Tag Archives: online volunteers

EU Aid Volunteers will include virtual volunteering

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It’s official! In February 2014, members of the European Parliament, by a margin of 600 to 30, endorsed the European Union Aid Volunteers (EUAV) initiative that will facilitate more than 18,000 EU citizens, NGO employees and third country nationals over 18 to take part in humanitarian work worldwide in the next seven years.

This article, New EU aid volunteers program to make a ‘concrete, positive difference, notes that, “from 2014-2020, the European Commission expects to facilitate the deployment of more than 3,950 EU citizens to disaster-affected countries. An additional 1,990 humanitarian apprenticeships will be offered within the European Union, and some 10,000 home-based ‘online volunteers’ will be responsible for tasks ranging from graphic design and translation to providing advice and support. It is also expected that more than 4,400 people from local organizations in non-EU, disaster-affected countries will also benefit from the chance to undertake training and job shadowing within European humanitarian organizations.”

This official press release from Brussels, EU Aid Volunteers: the initiative takes shape, provides more details about this initiative, envisaged by the Treaty of Lisbon that created the EU. “Trained volunteers will have a variety of options: from performing online tasks from home, through work at the offices of humanitarian organisation inside the European Union, to deployment to EU-funded humanitarian operations around the world.”

In fact, onsite, in-the-field placements for EU Aid Volunteers are already being recruited.

More info:

It’s been my pleasure to be a part of putting together the online volunteering strategy for the EU Aid Volunteers initiative. That means providing:

  • Background on virtual volunteering – what it means in the EU context, what best practices have long been established, etc.
  • Details on the infrastructure and capacity that will be needed by host organizations and online volunteers in order to participate, including policies and procedures and how to address issues around confidentiality and safety
  • Possibilities for how online volunteering in support of the EU Aid Volunteers initiative might look, in terms of applications, screening, assignment creation, volunteer matching and supporting
  • How to integrate returned volunteer alumni networks and peer-to-peer online mentoring into the scheme
  • How to evaluate the online volunteering component of the EU Aid Volunteers initiative
  • How the contributions of online volunteers might be recognized
  • Recruitment of online volunteers to support EU Aid Volunteers and volunteer sending organizations
  • How to address potential risks and challenges, like protection of personal data, protection of confidential data of organizations, fear of negative behavior online, lack of understanding of and support for volunteer management among some agencies, labour concerns that can arise with volunteer engagement, and what to call online volunteers that support the EU Aid Volunteer initiative.

What I’ve loved most about this assignment is that it combines BOTH my background in international aid and development and my background regarding volunteer engagement, particularly virtual volunteering. I don’t often get to combine them!

This is my second European-related project in the last 12 months. The other involved researching “Internet-mediated volunteering” in the EU, to map how prevalent it is and how it might be further cultivated, as well as its potential relation to employability & social inclusion. There’s more information bout that project at this wiki. The final research is not yet published, but I did write this blog about “What I learned from researching virtual volunteering in Europe.”

More about me and my work, and my consulting services, including subjects on which I train.

Research on USA volunteerism excludes virtual volunteering

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graphic by Jayne Cravens representing volunteersThe Bureau of Labor Statistics says that USA volunteerism rates declined by 1.1 percentage points to 25.4% in a year ending September 2013. BUT, the survey apparently had wording that left out virtual volunteering, which makes me question the validity of these numbers.

Here’s how BLS identified volunteering activities:

  • Coach, referee or supervise sports teams
  • Tutor or teach
  • Mentor youth
  • Be an usher, greeter, or minister
  • Collect, prepare, distribute or serve food
  • Collect, make or distribute clothing, crafts or good other than food
  • Fundraise or sell items to raise money
  • Provide counseling, medical care, fire/EMS or protective services
  • Provide professional or management assistance, including serving on a board or committee
  • Engage in music, performance, or other artistic activities
  • Engage in general labor, supply transportation to people

It’s 2014 and this is how BLS defines volunteering activities?! In these definitions, where do these typical virtual volunteering activities go?

  • Managing an online discussion group
  • Facilitating an online video chat/event
  • Translating a brochure from English to Spanish
  • researching subjects
  • creating web pages (designing the pages or writing the content)
  • editing or writing proposals, press releases, newsletter articles, video scripts, etc.
  • developing curricula
  • transcribing scanned documents
  • designing a database
  • monitoring the news to look for specific subjects
  • managing social media activities
  • tagging photos and files

Heck, where do volunteering activities like hackathons and wikipedia edit-a-thons go in BLS’s volunteering activity categories?!

