Tag Archives: tech4good

Looking for EU charities & NGOs to offer feedback

I’m looking for employees, consultants and volunteers at charities and NGOs based in the European Union to comment on any or all of the following three (3) subjects, based on their own observations or experience. Various people at one organization can comment, since different people at any one organization may have different perspectives. The identity of anyone who responds, and that of any organization a respondent represents, will be kept anonymous in any published material that might include that person’s comments unless that person gives express written consent otherwise.

If you are an employee, consultant or volunteer at a charity or NGO based in the EU, I welcome you to comment on any or all of the following three subjects, in a direct email to me at jc@coyotecommunications.com or, if you want your identity and comments to be fully public, in the comments section of this blog:

(1) The lack of widely-available online volunteering work in the EU, compared to, say, the USA, may include:

  • lack of support at charities, NGOs and other organizations for the engagement of volunteers (online or off); support includes staffing, knowledge and funding
  • lack of understanding regarding the value of volunteer engagement, in general (not just online) for a charity or NGO
  • lack of awareness or understanding regarding online volunteering
  • lack of availability of online tools at charities, NGOs and other organizations for the engagement of online volunteers (many organizations have prohibitions instituted by senior management or the IT department with regard to using social media, VOiP technologies like Skype, or cloud-based platforms)

Do you agree? Disagree? Have comments?

(2) For organizations based in the EU that are involving volunteers online in any way (this can include volunteers from outside the EU):

  • Why did your organization start involving volunteers online?
  • What did you have to do or change at your organization to start involving volunteers online?
  • How have you evaluated the impact of the work of online volunteers at your organization (and if you have not evaluated the impact, why not?)
  • Have any of the volunteers who have contributed to your organization somehow online said that their online volunteering experience lead to paid work, to their greater employability or to career advancement?

(3) Obstacles to leveraging online volunteering work into greater employability/career advancement in the EU may include:

  • lack of available online volunteering work
  • lack of awareness of this type of volunteering among those seeking/needing employment
  • perceptions among potential employers regarding the value of volunteering, online or onsite, for application to paid work (“it’s just volunteering” or “you were just volunteering, rather than really working”)

Do you agree? Do you think these factors might affect this as well:

  • lack of computer or Internet access?
  • lack of basic skills needed to engage as a volunteer online?
  • lack of literacy?

If you are based in the EU and work for an organization based in the EU, as a paid employee, consultant or volunteer, and this organization involves volunteers online in any way, and you have any comments or questions on the aforementioned three subjects, I would welcome your response. The identity of anyone who responds, and that of any organization a respondent represents, will be kept anonymous in any published material that might include that person’s comments unless that person gives express written consent otherwise. If you are an employee, consultant or volunteer at a charity or NGO based in the EU, I welcome you to comment on any or all of the following three subjects, in a direct email to me at jc@coyotecommunications.com or, if you want your identity and comments to be fully public, in the comments section of this blog.

Why am I asking? Because I am working on a research project for the EU for the next several weeks. The project is called the ICT4EMPL Future Work project, and I am contacting various organizations based in the EU, or that have offices in the EU, and that I know, or strongly suspect, involve online volunteers. I define online volunteers as people who do some or all of their volunteering (unpaid service) for an organization via the Internet, via a computer, smart phone or tablet they are using from home, work, school, or elsewhere offsite from the organization. The online volunteers that your organization involves do not all have to be in the EU.

My part of this research is to explore the state of play of internet-mediated volunteering: virtual volunteering, microvolunteering, crowd-sourced labour, crowdfunding, internet-mediated volunteering, internet-mediated work exchange (timebanks and complementary currency), etc., with regard to developing entrepreneurship and self employment, skills and social inclusion, and transition from education to employment for young people in the European Union.

I have a wiki that details this research project.

To stay updated about this project:

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:

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

 

What mobile apps do you promote to clients, volunteers, supporters, staff?

The Center’s Internet & American Life Project tweeted out a link to a list of health-related mobile apps people have on their phones
(http://pewrsr.ch/UnJyt5).

