Dave Carroll became famous for writing a song and making a video about United Airlines smashing his guitar and not taking responsibility for it. The video went viral, Mr. Carroll not only appeared on various media outlets as a result, including CNN and The View, not only did United give him the financial settlement and apology he’d been demanding for months, he also became a paid speaker for various conferences and retreats, talking about “inhuman customer-service policies” and their unseen costs: loss of customer trust (and, therefore, customers), brand destruction, and more.
In February of this year, after he tried to volunteer at his son’s school, Mr. Carroll produced another song and video, this one about his frustration at trying to volunteer at his son’s school. It’s called “There’s Got to Be a Better Way.” You can watch the entire video, where Mr. Carroll makes fun of the volunteer screening at length, or just jump to the song about the experience at the 5:56 mark.
IMO, the video and song are a PERFECT example of thoughtless volunteer screening, where nonprofit and public sector organizations are interested just in checking a box rather than doing MEANINGFUL, effective screening of someone to work with kids.
I am so tired of seeing the question on discussion groups for managers of volunteers: “Where can I get a cheap criminal background check for potential volunteers?” or “How do I get a discount at the police station for police to do background checks of potential volunteers.” These people are looking for a box to check, rather than creating a culture that keeps everyone safe. Instead, read Screening Volunteers to Prevent Child Sexual Abuse: A Community Guide for Youth Organizations (it’s free to download) and use its very effective ways for screening out inappropriate candidates and creating a culture of safety. Combine it with Beyond Police Checks: The Definitive Volunteer & Employee Screening Guidebook by Linda Graff, available from Energize, Inc. (but not for free), and you’ve got a solid, more-than-basic understanding of risk management in volunteer engagement activities, and know how to better assure safety without driving away quality volunteering candidates. You also will understand how mindlessly enforcing protocols, without thinking about their purpose, doesn’t keep anyone safe.
Is it appropriate to screen employees, consultants or volunteers using Google or Bing online searches, or searches on social media? It depends on so many things…
If that person is going to act in a capacity where they regularly represent the organization to the public, particularly through the press, or the person is going to interact with vulnerable populations – children, people with disabilities, women that have been the targets of domestic violence, people with dementia, etc. – yes, it’s completely legitimate to look them up online, to see what comes up. But you have to think clearly about what it is you are looking for. A person being politically active online, or expressing opinions online should not automatically exclude someone from working for you. Susan Ellis and I discuss this at length in The LAST Virtual Volunteering Guidebook,.
I’m in human resources at an organization with a conservative culture. As part of vetting candidates, I Google them, check Facebook, etc., to see if there is anything of an embarrassing nature. One young woman candidate, age 23, has me stymied. She has a professional-quality website chronicling her many accomplishments and a perfectly innocent Twitter account. Her recommendations are lovely. But everything on the Web about her has happened since 2009, the year she graduated from college. No Facebook account, no Myspace. I find this weird. I have never known a person under 25 who wasn’t all over the Web in high school and college. I thought of asking her, but if she’s clever enough to sanitize a Web presence, wouldn’t she have a story ready, too? I don’t want make unfair assumptions or ask an inappropriate question, but I also don’t want to be the idiot who hired someone who was in a sex scandal and have my career go down in flames. Should I take a chance? Is there a perfectly logical explanation I have not thought of? —Stumped
Here is the response from Prudence, which I think is brilliant:
Dear Stumped,
How amazing that someone might get rejected for a job because the Internet is not full of her idiotic, juvenile activities. Think about how silly it sounds that you would find it reassuring if there were Facebook pictures of her at drunken frat parties or if you could read her deepest Myspace thoughts from high school. As hard as it may be to accept, some people just aren’t that interested in social media and their absence from it does not signify that they were part of an underage sex ring. In doing your due diligence you’ve discovered that as this young woman launched her career, she has a created a professional presence on the Web. She sounds exactly like the kind of person your conservative company would welcome. Don’t punish her because you can’t find evidence of something she has to hide.
