Tag Archives: virtual volunteering

Latest reviews of The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook

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vvbooklittleHere are some of the latest reviews of The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook:

“We are engaging volunteers with smart phones to review public venues for accessibility. I must say the full review does take more like 45 minutes instead of 10. This information is then available on a website to anyone who might need it. We have found we are making people more aware of the needs of those with different abilities and the volunteers are loving this virtual opportunity. The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook was invaluable!”

— Marty O’Dell, CVA, Volunteer Program Manager, Goodwill Easter Seals Miami Valley, Dayton Ohio, USA, via the comments section for Susan Ellis’ July 2014 Hot Topic.

“I highly recommend the Guidebook to all association leaders, directors of volunteers in agencies, NGO directors and faith based organizational leaders. Guidebook is a must read and resource guide that should be on the desk of any serious leader of volunteers.”

From his review of The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook, July 24, 2014 by Thomas McKee (also posted to our page on Amazon).

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 in Austin in September

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I’ll be in Austin, Texas September 17 – 19 for the Alliance for Nonprofit Management Annual Conference. My book, The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook, co-authored with Susan Ellis (who will be in Austin too!), is a finalist for Terry McAdam Book Award. In addition to being present for the awards, Susan and I will also be presenting (details TBA), and I’ll be helping at Susan’s Energize booth at the conference, where we will have several copies of our book for purchase, as well as many other volunteer engagement books published by Energize.

I’m excited beyond belief because Austin was my home for four years, it’s where I directed The Virtual Volunteering Project from the University of Texas at Austin, and when I’m stressed, it’s the happy place I go to in my mind… I haven’t been there since 2009. SO EXCITED. If you are an organization in Austin and want to book me for a short training or consultancy while I’m there, please contact me (also see my public calendar for my availability).

The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook is available in both traditional paperback and as an ebook.

virtual volunteering is probably happening at your org!

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A guest post from Susan J. Ellis, President of Energize, Inc., originally posted as a “Quick Tip” in Energize Volunteer Management Update, May 2014.

OPEN YOUR EYES:ONLINE VOLUNTEERING MAY BE RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOU

Jayne Cravens and I are enjoying a variety of feedback about our new book, The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook. But we admit frustration at one too-common reaction: “That seems interesting, but I don’t see how our organization would possibly involve online volunteers.” So this month’s Tip is: Open your eyes!

If virtual volunteering is still hard for you to accept comfortably, consider some of the points we raise in the book. For example, it is rare to find an organization where onsite volunteers are constantly under observation; most volunteers provide service out of sight of their manager, whether in a different cubicle, a different room, a different area of the facility, or away from the organization’s headquarters altogether. Volunteers who are youth group leaders, home visitors, coaches, mentors, and tutors generally provide their service out in the field (for some, literally out ina field). Obviously, organizations have long ago resolved their concerns about allowing certain volunteers the freedom to do their work, make judgment calls, and act responsibly without constant staff surveillance, even when those volunteers are working with children.

It is hard to imagine any volunteering effort where at least some integration of the Internet would not be appropriate or in which some Internet use with volunteers is not already happening.

Invisible Virtual Volunteering? There is a very good possibility that online service has evolved naturally at your agency already. You need to identify it. See what you can discover by asking some key questions:

  • If your organization asks volunteers to visit clients in their homes, or to mentor or tutor people one-on-one at an offsite location or via the phone, or to do any sort of outreach into the community on your behalf, ask: Do volunteers ever interact with these clients/community members online as well, such as with e-mail, instant messaging or calls via Skype? How and how often?
  • If there are volunteers helping with your organization’s Web site or with any computer or Internet tech-related issue, is all service being performed onsite, or are some activities being done via a volunteer’s home, work, or school computer? Ask this of both the employees who work with these volunteers and the volunteers themselves.
  • If any volunteer assignments involve writing of any sort – editing a newsletter, doing research (probably, these days, online!), producing reports, etc. – don’t you expect to receive the materials in electronic form, via e-mail or posted to a cloud platform such as Dropbox or Google Docs?
  • Are there any pro bono consultants at your organization? If so, are they interacting with employees online sometimes, in addition to onsite meetings, or doing their work (such as producing a report) offsite from your organization and submitting it via e-mail?
  • Does the board of directors ever “discuss” issues via e-mail exchanges or live chat before a formal face-to-face meeting? What about various committees and advisory groups?

vvbooklittleChances are great that you will answer one or more of these questions affirmatively. So if you discover people are already doing virtual volunteering, call it what it is and do more!