How do we get the Bureau of Labor Statistics and others that research volunteering activities, like the Pew Research Center, to change their survey methods so that virtual volunteering activities and new forms of volunteering, like hackathons, get included in research about volunteering? Perhaps someone at each organization should buy, and read, The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook?

Also see this blog of suggestions for research about virtual volunteering, specifically.

Update March 29, 2018: Well done, Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), for redesigning its the General Social Survey (GSS) – which measures the official number of volunteers in Australia – to ALSO capture informal, online and spontaneous volunteering, not just traditional, face-to-face, onsite volunteering. More about the change here.

Meanwhile, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, at least as of 2015, has the same old categories that exclude modern forms of volunteering. Online volunteering, hackathons, edit-a-thons – those still don’t get counted.

Why did we call it the LAST guidebook?

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vvbooklittle

In hearing about The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook, you may have noticed two things:

    • My co-author, Susan Ellis, and I don’t talk about the guidebook as a revision of The Virtual Volunteering Guidebook that we wrote back in the 1990s. That’s because this new book was written from the ground up – we didn’t merely update that previous guidebook. While I think most of what we wrote in that first book remains valid, in terms of still being helpful advice to work with online volunteers, this new book provides substantially more information and reflects just how integrated the Internet is in our lives now versus back in the 1990s.
    • That standout word in the title: Last.

What do we mean by this being  The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook?

What we don’t mean is that there will or should never be a further need to write or talk about the latest developments in engaging volunteers online.

What we do mean is that, from this moment on, we hope that talk about virtual volunteering won’t be segregated to a separate book or separate chapter at the end of a book about volunteer management. Our dream is that this is a turning point regarding talk and training about volunteer engagement, and

  • any book about volunteer management, whether it’s a book about basic principals in general, group volunteering, episodic volunteering, skills-based volunteering, teen volunteering, whatever, has advice about using the Internet to support and involve volunteers integrated throughout the material. For instance, episodic volunteering, online, is called micro volunteering, yet workshops and other resources regarding episodic volunteering rarely talk about it – we hope that exclusion stops NOW.
  • any workshop about some aspect of volunteer management, whether it’s about the fundamentals of volunteer management, recruitment, risk management, adults working with children, whatever, fully integrates advice about using the Internet as a part of those activities.

In short, NO MORE SEGREGATION OF INTERNET-MEDIATED VOLUNTEERING. Virtual volunteering should not be an “add on” – not only in a book or training about volunteer engagement, but also, not in any volunteer engagement scheme at any organization. In fact, our dream is that we no longer hear about onsite volunteers as one group and online volunteers as another, separate group – how about we talk about volunteers, period?

Involving volunteers online is a practice that’s more than 35 years old. There are at least several thousand organizations using the Internet to support and involve volunteers. Actually, Susan and I believe virtual volunteering has, in some way, shape or form, been adopted by a majority of nonprofits and NGOs, whether they know it or not – we base this on the research that’s been done by others, our own research, and our observations in our extensive work with nonprofits. It’s even reflected in this discussion group regarding virtual volunteering on LinkedIn. And it’s based on this reality that we’re calling for full integration of virtual volunteering into any book or training about any aspect of volunteering.

Order information for The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook.

Also see our virtual volunteering wiki. Whereas the guidebook is written in a timeless manner as much as possible, focusing on suggested practices that the authors believe do not change, for the most part, this wiki will continually evolve as tracking and networking tech tools change, as new research is conducted, and as substantial news about virtual volunteering is announced.

If you read the book, I would so appreciate it if you could write and post a review of it on the Amazon and Barnes and Noble web sites (you can write the same review on both sites).

Me with The LAST Virtual Volunteering Guidebook

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It’s real! Not virtual! Me with The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook.

Amazing to hold YEARS of research and writing in my hands at last!

The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook is now available for purchase as a paperback and an ebook , published by Energize, Inc. 

If you read the book, I would so appreciate it if you could write and post a review of it on the Amazon and Barnes and Noble web sites (you can write the same review on both sites). You don’t have to buy the book in those places to review it there (and I hope you will order it from me directly instead). 

accessibility, diversity & virtual volunteering

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One of the many things I’m proud of in The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook, is that it features an entire chapter on accessibility and diversity.

