Tag Archives: online volunteers

Transcribe & caption!

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Captioning a video, or offering a transcription of a video or podcast, should be a priority for your organization. Why?
    • Many people that don’t have time to watch that video or listen to that podcast DO have time to read the transcript.
    • Many people are in an environment that would not allow them to listen to a podcast or online video (their surroundings are too loud, they would disturb people around them, they can’t use headphones or ear buds for some reason, etc.).
    • Many people want to quote from a video or podcast in something they are writing (and if that’s online, that quote will often link back to the original broadcast).
    • A person may just need very specific information, and a text search makes that information oh-so-easy to find.
    • Some people prefer reading to listening or watching (I’m one of those people); they are much more likely to access your information in text form than a video or audio.
  • And, of course, so people with hearing impairments can access the information.
In short, you greatly increase the number of audience members for a video or podcast, reaching more potential donors, volunteers, clients and others, by captioning a video or offering a transcription of a video or podcast. At minimum,
  • Any video or audio training materials you have should be captioned and/or transcribed.
  • All PSAs you want to be distributed widely should be captioned and/or transcribed.
  • Videos and podcasts that are part of your service delivery should be captioned and/or transcribed.
Think you don’t have the resources to caption or transcribe a video or podcast? You do: volunteers. There are online volunteers who would love to transcribe your audios and videos. These volunteers may have speech recognition/voice recognition software that they can use to convert spoken words to text, or they may be willing to listen and type. Either way, you will want volunteers checking up on other volunteers’ transcriptions and captioning, to ensure information is rendered correctly. Keep such volunteer transcribing assignments small: you might have trouble finding a volunteer to transcribe a two-hour-long panel discussion, but it might be much easier to find someone to transcribe just a 10 minute excerpt. If a video or podcast is particularly long, you could divide the transcribing or captioning job up among several volunteers. You might even be able to find a volunteer who would happily lead up the entire project for your organization – leadership volunteering opportunities are highly sought by many people these days! Recruit these volunteers from among your existing volunteers and their networks, via your web site, via VolunteerMatch and AllforGood if you are in the USA, Idealist and whatever resources are available in your country, or, if you are in a developing country or your NGO or nonprofit is focused on such: the UN’s Online Volunteering service. December 21, 2017 update: I recently created a five-minute pitch video for the OpenAIR hackathon – the Accessibility Internet Rally – for Knowbility, a nonprofit based in Austin, Texas (I’m in Portland, Oregon). I also used the YouTube captioning tool for the first time ever – I couldn’t believe how easy it was! If I can figure it out, anyone can – including online volunteers you might recruit to caption all of the videos your nonprofit has on YouTube already.
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 and for working with online volunteers, including volunteers that are going to transcribe or correct the transcriptions of your videos or podcasts. The book also has detailed guidance 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. It’s co-written by myself and Susan Ellis. Tags: volunteering, volunteers, community, engagement, volunteerism, volunteering, online, micro, microvolunteering, virtual

Photos of Online Volunteers Wanted

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Camping and surfing in North DakotaI’m looking for photos of people who help nonprofit organizations, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), grassroots organizations, schools, or other civil society organizations (CSOs) via a computer at their homes, their work, a computer cafe, a cell phone/smart phone — as a volunteer (that means unpaid, NOT as a paid staff member or paid consultant).

You know: online volunteers. Virtual volunteering. Online mentoring. Cyber service. Microvolunteering. Crowd-sourcing. Clowd computing volunteering. Whatever the hot new term is.

I need photos of people who research information, design web sites, databases or graphics, prepare proposals, edit documents, translate text, offer professional advice, moderate online discussion groups, contact the press write newsletter articles, manage web sites, manage Flickr accounts, edit podcasts or online videos, or any other activities to help organizations that support causes those people believe in – but these people perform their service as a volunteer (unpaid!) from a remote site.

Why? I want to feature them at this Flickr Group, “Online Volunteers.”

These don’t have to be volunteers who help ONLY via the computer; most online volunteers also help onsite as well. So if the volunteer helps only half the time, or a quarter of the time, online, that’s fine! It still counts!

Photos or video of online volunteers should be taken either via your webcam or with the computer or other Internet device you use somehow visible in the photo, to give it that “Internet” feel. ALSO, describe what you do as an online volunteer, including either the name or a description of the organization(s) you support. If you really can’t work a computer into the photo, then at least make the description ultra-obvious about why you are submitting the photo.

ALSO, please tag your photo “online volunteer.”

Submit the photos directly to the Flickr group for online volunteers– which means you will need a Yahoo ID. If you don’t already have such, and don’t want one, you can send ONE photo to me, via email, however, please clearly note in your email who you are, why you are sending the photo, etc.; blank emails, or those with sketchy descriptions, will be discarded without viewing (to protect myself from computer viruses). Photos that don’t clearly represent online volunteers will be rejected.

