstream, now that an online mentoring program representative has been nominated as a CNN Hero.

I was introduced to Infinite Family in 2010, and was immediately impressed with its commitment to the fundamentals of a successful online mentoring program in its administration of the program, including the importance it places on site manager-involvement in its program. This is an online mentoring program absolutely committed to quality, to the children its been set up to support, and its online volunteer screening process is no cake walk – as it should be, as the children it supports deserve nothing less! Mentoring cannot be done whenever you might have some time, in between flights at an airport: it takes real time and real commitment, even when its online. Infinite Family gets that.

While all of the CNN Hero projects are worthy of attention and support, I am throwing my support to Infinite Family as the top CNN Hero for 2011.

If you want to volunteer online, here is a long list of where to find virtual volunteering opportunities, including long-term service, online mentoring, online microvolunteering, and crowdsourcing.

Also see the archived Virtual Volunteering Project web site, and resources on my web site regarding volunteer engagement and support.

Using the Internet to recognize volunteers?

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I got quite a lot of traffic on a page on my web site re: using the Internet to recognize volunteers because it was highlighted in a Tweet by VolunteerMatch. Which is great… but the page is outdated. It needs an update.

Are you a nonprofit or NGO or government community program and, if so, how do you use the Internet – your web site, your blog, your Twitter feed, your Facebook page, your Flickr account, whatever – to recognize the contributions of your volunteers? Or any Internet or smart phone tool to do so?

Are you a volunteer and, if so, how has a program or organization you have helped used the Internet to honor your contributions? How aren’t they doing so that you wish they were?

Links to specific examples would be swell. Post your ideas in the comments or over on this TechSoup forum thread and let’s share!

Here’s an example I just found that I thought was fab: The Hayden Planetarium lists its employees and volunteers altogether on one page – in alphabetical order, instead of segregated by who’s paid & who’s not (first employees, then the volunteers, the unpaid staff). That’s a very interesting approach to volunteer recognition, don’t you think?