Also, remember that some people may have two accounts on the same platform, one for their professional activities and one for, say, their Princess Leia cosplay activities. If you try to friend an employee or volunteer on Facebook, and are rejected, that could be because the person really wants to keep their personal life separate from their professional or public life, not because they are trying to hide anything.
Also, remember that there are many, many people with the same name. I’m stunned at how many people have my name too. I’ve never been to Albuquerque and was not in New Mexico in 1997. Yet, do a search on me with particular phrasing, and this comes up (not that rescuing sheep would preclude me from volunteering):
Okay, one more thing to remember: search engine results can be misleading. For instance, a Google search of my name back in 2013 generated this link, which makes it look like I’ve been arrested (I haven’t – EVER):
This newspaper published information about a training I was leading back in my home town in Kentucky, but the Google result also captured other information on the same page in that newspaper, like a story about a woman who was arrested on an alcohol-related charge. To the untrained eye, it looks like it’s me! But you would know that only if you clicked on the link. Remember this when you are researching a new employee, consultant or volunteer online!
There are lots more suggestions and specifics about risk management, interviewing and screening online volunteers and setting boundaries for relationships in virtual volunteering among volunteers and between volunteers and staff and clients in The LAST Virtual Volunteering Guidebook, available both as a traditional printed book and as a digital book. Our advice is focused on working with online / remote volunteers, but it applies to working with any volunteers, including those who will do all of their service onsite, under the supervision of staff or another volunteer. Our advice is based on many years of working with online volunteers ourselves, consulting with people working with volunteers, and reading all we can, both in research and in the news, regarding working with volunteers and legal challenges around employee use of social media.
Today, it’s about a comment made repeatedly in student evaluations for one of the classes that invited me to lecture, one that’s given me pause ever since.
My visit at the University of Kentucky was focused on leadership development, and community development and engagement, as both relate to the use of online media. And as guest lecturer in CLD 230 Intrapersonal Leadership, my topic was “How to use social media and online collaborative tools to demonstrate leadership and to support a team.” During my lecture, I noted that text-based online communications, unlike video conferencing, hide our weight, ethnicity, hair color, age, and other physical traits from each other online. That means, online, people are judged by the quality of their online performance, not their physical appearance or regional accent. As Susan Ellis and I note in The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook: “Today’s preference to actually see and hear each other online is a double-edged sword: it can make electronic communication more personal and personable, but it can also inject offline prejudices evoked by how someone looks.” I pointed out that, online, via text-based communications, I can’t judge people regarding how they look but, rather, by the quality of the character they show through their words.
The comment ended up on many of the students’ “guest speaker reflection” form the instructor, Grace Gorrell, asks all students complete during class. The comment struck a chord with many of these students, most of them in their teens or 20s. And that’s given me pause: about society’s obsession with appearance, and about stereotypes. Young people are quite aware of those two factors affecting people’s lives, including their own – and probably quite worried about such. There are advantages, and disadvantages, to being perceived as attractive during a job search, and even a Harvard degree doesn’t level the playing field for African-American graduates in the job market, a study by a University of Michigan researcher found. It’s likely that these students have experienced first hand or witnessed first-hand preferences given because of someone’s appearance, perceived ethnicity or age, accent, etc., or discrimination because of the same. I think these students really like the idea of being evaluated purely by their work and communications skills – by their character.
Are we giving young people the information they need to portray themselves online as worthy of employment, of being involved as a volunteer, of inclusion? Are we teaching them how to build trust among people they work with, with their neighbors, and with those they will encounter online – and why this is important?
And are we continually exploring our own prejudices that may be affecting how we work and interactive with others?
Updated April 15, 2021: A comic strip demonstrates the challenges women face online. It’s developed by Kenya ICT Action Network (KICTANet). In a story of three differently aged, differently shaped and differently employed women, we see what violence can look like online, how the seemingly harmless can actually contribute to it, and what we can all do to prevent it and to create a safer space for women online.
Linda Graff is a volunteer management trainer, with a specialization regarding risk management in engaging volunteers.
Linda is retiring, and Andy Fryer has done an interview with her that talks about her incredible contributions to our knowledge about effective volunteer engagement. It’s worth your time to read the interview.