The LastVirtual Volunteering Guidebook really can help you. It’s available both as a traditional printed book and as a digital book. It’s written in a style so that the suggestions can be used with any online tools, both those in use now and those that will become popular after, say, Facebook goes the way of America Online. This is a resource for anyone that works with volunteers – the marketing manager, the director of client services, and on and on – not just the official manager of volunteers.

And if you have more simple ideas

Incorporating virtual volunteering into a corporate employee volunteer program

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A new resource on my web site:

Incorporating virtual volunteering into a corporate employee volunteer program 
(a resource for businesses / for-profit companies)
Virtual volunteering – volunteers providing service via a computer, smart phone, tablet or other networked advice – presents a great opportunity for companies to expand their employee philanthropic offerings. Through virtual volunteering, some employees will choose to help organizations online that they are already helping onsite. Other employees who are unable to volunteer onsite at a nonprofit or school will choose to volunteer online because of the convenience. This resource reviews what your company needs to do, step-by-step, to launch or expand virtual volunteering as a part of your employee volunteering program.

Inspired by my recent webinar with Kaye Morgan-Curtis, of Newell Rubbermaid for VolunteerMatch: Virtual Volunteering: An Untapped Resource for Employee Engagement.

ICTs, Employability & Social Inclusion in the EU

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(note: if any URL does not work, cut and paste it into archive.org).

In my last blog, I talked about how, at long last, my paper, Internet-mediated Volunteering in the EU:  Its history, prevalence, and approaches and how it relates to employability and social inclusion, had been published. My research was for the ICT4EMPL Future Work project undertaken by the Information Society Unit of the Institute for Prospective Technological Studies at the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre.

The ICT4EMPL Future Work project aims to inform policy of new forms of work and pathways to employability in the European Union mediated by ICTs – Information and Communications Technologies. The ICT4EMPL research project is in the context of of implementation of the Europe 2020 strategy and the Digital Agenda for Europe. For more information, see Skills & Jobs, Digital Agenda for Europe.

The ICT4EMPL Future Work project developed, produced overview reports on the state of play of crowd-sourced labour, crowdfunding, internet-mediated volunteering and internet-mediated work exchange (timebanks and complementary currency). These activities were explored in relation to key themes of opportunities for entrepreneurship and self employment, skills and social inclusion, and transition from education to employment for young people.

In addition to my paper, here are other papers published as part of the ICT4EMPL Future Work project, and almost all of them talk about volunteering in some way:

Wish they had a way people could comment on the papers. Online discussions about these topics would further our learning about them.

Internet-mediated Volunteering in the EU (virtual volunteering)

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paperAt long last, Internet-mediated Volunteering in the EU:  Its history, prevalence, and approaches and how it relates to employability and social inclusion, has been published. 

My research was for the ICT4EMPL Future Work project undertaken by the Information Society Unit of the Institute for Prospective Technological Studies at the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre, and consumed most of my 2013.

As part of this project, I created a wiki of all of the various resources I used for my research, and it includes a list of online volunteering-related recruitment or matching web sties that are either focused on or allow for the recruitment of online volunteers from EU-countries, and a list of more than 60 organisations in EU countries that involve online volunteers in some way. The wiki offers many more resources as well, not all of which made it into the final paper.

I also blogged about what I learned from researching virtual volunteering in Europe, such as how much virtual volunteering is happening all over Europe, how Spain is, by far, the leader in Europe regarding virtual volunteering (particularly in Catalonia), how little the French seem to be doing with regard to virtual volunteering (tsk tsk), and that traditional volunteer centers in Europe are pretty much ignoring virtual volunteering – if it’s mentioned at all, it’s talked about in terms of being new and rare – which the research firmly established is not at all the case.

It would be amazing if this paper lead to significant change in the EU regarding volunteering: if volunteer centers – from the city level to the international level – fully acknowledged virtual volunteering at long last, and if detailed materials regarding how to create virtual volunteering tasks was written and published in all the various languages of Europe. It would be great if employers in Europe started valuing volunteer experience on people’s résumés, something they don’t seem to do currently. What would be particularly awesome would be the establishment of online discussion groups for managers of volunteers in European countries., something that, as far as I can tell, only exists for the UK (UKVPMs) and, to a degree, in Spain (E-Voluntas). People are hungry for virtual volunteering activities – particularly, but not limited to, people under 40 in the EU. I hear European-based NGOs and charities complaining about not being able to involve young people as volunteers – and then balk at the idea of creating online volunteering assignments. THIS HAS TO CHANGE.