That chapter, and the entire book, provide detailed advice regarding:

  • the benefits of having online volunteers representing a variety of socio-economic levels, neighborhoods, ages, cultures and other demographics
  • the benefits of accommodating a diversity of volunteers (an accommodation you make for one particular group often ends up benefiting ALL volunteers)
  • how to use language in such a way as to accommodate and welcome a variety of volunteers 
  • how to adapt online tools to accommodate different online volunteers, including those that may have physical disabilities
  • how to accommodate online volunteers with learning and emotional disabilities
  • how to recruit for diversity; and
  • how to track progress regarding diversity among online volunteer ranks.

The chapter on accessibility and diversity is referenced throughout The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook , because Susan and I did not want anyone thinking it was a chapter to take or leave.

I became an advocate for accessibility and diversity in volunteering and in computer and Internet use in October 1994 when I attended the annual meeting of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility at UC San Diego. There was a panel discussion called “The Meanings of Access,” and remarks during that talk, particularly by Deborah Kaplan, then of the World Institute on Disability, changed my life forever. I came to a realization of two things I’d never had before: accessibility is a human right, and accessibility brings me in contact with awesome people I would never meet or work with otherwise. I became an advocate right then and there.

In 1997, I got funding from the Mitsubishi Electric America Foundation for the Virtual Volunteering Project to explore how to make online volunteering as accessible as possible, and that same year, blew my mouth off at a conference in Austin, Texas about how disappointed I was that the panelists I’d just listened to, talking about the digital divide, never once mentioned people with disabilities, resulting in one of the greatest personal and professional relationships of my life, with Sharron Rush, who was also in the audience and later formed Knowbility, a nonprofit that promotes accessibility in technology tools and technology careers.

In 2008, I read “InVolving LGBT Volunteers,” published by The Consortium of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered voluntary and community organisations, based in London, the United Kingdom, and that solidified my understanding that making accessibility and diversity a priority in any program is about benefits for everyone in that program, not just people with disabilities or people who are from minority or under-represented groups. This publication is referenced in The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook, and remains one I return to frequently when preparing lectures or workshops about volunteer recruitment.

I have tried to put into practice all that I’ve heard about regarding virtual volunteering, including accommodations for a variety of people as volunteers and recruiting specifically to create a diverse volunteer pool. I won’t say I’m always successful, and I won’t say trying the methods we promote in the book is always easy, but I will say that it’s made my work experience oh-so-much richer and interesting, and it’s always been worth trying.

The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook is now available for purchase as a paperback and an ebook. 

Now available: The LAST Virtual Volunteering Guidebook!

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vvbooklittleThe Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook is now available for purchase as a paperback and an ebook, published by Energize, Inc. 

The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook reflects all that has changed — and remained the same — since the first book was published online more than 10 years ago. Again co-authored with Susan Ellis and published by Energize, Inc., The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook still includes the basics for getting started with involving and supporting volunteers online, but it goes much farther, offering detailed information to help organizations that are already engaged in virtual volunteering with improving and expanding their programs. It also offers more international perspectives. The first book was focused on people who had never heard of virtual volunteering; this revised book still serves as the most comprehensive introduction to the subject available, but provides much more in-depth information and guidance for organizations already engaging online volunteers, who want to improve or expand their virtual volunteering activities.

New and advanced information includes:

  • More detailed advice on virtual volunteering assignment, including one-time “Byte-Sized” tasks (micro-volunteering), longer-term, higher-responsibilities and virtual team assignments.
  • A thorough look at various practices for screening and matching volunteers to assignments, with an eye to getting the most capable volunteers into your volunteering ranks and preventing incomplete assignments or burdensome management tasks
  • How to make online volunteer roles accessible and diverse
  • More details about how to work successfully with online volunteers, so that they are successful, your organization benefits and volunteer managers aren’t overwhelmed
  • Balancing safety with program goals
  • Respecting privacy of both the organization and online volunteers themselves
  • Online mentoring
  • Blogging by, for and about volunteers
  • Online activism
  • Spontaneous online volunteers
  • Live online events with volunteers
  • The future of virtual volunteering and how to start planning for oncoming trends

There’s also a new chapter just for online volunteers themselves, which organizations can also use in creating their own materials for online volunteers.