Readers are invited to comment, and my comment says, in part:
I can’t count how many times I have run to my risk management books by Linda to be able to make a point or even win an argument – and I pretty much dismiss any volunteer management expert who doesn’t have one of her books on the shelf or doesn’t seem to know who she is (blasphemy!).
Every nonprofit organization/mission-based organization needs at least one Linda Graff book on the bookshelf – and staff need to consult such regularly. My recommendation is Beyond Police Checks. It’s North America-specific, but the advice is applicable to any country.
It’s a loss for our sector that Linda is retiring, but I know that she now gets to spend much more time fishing, and that makes me happy.
On a LinkedIn group, someone asked for a resource to help with volunteer evaluations (forms, policies, etc.). A couple of folks, myself included, responded with some references/resources.
And then came these two comments:
(1) Volunteers generally do not expect to be evaluated, after all, they are doing the organization a favor.
(2) As someone who has volunteered in over 30 organizations in a large array of positions, some with intense responsibility, if I had to be vetted each time I volunteered, I would never do any of it. In fact, if I had been appraised, they probably would have disqualified me in the first place when in actuality, I did better than some of their paid and “experienced” staff. It is not worth my time to go through that nonsense, I am a volunteer for goodness sakes. Whenever someone imposes requirements, I just walk away. I have sat on advisory boards of non-profit organizations, as well, and have been entrusted with finances, operations, etc., if they had said you will have to go through some job interview hoops, I would have just laughed and also kept my wallet closed to any further contributions.
Volunteer managers have been working to raise the standards of volunteer involvement schemes for a few decades now, often with success. Yet, there are still oh-so-many entitlement volunteers, those folks who think organizations should take ANY volunteer and whatever that volunteer offers, and simply be grateful for what they get. No standards, no quality control, no performance measurements when it comes to volunteers. To demand quality from volunteers is insulting.
For me, as a volunteer management practitioner and someone who is committed to the success of nonprofit organizations and NGOs, I’m only to happy to show those people the door. I don’t need nor want their services as a volunteer. My organization — and those it serves — deserve better.
Nonprofit organizations are businesses. They aren’t there to be nice, they are there because they are necessary. A nonprofit has a mission — to house stray animals and reduce pet over-population, to present quality, professional theater performances, to educate people about HIV/AIDS, to provide care for victims of domestic violence, to keep a local environment clean, to help family farms survive even the worst economic times, to keep a state park clean and vibrant and accessible, and on and on. For a nonprofit, that mission trumps everything else — including the egos of entitlement volunteers. Nonprofit organizations have very limited resources to meet their mission, and they cannot waste those resources waiting and hoping entitlement volunteers maybe possibly might spare some time this week to staff the information booth at the local fair or come to the board meeting or counsel clients or attend a training or coach a youth soccer team or lead a childcare class or raise the money they have committed to raise or follow the rules.
Let’s say it again: volunteers are not free. An organization has to expend a lot of time and resources to involve volunteers. Organizations have to provide at least one staff member to supervise volunteer work and ensure volunteers don’t do any harm. Staff has to develop activities for volunteers to do — activities that often would be probably be cheaper and done more quickly by staff themselves. The organization has to monitor the volunteers and record their progress to the board and donors. And they must make sure the work volunteers undertake is of the quality and type the organization’s clients deserve.
Therefore, organizations want the people who volunteer to be worth all that investment of time and money. They want volunteers to take their commitment seriously, finish what they’ve started, and continue to support the organization, as volunteers and, maybe, as donors. They don’t want volunteers who aren’t going to show up, who do substandard work, who won’t be on time, who won’t follow policies and procedures, and who will reduce the trust and respect clients, donors and partner organizations have for the organization — those volunteers not only aren’t worth the effort, they aren’t worth the damage they may do.
