It’s December 2011. Here’s what I will be taking with me into 2012:

• The Second Mile/Penn State/Jerry Sandusky scandal. This was more than the case of one pedophile; this was a colossal management and policy failure by a nonprofit organization and a university. Will you use this as a starting point for an open, honest discussion and review at YOUR organization? The case reminded me that I need to keep asking questions that make nonprofits uncomfortable regarding how they screen and supervise volunteers.
• Virtual Volunteering is accepted as mainstream, as this recognition by CNN this year confirms. So, no more calling it “new.” That includes microvolunteering, which was identified and called byte-sized volunteering as early as 1997.
• There is no excuse whatsoever, no matter how awesome the work that is done, no matter how large the task at hand, for a nonprofit organization, a non-government organization, a government agency or an international agency to not be vigilant about measuring its results and reporting on what it is doing, because, as the  Three Cups of Tea Fallout showed, the consequences hurt ALL mission-based organizations.
• Too many agencies, governments and even charities themselves remain obsessed with valuing volunteers based on the hourly wages they aren’t paying them. One of the most popular blogs I wrote in 2011 was regarding the huge misstep by the United Nations Volunteers programme, IFRC, ILO & John Hopkins University make HUGE misstep this year regarding how to assign value to volunteers. Those that use this method – assigning a monetary value to the hourly work by volunteers – create problems like this with the USA’s union of professional firefighters. Or this with the unionized school employees in Petaluma, California. In addition, judging volunteers by their number of hours remains a bad idea as well, and it’s important to keep showing why.
• Corporate folks really do NOT always know best when it comes to nonprofit and volunteering initiatives, as a certain stupid name for this new online volunteering service for nonprofits demonstrates – and as does the organizers’ continual denial that the name is offensive.
• For-profit companies that try to pass off watching videos as community service do NOT like it when their activities are brought to light online and in the press by me, as oh-so-many nasty comments submitted to this blog – courts being fooled by online community service scams – demonstrate. I stopped posting the comments because they attacked me for things I never said regarding this company, and because they were sinking to the level of this, received today: Haha fuck you, bitch. Stay classy, guys.
  
• Volunteer managers really do have a sense of humor: two of my most popular blogs this year were How to get rid of volunteers and Volunteer Manager Fight Club.
• Twitter rocks. I’ve added hundreds of new followers in 2011, but much more importantly, I have learned things I never would have otherwise, met people at agencies I’ve long had my eye on, and gotten the word out about my own resources and activities to people and organizations that actually read and respond to such. Facebook was making me lose hope for the Internet as a meaningful way to meet people and exchange ideas; Twitter has restored that hope.
• The world economy is still bad. Most of the jobs I had in 2011 were budgeted by my clients in 2009 or 2010. I’m not sure anything has been budgeted in 2011 to work with consultants – or hire new employees – for 2012, based on how my calendar is looking. One government program got eliminated entirely just before I started work! Even if the recovering starts in 2011, we will be feeling the consequences from these bad years for quite a while.

What did you learn in 2011? What are you going to do in 2012 regarding nonprofits, charities, humanitarian efforts, community capacity-building and/or volunteers?