I’ve worked hard over the years to make this book worth the purchase price, and to be a resource you can turn to any time for support in your engagement with volunteers online.

In conjunction with the revised guidebook is the Virtual Volunteering Wiki, a free online resource and collaborative space for sharing resources regarding virtual volunteering. We are seeking a partner university or college that could recruit an intern from among students studying in its post-graduate program to keep this wiki updated.

If you read the book, I would so appreciate it if you could write and post a review of it on the Amazon and Barnes and Noble web sites (you can write the same review on both sites).

Questions for programs sending volunteers to developing countries

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For a research project I’m working on with various EU-based NGOs through February 2014 or so, I’m gathering info on three related areas:

  • Volunteer-to-volunteer support online. How organizations that send volunteers to developing countries do, or do NOT, support these volunteers to interact with each other, or returned volunteers / alumni, online. I’m looking for strategies, procedures and policies, as well as assessments, formal or informal, about what’s working and what’s not.
  • Alumni networks. How these organizations set up and manage their alumni programs for returned volunteers – or if they don’t, why not, and if they don’t, would they be interested in such. Again, I’m looking for strategies, procedures and policies, as well as assessments, formal or informal, about what’s working and what’s not. For instance, there is a long-established alumni network for returned Peace Corps members, National Peace Corps Association, that is independently run from the actual Peace Corps program.
  • Online volunteering support. How these organizations support connections between volunteers currently serving in the field and online volunteers that have the expertise these volunteers to support them in their work – or if they don’t, if volunteers are engaging with such online volunteers on their own. For instance, Cuso International has a formal program, E-Connect, an e-volunteering pilot program that “welcomes new and returning volunteers to work with our in-country program partners remotely.” By contrast, the UNV program encourages currently-serving UN Volunteers to use its Online Volunteering service to recruit online volunteers to support them in their field work, but does not have a formal program to track or support this specific engagement.

It’s a challenging project because: 

  • So many organizations do not track these activities at their own organizations. For instance, when I worked at the United Nations Volunteers program from 2001-2005, I knew of program officers, each with a responsibility for a particular country or region, that had set up YahooGroups for the UN Volunteers they worked with in a specific region – yet, if you asked senior staff if online communities existed for currently-serving UN Volunteers, for peer-to-peer support, they would say no, because these activities weren’t well-communicated.
  • Language. If I say, “Do you have an online community that allows your volunteers to support each other?”, many staff will say no. But if I say, “Are you a part of any GoogleGroups or YahooGroups or Facebook Groups?” they will say yes, and if you ask “What are the groups”, you will find out that, indeed, such groups are for currently-serving volunteers and/or volunteer alumni.
  • No one person knows it all. There’s rarely one person at the organization that knows all of the online activities or alumni activities in which different staff is engaged. If you talk to one staff person at an organization, they may give you entirely different answers to your questions about online communities and alumni associations than another staff person.
  • A lot of online peer-to-peer support of volunteers in the field may not happen through an online community specifically for volunteers but, rather, through a subject-based online community for anyone, volunteer or paid, full-time employee / consultant, such as those engaged in evaluation activities using ALNAP’s Humanitarian Evaluation Community of Practice, or those engaged in water and sanitation programs.

That said, if you have info for me,  please email me at  jc@OINKMOOcoyotecommunications.com (remove OINKMOO from the email address).

crowdcrafting.org – crowdsourcing for anyone

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Crowdcrafting.org is an open source software platform launched this year for developing and sharing projects that rely on the help of thousands of online volunteers. “It enables the rapid development of online citizen science applications, by both amateur and professional scientists.”

There are already many citizen science projects that harness virtual volunteering, in fields as diverse as proteomics and astronomy. These projects often involve hundreds of thousands of dedicated online volunteers over many years. The objective of Crowdcrafting is to make it quick and easy for professional scientists as well as amateurs to design and launch their own online citizen science projects. This enables even relatively small projects to get started, which may require the effort of just a hundred volunteers for only a few weeks.

An example occurred after the tropical storm that wreaked havoc in the Philippines. A volunteer initiative called Digital Humanitarian Network (which has been mentioned many times here on the TechSoup forum) used Crowdcrafting to launch a project called Philippines Typhoon. This enabled online volunteers to classify thousands of tweets about the impact of the storm, in order to more rapidly filter information that could be vital to first responders.

