Tag Archives: nonprofits

Anger motivates volunteers as much as sympathy

For years, during my workshops on volunteer engagement, I have half-jokingly said I have never volunteered out of the goodness of my heart or to be nice – because I’m not at all a nice person – and have, instead, volunteered because I’m angry about something. I have used this as a way to introduce audiences to the plethora of motivations of volunteers, to help them create better recruitment and engagement schemes.

Now, I have some science to back me up!

Someone sent me this link today: “Anger motivates volunteers as much as sympathy.”  The authors of the study are Dr. Robert Bringle and his students Ashley Hedgepath and Elizabeth Wall at Appalachian State University.  

And it’s not the first study that’s said this: Ilana Silber published “The angry gift: A neglected facet of philanthropy” in 2012. 

It’s a mistake to think that all volunteers are motivated only by kindness or selflessness. There are all sorts of motivations for volunteering. People volunteer because they:

  • like the idea of being associated with the particular organization or activity
  • want experience to put on job applications
  • want to meet people, as friends or for their social or business connections
  • think the activity looks fun
  • like the people that have invited them to volunteer, or like the people volunteering
  • are curious
  • are bored

and, yes, because they are angry about something – about how many discarded pets are at shelters or women’s lack of access to reproductive health information or domestic violence or barriers to girls in STEM-related careers or the condition of the environment and on and on.

And all of these are GREAT reasons for volunteering. Do you welcome all of these volunteers at your organization?

Also see:

Making certain volunteers feel unwelcomed because of your language

Do you welcome people with your language?

Screening Volunteers for Attitude

Mission statements for your volunteer engagement

Welcoming immigrants as volunteers at your organization

greater good – online

I’ve become fascinated with The Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley, a research center devoted to the scientific understanding of individual happiness, compassion, strong social bonding, and altruistic behavior.

Some of their research involves online activities, and they frequently link to studies by others:

whether or not technology makes us lonely — Highlighting three studies that “paint a surprisingly complicated picture of the role of mobile devices in our social lives—and suggest steps we can take to make the most of technology.”

Are Some Social Ties Better Than Others? — Compares online networks with offline social networks, professional friends and others, linking to research to make its point.

How Your Teen Can Thrive Online — Compares two new books look at how the Internet is affecting teens—and what adults can do to help foster a healthy online life for kids.

Can Science Make Facebook More Compassionate? — Facebook is confronting cyberbullying and online conflict. Can a team of researchers help boost kindness among the site’s 900 million users?

Three Ways to Find Happiness on Facebook — According to some interesting research, social media arguably can make us feel more connected and less lonely.

They also link to research about volunteering.

Wouldn’t it be awesome if they would have a look at The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook, and start doing research on virtual volunteering?

Oh, and look, they involve volunteers! I wonder if any are online volunteers…

Penn Social Impact Doctoral Fellows Program

The University of Pennsylvania’s Nonprofit Leadership (NPL) Program invites doctoral student researchers to apply for the 2014 Penn Social Impact Doctoral Fellows Program.

Facilitated by Peter Frumkin, Director of the NPL Program, the program will explore emerging issues in the world of nonprofit organizations, voluntary action, philanthropy and international civil society. The program is June 7 – July 1, 2014 at The University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Students are expected to submit a draft research paper that they would like to refine and prepare for publication during the program. Housing near the Penn campus and $3,000 stipends are provided to all 2014 Summer Fellows.

Eligibility: Graduate students currently enrolled in PhD programs at degree-granting institutions

Submission deadline: Friday, March 14, 2014

Submission requirements: A resume, draft research paper (unpublished) on a topic related to the nonprofit sector, and an abstract. Send to Leeamy1@sp2.upenn.edu by March 14, 2014.

Unions & Nonprofits: Commentary from the Nonprofit Quarterly

Should nonprofit workers unionize? Will more and more nonprofit employees unionize?