 

It prompts me to ask this question: what mobile apps does your nonprofit, NGO, library, school or other mission-based organization encourage clients, volunteers, supporters, and/or staff to use? Or just simply recommend – and do you recommend it as a part of the goals of your mission or as a way to improve productivity/better communication with volunteers and staff?

 

For instance,

  • A nonprofit that promotes healthy habits/change of lifestyle to improve health might encourage use of the apps from the Pew list to its clients.
  • A nonprofit promoting alternatives to car travel might encourage the use of apps related to bus schedules or bike routes.
  • A homeless shelter might encourage use of apps related to bus schedules or health as well (a lot of people in the USA living on the streets have feature phones – such a phone from Tracfone costs just $20)
  • An agricultural-related initiative, such as a community garden or grow-your-own food program, promoting weather-related apps that might be particularly helpful to its constituents
  • A nonprofit live theatre might use or promote the use of the kinds of apps listed here:
    http://www.dialaphone.co.uk/blog/2010/11/06/top-10-theatre-mobile-apps/

What mobile apps might an organization with hundreds or thousands of volunteers, an organization that works with wildlife, an initiative promoting positive activities for girls, an animal shelter, a library, or any other nonprofit, NGO, library, school or government initiative want to promote to volunteers, staff, clients, or supporters?

 

You can answer here, but I’d really love it if you would answer over on TechSoup, where I originally asked this question:
http://forums.techsoup.org/cs/community/f/13/p/36558/124520.aspx

What did you learn today? Or this week?

Are you an employee, a consultant or a volunteer at/with a nonprofit, library, NGO, school, government agency, charity or other mission-based organization?

Then these questions are for you:

What did you learn today, or this week, or recently, about computer or Internet/networked tech while working with or for a that mission-based organization? Or some other thing you learned about tech that would be helpful to others? And per this learning, what else do you need to know?

It could be:

“I learned to do this cool thing with Outlook – I can now…”

or

“I learned that I really don’t like such-and-such feature on LinkedIn. Here’s why…”

or

“I learned that washing my LG 500 feature phone in the washing machine leads to it no longer working” (Yes, that’s me).

I would really love it if you would answer that question here on the TechSoup Community Forum.

Registration on TechSoup is required in order to respond, but registration is free. And by registering, you can participate in TechSoup community activities in the future! Come on, let’s hear from ya!

Pioneering in “hacks for good”: Knowbility

Hackathons, hacks for good, hackfests or codefests are quite the buzz words these days.

There are a lot of new initiatives getting a lot of attention for mobilizing people with high tech skills to help various causes at individual events: these initiatives bring these people together to spend the day, or maybe a few days in a week, at computers, usually in one big room, with everyone using their skills to do good, eat some good food, take lots of fun photos of everyone in action, and celebrate the great work at the end of the day.

Good stuff. But one of the first organizations to do this, Knowbility, gets lost amongst the much better-funded, higher profile newcomer groups, and it’s such a shame, because more people really should get to know Knowbility!

AIR Houston 2007

Knowbility is a national nonprofit organization based in Austin, Texas that creates technology programs that support independent living for people with disabilities, including veterans. Knowbility’s signature event is its Accessibility Internet Rally (AIR) – a hackathon that brings together teams of web designers to learn about web design accessibility standards, and then to apply those standards in a competition to create web sites for nonprofit organizations. The result of an AIR event isn’t just a fun day and new web sites; all participants walk away with an understanding of web design accessibility standards they didn’t have before that they can apply to their daily professional work, and the volunteer teams, most of them from the corporate sector, learn about the unique work of nonprofit organizations, creating opportunities for better partnerships in the future.

Knowbility’s activities have earned all sorts of awards and recognition – like the Peter F. Drucker Foundation Recognition for Nonprofit Innovation. On September 21, 2000, the White House issued a press release to highlight programs across the country that are helping to bridge the digital divide for people with disabilities and Knowbility’s AIR event in Colorado was mentioned by President Clinton as a new and noteworthy initiative. And I’ll never forget when they got mentioned at the end of Oprah’s talk show, resulting in an onslaught of emails and phone calls and oh-so-much excitement.