Also, as a result of this and other research, I have a list of people based in Europe that I consider experts in virtual volunteering – in the U.K., in Spain (of course – mostly in Catalonia, in fact), in Germany, in Italy (met her after the research was turned in, unfortunately) and Poland, and if you are a researcher, journalist, or organization interested in virtual volunteering, and want to talk to an EU-based consultant, give me a shout and I’ll give you my list of contacts.

Also see this review of the paper by Ismael Peña-López.

Citation:

When Words Get in the Way (Like “Virtual Volunteering”)

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This blog originally appeared at the TechSoup blog space in March 2014:

At the start of any workshop I lead related to virtual volunteering, I ask the audience, “How many of you are engaging with volunteers virtually?” If few or no people raise their hands, I ask the question again at the end of my workshop. And the numbers always change.

Take for example the webinar I did recently for TechSoup’s audience on the best assignments for online volunteers. As usual, I ask a few minutes into the workshop how many people were involving online volunteers. The results:

Yes: 32%
No: 68%

So I went through the workshop and then, at the end, asked the question again. This time:

Yes: 58%
No: 42%

The term “virtual volunteering” is a contested term. Some people define oh-so-strictly: remote volunteers who never come on-site at an organization, and all of their service is conducted online. That means people who translate documents wouldn’t be considered online volunteers, because they aren’t actually using the Internet for their service, they are using their skills. So often, organizations are involving online volunteers – they are engaging in virtual volunteering – but because of the definition they’ve decided upon before the workshop, they have no idea they are engaged in the practice.

That’s why, at the start of any workshop, after the first poll of the room or the webinar attendees, I offer my definition of virtual volunteering:

Volunteers completing tasks, in whole or in part, off-site from the organization being assisted, using any Internet-connected device (computer, smart phone, etc.). 

That means a volunteer could perform most of his or her service for an organization on-site, but if he or she is doing some of the service from home – designing a logo, tagging photos with keywords, writing an article for a newsletter, participating in an online community of fellow volunteers – that person is also engaging in virtual volunteering.

Offering that broader definition at workshops makes people realize that, indeed, they are engaging with volunteers online, and a workshop about virtual volunteering isn’t going to help them introduce the practice; it is, instead, going to help them expand what they are already doing.

In Digital Engagement branch of the TechSoup Community forum!

2013 stats – UN’s online volunteering service

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The United Nations’ Online Volunteering service, which is managed by the UN Volunteers program out of Bonn, Germany, part of UNDP, has released some 2013 statistics about its service. In its March newsletter, UNV reports:

In 2013, the number of organizations that joined the service continued to grow (by 18% compared to 2012). 63% of the new organizations that benefited from online volunteers’ support were NGOs and other civil society organizations.

The number of online volunteers remained stable. Of the 11,328 online volunteers mobilized in 2013, 58% were female and 60% below 30 years old. 60% of the volunteers were from developing countries and 2% indicated they were people with disabilities.

By “remained stable”, I guess UNV means the number of online volunteers didn’t increase over 2012 numbers. What I wonder is what UNV is really counting – are these 11,328 people that expressed interest in online volunteering assignments, or people that actually participated in those assignments? Sad to say that most volunteers that sign up for assignments never actually participate in such, usually because the requesting organization never replies to the expression of interest.

What I love is that 60% of the volunteers were from developing countries – that’s something that has been true since I was directing the service from 2001-2005. It’s a number that shocks some people, but not me; when I talk with people in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Northern Africa and East Asia about virtual volunteering, the excitement is palpable.

The majority of the 17,370 online volunteering assignments posted benefitted education (18%) or youth (14%). 8% were gender-related. The majority of assignments benefitted projects in Sub-Saharan Africa (38%) and projects with a global reach (33%).

But I’d love to see the numbers regarding types of virtual volunteering tasks – how many were web design-related, how many were related to consulting or advising in the area of a volunteer’s expertise, etc. And which proved most popular with people signing up for assignments?

On the Virtual Volunteering wiki, you can find a page listing more virtual volunteering research and statistics from a variety of researchers and other sources.

greater good – online

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They also link to research about volunteering.

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

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