Todd Cohen of the Nonprofit Quarterly notes in this editorial:

In 2010, the employees of the nonprofit Larkin Street Youth Services, a homeless-services nonprofit, tried to organize a union, but failed. This year, they tried again, looking for a union affiliation to help them deal with issues such as understaffing, increased workloads, and cuts in their benefits. The vote count in the union election was overwhelmingly in favor of joining SEIU 1021. In San Francisco, unionized nonprofits include La Clínica de La Raza, the Exploratorium, and others that one wouldn’t necessarily think of as in the unionized university/hospital nonprofit class. Writing for the East Bay Express, Corey Hill says that the San Francisco Bay Area has the third highest number of unionized nonprofits, behind only New York City and the District of Columbia.

What isn’t here in this editorial is the word volunteer – specifically, what are the consequences of unionization on volunteer engagement? Unions have stated opposition to volunteer firefighters and pushed back over school employees being replaced by volunteers. They are angry (and rightly so) that volunteer engagement is so often used to replace paid workers.

I’ve already whined that organizations need to create a mission (and a mission statement) for volunteer (unpaid staff) involvement and live it, stating explicitly why your organization reserves certain tasks / assignments / roles for volunteers (unpaid staff, including unpaid interns), to guide employees and volunteers in how they think about volunteers, to guide current volunteers in thinking about their role and value at the organization, to show potential volunteers the kind of culture they can expect at your organization regarding volunteers, and to prevent lawsuits from interns. Another reason to create such a mission statement: so that no union members (or any employees, for that matter) can say the organization involves volunteers to replace paid staff.

That said: nonprofit employees deserve competitive wages, health care coverage, disability insurance, a decent amount of vacation time (three weeks at least!), and other benefits. And they shouldn’t have to unionize to get that.

My previous blogs on this subject:

Wiki re: virtual volunteering in Europe

In the course of researching and writing about Internet-mediated volunteering (virtual volunteering, online volunteering, microvolunteering, online mentoring, etc.) in European Union (EU) countries, I created a wiki to serve as a publicly-shared knowledge base for resources used to inform this project, resources that could inform future research projects related to the subject matter, and to invite further submissions of relevant information from any wiki visitor. The ICT4EMPLOY wiki includes:

  • More about the overall project & researchers
  • The information we are seeking / How to submit information
  • Online Volunteering-related recruitment or matching web sites
  • Organisations that involve online volunteers in the EU
  • Resources related to volunteering as a contributor to employability
  • Resources related to arguments against and concerns about volunteering by unions/professionals in Europe
  • Resources and research related to Internet-mediated volunteering (focused on, but not limited to, Europe)
  • Resources related to telecommuting, virtual teams and remote management
  • Legal status and regulations regarding volunteers
  • Resources related to volunteer engagement and volunteerism in EU countries statistics, studies, volunteer centres, volunteer matching sites, sites for volunteers, sites for those that want to involve volunteers, etc.
  • RSS feeds for keywords associated with Internet-mediated volunteering
  • Información en español
  • Informations en français
  • Informationen in Deutsch

I’ll update it as long as I’m working on the research.

Crowdsourcing & Microvolunteering: still not new, still takes a lot of work

Egads, another breathless story about crowdsourcing, one that says it’s new (it’s not) and that it’s all about doing work that nonprofits don’t have paid employees to do. Argh!

I’m not against crowdsourcing or microvolunteering or whatever we’re calling it these days. As I’ve said for many years, these can be very effective forms of virtual volunteering – perhaps not so much in getting critical work done for an organization, but, rather, for getting more people engaged with an organization such that they might be moved to volunteer more, in more substantial ways, to give a financial gift, and to tell their friends about their positive experience with the nonprofit.