Please forward this message to volunteers you work with, or anyone you think might be interested.

Goal: to show the diversity of online volunteers out there. The practice of online volunteering is more than 30 years old. I want to show just what a HUGE group of people volunteer online, and have been doing so for a long while now!

How many organizations involve online volunteers?

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I gave up trying to find every organization engaged in virtual volunteering back in 1998. Why? Because by 1998, when I was directing the Virtual Volunteering Project, I had already found hundreds of such organizations, and knew there were probably thousands more organizations engaged in virtual volunteering – I gave up and focused exclusively on discovering best practices.

Now, 13 years later, I dare say most nonprofit organizations, at least in the USA, involve online volunteers, even if they don’t know it; most organizations allow at least some volunteers to do some service online. For instance, Girl Scouts of the USA doesn’t say they involve online volunteers, yet I’m an online volunteer with Girl Scouts: 90% of my duties coordinating communications here in my part of the world are done online, from my home, via my computer. When I do workshops on virtual volunteering, attendees come up afterwards and say, “I’ve got online volunteers and didn’t even realize it!” And that’s good, because it means they aren’t distinguishing between online and onsite volunteers, something far too many organizations try to do – they are treating them all as just volunteers (and I mean just volunteers in the most praiseworthy of terms). Animal shelters, homeless shelters, communities of faith (churches, mosques, temples), community gardens, community theaters, nonprofit zoos, YWCAs and on and on involve online volunteers, to create web pages, to write articles for a newsletter, to test an online tool, to translate text from one language to another, to moderate or facilitate an online discussion group, to tag photos, to edit video, to research a subject online and gather information, to make regular posts to Facebook, to Tweet regularly, and on and on.

There is no database of organizations involving online volunteers, just as there is no database of every organization that involves volunteers. I hope that organizations that research volunteering, such as the Corporation for National Service, will finally catch up to the practice of online volunteering and start asking organizations about their virtual volunteering engagement for their volunteering studies!

What I have kept up is a list of organizations that recruit or involve online volunteers primarily and specifically; opportunities range from mentoring students to mentoring entrepreneurs in developing countries to helping to code software to offering tech advice to nonprofits to reporting on your local weather. Some tasks take an ongoing commitment, and some are so-called micro-volunteering (episodic volunteering online – it doesn’t take an ongoing commitment). I published the list to show what real online volunteering / online community service / virtual volunteering looks like – as opposed to highly questionable ones.

This is on one of my monetized pages so, yes, there are ads. But no study of online volunteering should be limited to this list – remember, if an organization involves volunteers at all, it’s very likely they involve online volunteers – or could!

But virtual volunteering means it takes no time, right?

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In addition to researching and writing about virtual volunteering, I’m also almost always engaged in the practice, either as an online volunteer, or as a manager of online volunteers.

I recently recruited online volunteers to help with identifying some outreach targets for a nonprofit organization I’m working with. First, I used a volunteer recruitment web site, posting a very detailed task description and asking for a commitment only 3 – 5 hours a week through the rest of the year. For those who expressed interest, I had an oh-so-short screening process: a few questions via email. Their answers show me how well they communicate via the written word, if they truly understand the importance of a prompt response, and if they really do read a message completely. 

One of the questions is regarding when the volunteer is planning on working on the assignment: is there a particular day and time they are going to specifically set aside for getting the task done? This question throws a lot of online volunteering candidates. As one put it: “I don’t understand this question, because I thought this was a virtual volunteering assignment.” It didn’t surprise me when that volunteer dropped out after just a week, without doing the assignment.

While an online volunteer can do his or her assignment whenever and, often, wherever, he or she wants to — at 3 a.m., during a four-hour layover at a wired airport, etc. — virtual volunteering takes real time. I’ve worked with online volunteers since 1994, and I’ve found that those volunteers who make a plan for getting an assignment done — who identify a day and time when their work is going to happen — actually get the assignment done. Those who expect available time to spontaneously materialize for getting the assignment done instead send me an email explaining all the many reasons they are unable to fulfill their commitment, always along the lines of “some unexpected things came up.”

Virtual volunteering takes real time and a real commitment, however small, however micro, and there is nothing virtual about the organization’s need for the assignment to get done.

Screening volunteers, even for micro-volunteering assignments, will cut down significantly on the number of “Oops, I didn’t realize I actually didn’t have time to do this. Sorry!” emails you will get from new online volunteers. Your online screening process does not have to be long; it can be done via email, with just a few questions a candidate could complete in just 10 minutes. Don’t be surprised if more than 50% of people who said they were interested in volunteering online with your organization drop out at this point – but isn’t that better than them dropping out after they have officially been given an assignment?

How to screen online volunteers is just one of the many topics that will be explored in-depth in the revised Virtual Volunteering Guidebook, which will be published in 2011. Stay tuned!

Read more about the myths of online volunteering/virtual volunteering.