When I am in charge of recruiting and screening volunteers, I have raised the bar high for applications – and the higher I have raised the bar for new volunteers, the more strict I’ve been regarding standards, the more hoops I’ve required volunteers to jump through with regard to reporting and work quality:
the less volunteer recruiting I have to do
the fewer conflicts among and with volunteers I’ve had to deal with
the fewer volunteers that drop out mid-assignment
the fewer volunteers I’ve had to let go (in fact, I’ve had to fire a volunteer just once)
the higher the quality of the volunteers contributions
the happier volunteers have been (based on their comments and how long they volunteer)
the less time I spend trying to put together reports showing volunteer effectiveness (because they provide the information automatically; I always have the information on hand, ready when needed)
the less time I have to spend trying to restore the faith of clients, staff and the general public in the work of the organization, and in volunteers in general, because of volunteer missteps
Nonprofit staff should never be afraid to say no to an offer of volunteer services. They should remember that their organizations and those they serve deserve the very best when it comes to services, including services provided by volunteers. And there are plenty of people out there ready to jump through your hoops and commit to quality volunteer service — and have their own service evaluated.
A colleague recently posted that this was one of the things that makes a great volunteer manager: going with your gut feeling.
UGH! Dislike!
In my trainings, I say just the opposite: do NOT assume your gut is telling you the truth.
NEVER let your gut be your guide to decision-making.
I’ve had volunteer managers tell me that their gut reaciton to applicants to volunteer is their primary guide to keeping “bad” people out of their program. And, so, I remind them of all of the many people who had no negative gut feeling about clergy, coaches or youth group leaders before or while those people abused children. And of all many people who did not have a negative gut feeling about that boyfriend, spouse, family member or friend who, after years of knowing each other, turned out to be a liar, a cheat – even a killer.
Everyone in the Penn State/Second Mile scandal went with their gut instead of following good policy and procedures. Look where it got them!
Linda Graff once told me that one of the most chilling things you will ever do is sit in a courtroom and watch all of the many people ready to testify on behalf of their husbands, wives, sons, daughters, neighbors, co-workers, etc. – oh, no, that person could NOT do the things you have accused him/her of. It’s impossible. I KNOW this person. I don’t care what your evidence says – I know in my soul he/she is a good person. Those people’s guts told them one thing – and despite the facts, they prefer to listen to their gut.
I have almost let my gut feeling turn volunteers applicant away — and those people have turned out to be some of my best volunteers. What I was actually doing was hearing my prejudices: about age, about culture, or about education (or lack their of). And I was honest enough to explore that and admit to it.
I have had people tell me, after working together for a couple of months, “You know, my first impression of you was insert-negative-comment-here. You have turned out not at all to be that way.” And I thank them for NOT going with their gut!
I’ve had endless numbers of volunteer managers tell me that their gut reaction to virtual volunteering is NO WAY IS THAT SOMETHING MY ORGANIZATION SHOULD DO.
In the course of my job, I never let my gut make decisions for me. Ever. Yes, my gut reaction might lead me in a direction, but if my gut is telling me something in the work place, such as don’t accept that person as a volunteer or that new idea just isn’t worth trying, I don’t make a decision based on that – I do more investigating and questioning. When it comes to effectively supporting and engaging volunteers, I need facts. Why am I having that feeling that such-and-such isn’t a good volunteer? Is it that he is being evasive in his answers? Is it that she seems too good to be true? Is it that he looks like an ex-boyfriend? When I start answering those questions honestly for myself, I either come to the concrete, fact-based reason I don’t want the person as a volunteer or I have to accept that my reluctance is more about prejudice than reality.
Volunteer managers: you are not psychic. There are no such things as psychics. Listen to your gut, but do NOT let it make your decisions, and if you haven’t said in the last three months, “Wow, my gut was wrong about that!” then you are NOT being honest with yourself!
Culture Matters is an online curriculum specifically developed by the Peace Corps to help newly-accepted members acquire some of the knowledge and skills they will need to work successfully and respectfully in other cultures. It’s not just about cultural sensitive or cultural awareness, however; it’s also about knowing what to do when one is personally stressed out, feeling overwhelmed, etc. It’s a combination of self-evaluation and self-strategizing. It not only helps to build volunteers’ awareness of how to handle a variety of challenges, it also might help to screen out people who are not emotionally nor mentally prepared, or not emotionally resilient enough, to serve overseas.