My beef with the crowdsourcing bandwagon is three-fold:

  1. It’s not a new practice. Not at all. It’s the oldest forms of virtual volunteering, a practice that’s been around for more than 30 years. USENET newsgroup were my favorite place to find and post crowdsource opportunities for nonprofits and causes I supported back in the mid-1990s.
  2. Creating crowdsourcing opportunities, or microvolunteering tasks, or microtasks, or whatever we want to call them for volunteers (I called them “byte-sized” opportunities back in the 1990s – the name didn’t catch on), takes a LOT of work:
      • You (the nonprofit) have to create meaningful assignments that can be done in just a few seconds or minutes by dozens, even hundreds, of people – not just busy work that isn’t really going to have any value to the organization nor to the volunteer. As anyone that works at a nonprofit knows, that’s easier said than done!
      • You have to come up with some way to track what volunteers are contributing to the project, so you can review what’s been submitted in a timely manner and leverage such, as well as so volunteers can be thanked and further encouraged to engage with the organization.
      • You have to come up with some way to measure the impact of the project, beyond number of volunteers that participated, if you want to justify spending the time and resources to engage in this form of virtual volunteering.

    For instance, say you want volunteers to tag photos on Flickr: someone from the organization has to upload the photos, has to create written guidelines for how the photos are to be tagged in an easy-to-understand way, has to look over how volunteers are tagging the photos to make sure such is being done appropriately (and to delete those tags which aren’t appropriate), and has to track all of the volunteers that contributed so they can be thanked and invited to participate in something else, or to otherwise support the organization. The vast majority of nonprofits I know of do NOT have the resources to do that!

  3. Crowdsourcing often DOESN’T work. Nonprofits tend not to blog about failures. Yet, I hear from them after workshops frequently, telling me how their attempts to engage people in microvolunteering has failed: few people submitted logo ideas, or voted in the contest that might help them get funding, or provided advice on that tech question the nonprofit had. Those breathless media stories convinced them that hundreds, even thousands, would turn out online to help – and few, if any, actually did.

I created several crowdsourcing opportunities when I directed the Virtual Volunteering Project. One of my favorites was asking people to come up with tag lines for virtual volunteering itself – anyone could email in a slogan idea, and dozens of people did (that’s right – WE came up with “volunteer in your pajamas” – or pyjamas – YEARS before anyone else did!). But I didn’t do it because I really needed help getting a tag line; rather, I did it to get lots of people excited about the Virtual Volunteering Project, to get as many people involved in an online activity as I could on the project’s behalf, in order to encourage more people to work on more substantial activities with us and other organizations as online volunteers, and to get more people talking about virtual volunteering. And make no mistake: it took a lot of work on my part to make this successful: I had to think about where and how I was going to communicate the campaign, what the wording of the message would be, and how I would track and respond to submissions. It didn’t take tons of time – but it did take time, at least a few hours.

A misconception about microvolunteering — and, indeed, about all volunteering, not just virtual volunteering — is that the goal is to get work done, or to get work done for free. These are old paradigms regarding volunteering that so many of us have worked for a very long time to move away from. Volunteering is about so much more: it’s about building relationships with the community, increasing the number of people advocating for your organization and even supporting it financially, demonstrating transparency, and even targeting specific demographics for involvement in your work.

So, by all means, yes, let’s get excited about crowdsourcing, microvolunteering, and all other forms of virtual volunteering. Let’s keep talking about it. But let’s also stay realistic: it takes a LOT of time and expertise on the part of the nonprofit or other mission-based organization to create successful crowdsourcing opportunities. Let’s do a better job of detailing what it takes to create these type of opportunities, so organizations really can leverage crowdsourcing – rather than breaking hearts.

Also see:

It’s official: my new blog home

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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What do NGOs understand that USA nonprofits don’t?

Last week, I got to be a part of the program for a group visiting Portland through the US State Department’s International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP). It was the fourth time I’ve gotten to be a part of the program over the years – the first time was in Austin, Texas, back in the 1990s. This time, visitors were from Egypt, Afghanistan, Liberia, Tunisia, Latvia, Greece, Mexico, El Salvador, Morocco, South Africa, Cameroon, the Philippines, Ethiopia, and more.