Knowbility earns more than 60% of its revenue through fee-for-service offerings. But that means it still relies heavily on grants and donations. Knowbility is worth your financial support. I really want this organization to continue – more than that, I actually want this organization to launch more AIR events and other activities all over the USA, and beyond! Knowbility is worth your investment.

And if you have ever been involved with Knowbility in any way, consider blogging about your expereince, talking about it on your Facebook status update or Twitter feed or Google Plus profile or other social media profile, and linking to the donation page.

Here are some other blogs I’ve written about Knowbility:

Hackathons for good? That’s volunteering!

Volunteer online & make web sites accessible

Nonprofits & volunteers – time to brag on Techsoup!

There are a LOT of opportunities right now on TechSoup for nonprofit employees and volunteers to share experiences and offer advice. Here are some recent questions and topics oh-so-ripe for your comment:

Nonprofit looking for Best Practices for Gathering Emails, other Info from New Donors.

Nonprofits, libraries, universities, others using Moodle? There’s someone looking for advice from you!

How does your nonprofit, library, other mission-based organization deal with “bad” tech etiquette?

What’s your experience with ICTs for rural economic development?

A small nonprofit maritime museum books sailing trips – & needs software advice for reservations

Are you a nonprofit or volunteer using Ubuntu Linux?

Nonprofit that collects veterinary medical supplies seeks inventory management software for Mac.

Firing a volunteer over insulting musings on Facebook re: a nonprofit or library?

Software for Substance Abuse and Mental Health Treatment?

Nonprofits & libraries: are employees, #volunteers using Google Drive, iCloud, Dropbox, other cloud apps? Share!

Nonprofit with network question: Some entries in NPS logs are in Hex others in plain text. Help?

SMS Engagement for civil society, the humanitarian sector, nonprofits, government programs – your experience?

Fear of Wrestling

You probably won’t hear any well-known social media guru talking about it, you probably won’t hear about it in any social media workshop (except mine, of course), but do you know who is getting the MOST out of social media when it comes to community engagement?

Wrestlers.

Check out 110 Trending Topics in 5 Hours: How WWE Wrestlemania Body-Slammed Social Media:

Behind strong pushes on Twitter and YouTube, WWE Wrestlemania XXVIII laid the smack down on social media last weekend, teaching a digital engagement lesson to the sports entertainment world.

Heck, Wrestlemania taught a digital engagement lesson to the nonprofit world, to ANY world, if those sectors will listen. Also see: How the WWE Is Making WrestleMania More Social Than Ever.

But will you click on those links? Or are you already lifting up your nose at the mere mention of the word wrestling?

Professional wrestling – or, as my people like to call it, rasslin’ – is unbelievably popular world wide. I’ve been stunned at how many wrestling shirts I’ve seen all over the world, including in Kabul, Afghanistan. In Kabul, there are (or, at least, in 2007, there were) gyms in the city that had the images of wrestlers from Wrestlemania in front of their businesses to draw people in (don’t sue, Wrestlemania, just don’t). I couldn’t understand why USAID wasn’t employing stars from Wrestlemania to create public service announcements for Afghans about whatever it is we’re trying to get Afghans to do (support women in microenterprises, support girls going to school, grow wheat instead of poppies, drive on the right side of the road, employ proper water sanitation practices, etc.). I’m totally serious, USAID!

But we cringe at the thought of… sniff… wrestlers being involved in anything noble or high-minded or community-focused like that.

I worked with People Magazine once upon a time to do a pilot online mentoring program with kids in Washington, D.C. – and the People folks wanted celebrities to be the online mentors. At a classroom we visited in the basement of a school (where it was easily over 100 degrees on that stifling hot day), there were probably five kids wearing Wrestlemania t-shirts. I talked to the kids while the rest of our visiting party stood across the room, as far away from the students as possible, and when I asked the students what kind of celebrities they admired, they didn’t name rap stars – they named wrestlers. I was thinking, hey great, we’re getting wrestlers for these kids as online mentors! Later that afternoon, in our followup planning meeting in an air-conditioned room of a then dominant Internet provider in Virginia, a room so cold I needed a sweater, People Magazine staff balked at the idea of wrestlers. They said they were thinking of celebrities such as Martha Stewart and Charleton Heston as possible mentors for these teens. I kid you not – that’s the two people they named in that meeting as examples of proper online mentors for inner-city teens.