Even if your volunteers are not going overseas, they can face feelings of isolation, stress, even fear, especially if they are in high responsibility or high-stress roles, such as
counseling women who have been abused (including rape victims)
fighting fires
providing emergency health care
participating in search and rescue missions
counseling low-income people regarding financial management
repeatedly communicating about a controversial issue that often incites hostility among some audiences
working in a facility that houses abandoned animals
mentoring high school students
serving food to people who could not eat otherwise
working with clients in a hospice program
helping at a free clinic
leading entire teams for a high-profile project
providing services to people who have lost everything to a fire or natural disaster
providing services to crime victims
training people in activities related to any of the above
Volunteers in these and other situations may need mental and emotional health support — activities that will relieve stress, address emotional conflicts, and help them explore how to balance work, volunteering, family and social activities. Otherwise, you risk volunteer burnout, or volunteers providing sub-par service.
Creating such an online curriculum for your own volunteers can be as easy as finding or recruiting a volunteer to interview current and previous volunteers, compiling their feedback into a draft curriculum, and then asking the volunteers to offer edits and suggestions. What a great assignment for someone looking for an internship as a part of their university studies, a retired human resources professional looking to volunteer for a limited task at your organization, someone who wants a project that will look great on their résumé, and on and on. As part of creating your online curriculum for volunteers to help them handle stress, map resources in your community that can support your volunteers’ health and mental well-being. These can include:
communities of faith and secular/ethical societies
debt counseling services
for-profit and non-profit exercise clubs (private health clubs, the YMCA and YWCA, community pools, T’ai Chi clubs in the park, yoga classes, sports clubs. etc.)
centers for aging/senior support
free and low-cost health clinics
Also, develop a list of “escape hatches” — lists of of free or very low-cost places nearby where your local volunteers can get away, relax and recharge. This can be a list of nearby city, state and national parks, a list of cinemas in the area, places to get a massage, a manicure, a pedicure or a facial, dance studios, golf courses (even miniature golf courses), art museums, and on and on. If you visit each of these places, you may be able to establish discounts with these organizations for your volunteers.
Provide information about these resources (web site address, physical address, hours of operation, etc.) to all volunteers. Provide the information via a regular group meeting, and/or via your online community. Put brochures for these resources in a place where volunteers take breaks. You can also use the information in one-on-one situations, but the information should be provided to all volunteers, not just those you think might need it.
Provide information on how to reach these places by mass transit and by bike — or provide web site URLs where your volunteers can find this information.
Compiling all of the above information and putting it together on an internal web site or on paper, or gathering brochures from all these various different sites and making a display of them in a staff break room, is a great task for a volunteer.
Even if most of your volunteers don’t take advantage of these free and low-cost services, think of the message you are sending to your volunteers by providing this information: that you value them and their health, that you understand that their volunteering activities can be stressful, and that your organization CARES. What a powerful form of volunteer recognition.
If you have benefited from this blog or other parts of my web site and would like to support the time that went into researching information, developing material, preparing articles, updating pages, etc. (I receive no funding for this work), here is how you can help.
Too often, volunteer involvement is described this way:
Volunteers contact us, we give them an assignment, they do it. Ta da!
This simplified description comes often from people who are from the for-profit/corporate sector or who are in senior management – they have no idea how much work it takes behind the scenes for successful volunteer engagement.
Volunteers should certainly feel like getting into an assignment is seamless and quick, but to give volunteers that experience actually takes a LOT of planning behind-the-scenes by the organization. For instance, there are rarely a plethora of well-defined tasks or roles laying around a nonprofit office waiting to be done by just anyone with some time on their hands and a good heart. It takes a lot of time and support to develop volunteering assignments, including “micro-volunteering” tasks that will take just a few hours, and not just any person is appropriate every assignment – some require particular skills, a certain amount of time within a specific time frame, or work at a particular type of day.