Talking with leaders of NGOs from all over the world is incredibly energizing – for me, it feels like coming home. Many are stunned that I’ve been to their countries – or that I even know where their countries are, what language they speak there, etc., in contrast to so many people in the USA. I’m sorry to sound the snob, but my fellow citizens are notorious worldwide for our ignorance about the rest of the planet, and not even having a passport, and I’m proud to be in contrast to that stereotype.

(just last week, I had to explain to a very close friend what the European Union was – she’s a very intelligent person, but if none of the news outlets ever mention the EU, how would she know what it is?).

This time with the IVLP, I was part of a small group of members from the Northwest Oregon Volunteer Administrators Association (NOVAA); instead of a traditional workshop, we divided up and each spent time with three people, for 20 minutes, talking about volunteer engagement, and would switch to a new group every 20 minutes. It allowed me to get one-on-one time with more than half the NGO representatives, and that’s always delightful. Many of the problems they face regarding volunteer engagement are the same as anywhere: trouble mainitaining volunteer motivation, volunteers not finishing assignments, too many volunteers one day and not enough another, etc. I hope they found my references helpful – hard to address everything in just 20 minutes!

One moment for me that I particularly loved: how integral social media is for many of these NGOs in working with volunteers. I loved hearing about all the ways they recruit, interact with and support volunteers using various social media tools, reaching volunteers via their phones as much, if not more, than via their computers – all said that, for the most part, email is dead for their young volunteers (people under 40) altogether. These NGOs haven’t needed workshops or conferences to convince them these tools are valuable; they’ve seen their value immediately. When I told them just how many nonprofits here in the USA refuse to use Facebook, Twitter, or other social media tools to work with volunteers, about how, if nonprofits here do decide to use such, they often give social media responsibilities to interns and senior management stays away from such, and how often I’ve had hostile reactions to the tech practices that these NGOs, by contrast, have fully embraced, they were floored. And they laughed. A lot. And when I told them that, in Oregon, in the supposedly oh-so-tech-savvy Portland area, I have had women younger than me say, “Oh, I don’t have email, so send that to my husband’s/daughter’s address, and he/she will print it out for me to read,” their jaws dropped.

True, many of these NGOs aren’t recruiting ethnic minorities, religious minorities and other marginalized groups as volunteers in their countries – and don’t see why they should have to make volunteering more accessible to such. They don’t see who they might be leaving out as volunteers by totally abandoning offline recruitment and support methods. In short, their volunteer engagement is not perfect and needs to further modernized, especially in terms of being inclusive – but what they are doing in terms of leveraging networked technologies in recruiting, involving and supporting volunteers is far, far ahead of what most nonprofits are doing in the USA. And all I can say is: WELL DONE. And keep teaching me!

Another big emphasis for these NGOs in particular is involving young people as volunteers – young people who are unemployed or under-employed, people under 40 with some education but who cannot find jobs. These NGOs see volunteer engagement with young people as a way not only to build the skills of those young people so that they can get jobs – or even start their own businesses – but also to give these young people a sense of civic responsibility and community connection beyond protesting in the streets. I was happy to help address some of these ideas in my very limited conversations, and welcomed their online inquiries so I can send them to further resources.

And, finally, I apologize to the guys from West Africa who were offended I hadn’t been to any of their countries yet (I’m trying!), and if the guy from the Philippines does not send me the photo he took of myself and the guy from Afghanistan wearing the cowboy that he bought in Texas, with both of us making the “hook ’em horns” sign, I will be DEVASTATED.

POSTSCRIPT: Not devastated.

For more information about my training.

Also see:

Nonprofits *are* job creators!

Recently, I heard a man on the TV ranting about why people without private sector experience are bad to serve in government offices. “They’ve never balanced a budget, created a job or had to struggle to make payroll!” he said.

And my head exploded. KAPOW.