It’s worth noting that the first virtual volunteering by a celebrity I have been able to find has been by…  A RETIRED WRESTLER. Mick Foley is a an online volunteer with RAINN (Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network), the largest anti-sexual assault organization in the USA. He talked about his experience as an online volunteer on a November 2010 episode of The Daily Show with John Stewart. In a RAINN web video, Foley says, “I cannot think of a better way to spend a few hours a week than helping someone who needs RAINN’s services.” Learn more about volunteering for RAINN’s Online Hotline.

(Yes, I just burned a bridge with People Magazine. So much for my bid to be one of their most beautiful people. Ah, well.)

Let’s be clear: I actually don’t watch wrestling. Well, now, anyway – when I was 8, I loved watching Bill “Superstar” Dundee on TV. I also loved roller derby in those days. But, indeed, I have moved on. I could not name a modern-day wrestler. I’m not as hip as you might think.

But I haven’t become too sophisticated to say, way to go, Wrestlemania. I’ll happily learn from Wrestlemania and wrestlers when it comes to virtual volunteering, online mentoring, and online community engagement, I’d love to invite your participation in any community engagement activity I’m a part of, and I’ll even use examples of your online activities in my workshops – even while other social media experts and nonprofit management trainers rolls their eyes and cringe.

But I still might call it rasslin’.

Consulting services by Jayne Cravens.

 

My Twitter Lists

One of the things I really like about Twitter is that I don’t have to follow absolutely everyone whose tweets I might be interested in reading at some point; I can put people and organizations on various lists, by subject matter, geography, whatever, and then check in with those lists as I like. I pick one or two of my lists a day, and then spend a few minutes going through the tweets of that list.

I make my Twitter lists public – anyone can see them. I’m also sharing them below – I thought you might like to see what they are, either to find someone you should be following, to subscribe to any of these lists or maybe to finally get you on Twitter at long last.

Afghanistan
People and organizations that tweet about Afghanistan. I’ll always care about Afghanistan…

Aid work & Dev
Organizations working development, aid and humanitarian response in developing/transitional countries.

CSR
Corporate social responsibility and social entrepreneurship, including pro bono help

Colleagues
My professional and volunteering colleagues (if you aren’t on this list, and we’ve worked together at some point in some way, and you are on Twitter, please let me know!)

español
Info & orgs in Spain & Latin America, or any site I follow that tweets in español, all related to some subject I follow (aid work and development, tech4good/ICT4D, tourism for good, CSR, FOSS, etc.)

FOSS
Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) – vendors, distributors, volunteers and advocates.

International NGOs
Major international non-governmental organizations I’m particularly interested in.

Nonprofit associations
City, state & regional nonprofit associations in the USA.

PNW
Portland, Oregon & Pacifc Northwest Tweeters I follow.

Tech4Good ICT4D
Also #nptech, apps for good. Organizations and individuals engaged in activities that use computer, software and Internet technology to help individuals, communities and the environment.

tourism4good
Organizations promoting tourism for good, or tourism for development.

Women & Girls Empowerment
Orgs & tweeters re women & girls empowerment/rights

Vol Research
Research regarding volunteerism and/or community engagement

Volunteerism non-English
Volunteer info & orgs that do not tweet English (but tweet in Spanish, French, Portuguese, or anything I can sorta kinda figure out)

For Volunteers
If you want to / are a volunteer. If you tweet about your volunteering activities, the things you do as a volunteer, contact me and let me know. If you are an organization focused primarily on volunteers (you have developed a web site or app to help people find volunteering opportunities, for instance), let me know.

Volunteer recruit/manage
For those that work with volunteers – for managers of volunteers, and for organizations that regularly tweet regarding their volunteers.

Volunteerism
Promoting or researching the concept of volunteers/community help.

If you want to be on any of these lists, please contact me. And if you are interested in the subjects I am, or want to know what I’m up to, I hope you will follow me on Twitter!

What I’m taking from 2011 for 2012

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

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

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