In addition, a person’s desire to volunteer is often not enough for a volunteer to be successful: a candidate needs to be screened at least a bit in order to make sure the volunteer understands the very real commitment he or she is making, even if that commitment is just a couple of hours. The candidate may need to be further screened to make sure he or she really does know how to do the assignment. To not do any screening means much more time down the road for the organization, tracking down volunteers, correcting sub-par assignments, finding more volunteers or staff to re-do assignments that were poorly done or not done at all, etc.
And, ofcourse, supporting volunteers takes a lot of time, no matter how automated you make the process. Someone has to be contacting volunteers to ensure they are getting assignments done, have the support they need, etc. Someone has to keep volunteers in-the-loop about what’s happening at the organization, and to recognize the value of their work – otherwise, those volunteers go away.
A terrific, easy exercise that can be really helpful in showing just what it takes for your organization or an individual department to involve and support volunteers successfully is to create a flow chart mapping your volunteer engagement, or a series of maps for different parts of the volunteer management process — the volunteer in-take process, the volunteer assignment development and matching process, the volunteer support assignment, etc. You could do charts for each of these processes, and then show how they all intersect.
You can do this mapping exercise alone, by yourself (if you are the coordinator of volunteer program or involve large numbers of volunteers yourself), or you can do this with a group of employees and volunteers. A dry erase white board with markers is best, but any computer program that allows you to do a flow chart or graphics will work as well.
Here’s one example of what a volunteer in-take flow chart could look like as a result of your mapping exercise (every organization is different):
Don’t be surprised if, in doing this process, you find gaps in your volunteer management process. I’ve done this mapping process with several departments and organizations, and the results have been revealing. Many times, I’ve found that an organization thinks it isn’t recruiting enough volunteers when, actually, it is — a lot of people are, in fact, responding to recruitment messages, but their information isn’t being forwarded to the coordinator of volunteers, or the volunteers are getting responses weeks or months after they express interest, instead of within hours or a few days. If I’m evaluating a volunteer program and an organization cannot produce such a chart — they don’t know what happens when someone calls, they don’t know how information gets to the coordinator of volunteers, the coordinator can’t say how many calls or emails he or she gets every month from potential volunteers, etc. — I know just how deep problems may be regarding the organization’s recruitment, involvement and support of volunteers.
Doing a chart correctly may require interviewing more than one person. For instance, just to map the volunteer in-take process correctly takes interviewing every person who answers the organization’s phone or main email address.
When I’m in charge of coordinating volunteers, I find this exercise quite helpful because it helps me educate fellow staff quickly on what it takes to involve volunteers successfully and helps explain why I’m doing whatever it is I’m doing.
Again, the example above is just for a volunteer in-take process (it doesn’t show how a volunteer is matched to an assignment, or how an assignment gets developed in the first place), and your map could be different for your organization. Maybe you don’t have an onsite orientation; your volunteer orientation may just be an email message, or may be an online video candidates for volunteering can view on their own. In either case, your map needs to show how you know they have read that email message or viewed that video.
Update: this chart and the methodology behind it are detailed in The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook: Fully Integrating Online Service Into Volunteer Involvement. The book can help you fully explore the reality of remote volunteer engagement, in terms of policy and procedures, to ensure success, as well as using the Internet to support and engage ALL volunteers, including those that provide some or all of their service onsite. This book was helpful long before the global pandemic spurred so many organizations to, at last, embrace virtual volunteering. This is the most comprehensive resource anywhere on working with online volunteers, and on using the Internet to support ALL volunteers, including those you might not think of as “online” volunteers.
If you have benefited from this blog or other parts of my web site or my YouTube videos and would like to support the time that went into researching information, developing material, preparing articles, updating pages, etc. (I receive no funding for this work), here is how you can help.
Dave Carroll became famous for writing a song and making a video about United Airlines smashing his guitar and not taking responsibility for it. The video went viral, Mr. Carroll not only appeared on various media outlets as a result, including CNN and The View, not only did United give him the financial settlement and apology he’d been demanding for months, he also became a paid speaker for various conferences and retreats, talking about “inhuman customer-service policies” and their unseen costs: loss of customer trust (and, therefore, customers), brand destruction, and more.