When you are working in government, or a nonprofit, balancing budgets and struggling to make payroll is often MOST of what you do!

In the nonprofit and public sectors, the pressure to balance a budget – one that has often been cut drastically with no input from you, the person expected to balance that budget – is far greater than the for-profit/business world. And the struggle to make payroll is something I’ve seen far too often in nonprofit organizations, often because a corporation has slashed its own budgets and cut funding to the organization or initiative that had been promised for months, or a government agency suddenly had its budget cut and, therefore, had to cut the budget of nonprofits it was supporting.

And nonprofit organizations are job creators. Funding nonprofits, which are focused on improving or preserving communities for EVERYONE, are not only job creators, but also, the people that make communities places where people actually want to live and work – which helps those that start businesses. Nonprofits:

  • help improve education (which creates better workers),
  • help preserve and improve environmental health (which helps organic farmers and fishermen have better products)
  • help improve children’s health (which allows parents to have the time to work instead of caring for sick children – time, perhaps, even to start businesses)
  • help promote bicycle use (which helps create more business for bicycle shops, creates more ways for workers to get to their jobs, contributes to a healthier workforce, and creates more parking spaces for cars)
  • build and promote community gardens (which helps those that sell gardening implements and other supplies)
  • fund and manager arts organizations (which create jobs for actors, production staff and administration staff, as well as enhancing the community and making it more attractive to employers to locate businesses there)
  • build, sustain and grow universities and colleges (which train people in various areas of expertise – and these people become workers, even job creators, themselves)

and on and on.

The amount of misinformation being promoted by so many pundits and even elected officials in the USA regarding the realities of the third sector is startling, disheartening and destructive. I have worked primarily in the nonprofit and government sectors, and in those sectors, I most certainly HAVE had to balance budgets, create jobs and struggle to make payroll. In fact, I have had to be far, far more creative with resources and efficient in the use of time and resources than I have ever had to be in a for-profit setting. By contrast, most people I’ve known who have worked primarily in the corporate sector have little understanding of how to do a lot with a limited amount of resources: they can’t believe most nonprofits don’t have fully staff IT departments or the latest computer technologies, and are stunned that volunteers are, in fact, not free at all.

Nonprofits and government agencies have GOT to do a better job of talking about what they accomplish, what it takes to make those accomplishments possible, and how they make those accomplishments happen. Every nonprofit has an obligation to show their transparency and credibility, and to teach the media and general public about the resources and expertise needed to address critical human and environmental needs. The Internet has made it oh-so-easy to do that!

Also see:

volunteering in the digital age – cool, but not new

The timeless act of volunteering in the service of others has taken on new dimensions in today’s digital age. Anyone with an Internet connection or a mobile phone can make a difference.
– United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon
5 December 2012, International Volunteer Day for Economic and Social Development Day

“New” is, of course, relative…

In 2001, I wrote about how people were using handheld technologies in community service, environmental and activist work, citing examples that went back to the 1990s (when we called them “PDAs” instead of “smart”). And, of course, the practice of virtual volunteering is more than 30 years old – as old as the Internet, and starting long before there was a World Wide Web (in fact, Tim Berners-Lee said in an October 2001 event with UN Volunteers that online volunteers played an essential role in his development of the Web).

But I’m glad, nonetheless, to see the head of the UN acknowledging virtual volunteering. His predecessor, Kofi Annan, certainly knew it was a force to be acknowledged and supported. Hope that recognition and promotion of volunteering, online or off, onsite or remotely, continues!

Volunteering in the digital age – it’s not new, but it’s most definitely cool, and worth continuing to talk about.

Also see:

Myths About Online Volunteering (Virtual Volunteering)

Micro-Volunteering and Crowd-Sourcing: Not-So-New Trends in Virtual Volunteering/Online Volunteering

Make All Volunteering as Accessible as Possible

Recognizing Online Volunteers & Using the Internet to Honor ALL Volunteers