Applications already running on Crowdcrafting range from classifying images of magnetic molecules to analyzing tweets about natural disasters. During the testing phase, some 50 new applications have been created, with over 50 more under development. The Crowdcrafting platform is hosted by University of Geneva, and is a joint initiative between the Open Knowledge Foundation and the Citizen Cyberscience Centre, a Geneva-based partnership co-founded by University of Geneva. The Sloan Foundation has recently awarded a grant to this joint initiative for the further development of the Crowdcrafting platform.

Here’s an example, where volunteers are sought to transcribe a PDF.

Commenting on the underlying technology, Rufus Pollock, founder of the Open Knowledge Foundation, said, “Crowdcrafting is powered by the open-source PyBossa software, developed by ourselves in collaboration with the Citizen Cyberscience Centre. Its aim is to make it quick and easy to do crowdsourcing for good—getting volunteers to help out with tasks such as image classification, transcription and geocoding in relation to scientific and humanitarian projects.”

The project is talked about on a blog posted both here and here, by Francois Grey, a Shuttleworth Fellow, focusing on the advancement of Open Science, specifically Citizen Cyberscience. He is coordinator of the Citizen Cyberscience Centre.

Also see:

Online volunteers, social media, disaster response & the Philippines

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United Nations OCHA and the Digital Humanitarian Network are looking for online volunteers to help in geo-tagging twitter messages and images to support relief efforts in the Philippines. Find out more and sign up here, at the UN Volunteers Online Volunteering web site.

Also, other online volunteers across the world are building the digital infrastructure for the organization’s Typhoon Haiyan relief efforts: since Saturday, more than 400 volunteers have made nearly three quarters of a million additions to OpenStreetMap (OSM), regarding areas in and around the Philippines. Those additions reflect the land before the storm, but they will help Red Cross workers and volunteers make critical decisions after it about where to send food, water, and supplies (OSM aims to be a complete map of the world, free to use and editable by all. Created in 2004, it now has over a million users). The Red Cross is using the data. More at this article from the Atlantic.

And, hurrah, the first shipment of Facebook “likes” have arrived in the Philippines (article in German – and is a better criticism of slacktivism or slackavism than anything else).

Finding out how many orgs are involving online volunteers

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A followup to my last blog, where I whined that so many organizations charged with measuring volunteering in a region or country refuse to ask any questions related to virtual volunteering.

As I’ve said many times: when I do workshops on virtual volunteering, and describe all the different aspects of what online volunteering looks like, including microvolunteering, someone always raises a hand or comes up to me afterwards to say, “My organization has online volunteers and I didn’t even know it!” or “I’m an online volunteer and I didn’t know it!”

If you ask organizations, “Do you have virtual volunteering / microvolunteering at your organization?” most will say “No.” But if you ask the question differently, the answer is often “Yes!”

How would YOU ask the question of organizations to find out if they were engaging volunteers online?

Here’s one idea:

In the last 12 months, did any volunteers helping your organization work in whole or in-part offsite on behalf of your organization, and use their own computers, smart phones, notebooks (Internet-enabled devices) from their home, work or elsewhere offsite, to provide updates on their volunteering, or the results of their volunteering?

What is your idea for ONE question? Please post it in the comments.

Challenges to getting answers:

  • There’s rarely just one person at an organization involving volunteers; often, several employees or key volunteers are involving volunteers, but there may not be one person tracking all of this involvement. So if you ask this question of just one person at the organization, you might not get an accurate answer.
  • The word volunteer is contested. People will say, “Oh, we don’t have volunteers. We have pro bono consultants, we have unpaid interns, we have executives online, we have board members, but we do not have volunteers.” That means someone who is advising your HR manager regarding the latest legislation that might affect hiring or your overworked marketing person regarding social media, and offering this advice unpaid, from the comfort of his or her  home or office or a coffee shop, won’t be counted as an online volunteer – even though they are. In fact, I talked to the manager of an online tutoring program who brought together students and what she called “subject matter experts” (SMES) together online for school assignments, but because it never dawned on her that the SMES were volunteers (unpaid, donating their service to a cause they believed in), she had no idea she was managing a volunteer program, let alone a virtual volunteering program.

This is not easy. I’ve been researching virtual volunteering since 1996 and, geesh, it’s still not easy! When does it get easier?!