Tag Archives: volunteering

Everything old is new again, & again

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People watching TV and writing about it online with their friends at the same time?!. Breathless buzz buzz buzz buzz buzz!!!

Am I talking about the Super Bowl last weekend, and so many people live tweeting it? Or the last episode of 30 Rock last week? Or the Olympics last year?

No – I’m talking about something that’s been happening for at least 30 years.

I’m talking about Usenet, a worldwide Internet discussion system that started in the early 1980s. Usenet was not only the initial Internet community – in the 1980s and 1990s, it was THE place for many of the most important public developments in the commercial/public Internet: it’s where Tim Berners-Lee announced the launch of the World Wide Web, where Linus Torvalds announced the Linux project, and where the creation of the Mosaic web browser was announced (and which revolutionized the Web by turning it into a graphical medium, rather than just text-based).

It was also the place where there were discussion groups – called newsgroups – for everything imaginable: volunteer firefighting, accounting, classic cars, computer repair, tent camping, hiking with your dog, nonprofit management, college football teams – and, indeed, television shows.

Yes, as early as the 1980s, many thousands of people all over the USA were gathering online with friends to talk in realtime about what they were watching on TV. While I didn’t write online during the X-Files in the 1990s, I fully admit to running to my computer as soon as an episode was over, to read what everyone thought and to share my own reactions. Usenet TV and entertainment-related communities fascinated me so much at the time that I ended up writing about them at my day job: about how members of the online communities for the X-Files, Xena, and other entertainment-focused newsgroups engaged in online volunteering & various charitable activities. That was in 1999.

There’s nothing really new about people live tweeting what they are seeing on TV, except that more people are doing it than were on newsgroups and that it’s being done on Twitter now.

And I bring this up because I keep finding articles and research that claims online volunteering or microvolunteering is new. It’s not. Helping people via the Internet, in ways large and small, is a practice that’s more than 30 years old, and just-show-up volunteering without a long-term commitment, which until recently was called episodic volunteering (and I called online versions of it byte-sized volunteering back in the 1990s) has also been around for decades.

We’re not in uncharted territory regarding volunteering or any human interaction online – so let’s embrace our past, learn from it, and give the true innovators, the real pioneers, their due! Rebranding practices and approaches is fine, but let’s not deny our past in the process – there are some great learnings from back in the day that could really help us not so make many missteps online now!

Also see:

Hire me in 2013 – let me help make your organization even better!

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Blunt headline, I know, but it gets the point across: I’m available as a trainer for your organization or conference, or for short-term consulting, for long-term consulting, and, for the perfect opportunity, full-time employment in 2013!

As a consultant, I specialize in training, advising, capacity-building services and strategy development for not-for-profit organizations (NPOs), non-governmental organizations (NGOs), civil society, grass roots organizations, and public sector agencies, including government offices and educational institutions (altogether, these organizations comprise the mission-based sector).

Capacity-building is always central to any training or consulting work I do. Capacity-building means giving people the skills, information and other resources to most effectively and efficiently address the organization’s mission, and to help the organization be attractive to new and continuing support from donors, volunteers, community leaders and the general public. My training and consulting goal is to build the capacities of employees, consultants and volunteers to successfully engage in communications and community involvement efforts long after I have moved on.

My consulting services are detailed here. I can deliver both onsite and online services. Also, I love to travel (especially internationally!).

In 2013, I would love to create or co-create an entire course as a part-time or full-time instructor at a college university within any program training nonprofit managers, social workers, MBA students, aid and humanitarian workers, etc. I am most interested, and, I think, most qualified, to teach courses relating to:

  • public relations (basic public relations functions, outreach to particular audiences, crisis communications, how to address misinformation / misunderstandings, how to deal with public criticism, etc.)
  • strategic communications (systematic planning and utilization of a variety of information flows, internal and external to an organization or program, to deliver a message and build credibility or a brand)
  • cross-platform media and electronic media (using traditional print, synchronous and asynchronous online / digital communications, and emerging digital technologies effectively, and integrating the use of all information flows)
  • public speaking
  • community engagement (involving community members as volunteers, from program supporters to advisers, and creating ways for the community to see the work of an organization firsthand)

Would I consider giving up the consulting life and working just one job, either as a full-time consultant for a year or a full-time, regular employee? Yes! In that regard, I am looking for opportunities to:

  • manage/direct a program at a nonprofit, university or government agency.

or

  • direct the marketing, public relations or other communications activities for a major project or program at a nonprofit, university or government agency – a corporation that matches my professional values.

I have a profile at LinkedIn, as well as details on my own web site about my professional activities. I’m also happy to share my CV with you; email me with your request. If you have any specific questions about my profile, feel free to contact me as well. References available upon request as well!

Looking forward to hearing from you! Questions welcomed!

volunteering in the digital age – cool, but not new

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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

 

Striking a chord in 2012

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My most popular blogs in 2012, based on visitor numbers, were all focused the points of view of volunteers:

  • I’m a Frustrated Volunteer, my confession at just how many of my blogs from the points of view of people that were trying to volunteer and weren’t able to were actually about my own attempts to volunteer since moving back to the USA in 2009. Got a lot of comments as well.
  • A missed opportunity with volunteers, which included this quote from a colleague (not me this time!!) about her volunteering experience at an un-named organization: “No one ever asked me for my name. They didn’t have a sign in sheet. They didn’t capture any of my information. And I have no idea what all this work that I did means to them.”
  • I’m a volunteer & you should just be GRATEFUL I’m here!, which quoted entitlement volunteers, those folks who think organizations should take ANY volunteer and whatever that volunteer offers, and simply be grateful for what they get, should not have standards, quality control or performance measurements when it comes to volunteers, and that to demand quality from volunteers is insulting.

I expected some defensive comments on these blogs, about how over-worked managers of volunteers are, about how they can’t be expected to respond somehow to every person that wants to volunteer or to ask volunteers about their experience, etc. That’s what usually happens when I try to talk about these subjects on online discussion groups for managers of volunteers. That didn’t happen (progress!), but the visitor numbers show that these blogs really did strike a chord!

Being a volunteer – or trying to volunteer – and talking to others volunteering or trying to volunteer, has taught me more about the essentials of volunteer engagement than any book, article or workshop!

I’m quite surprised that the blogs regarding the results of the volunteer management software survey that Rob Jackson (robjacksonconsulting.com) and I did this year didn’t get much more attention than they did – I fully expected the blogs about this survey to be the most popular of the year, but they weren’t! The purpose of the survey was to gather some basic data that might help organizations that involve volunteers to make better-informed decisions when choosing software, and to help software designers to understand the needs of those organizations. We also wanted to get a sense of what organizations were thinking about volunteer management software. I think we more than met those expectations! In addition to the main blog announcing the results in July 2012, there was also a blog about What’s so fabulous about software tools for volunteer management?, a blog about just how much managers of volunteers love spreadsheets, and a blog about What do volunteers do? The answer may surprise you, as reported by survey respondents, that turned out to be much more wide ranging than many volunteer management consultants and books would have you believe. In short, our survey provided a lot of in-depth information about not just software, but volunteer engagement in general.

In case you missed a blog this year: I’m retweeting two or three of my blogs a few times a week between now and the end of the year (follow jcravens42 for more!), and I’ve created this index of all my my blogs (indexed by date).

2012 isn’t over – I’ll be writing a few more entries in the waning days of the year. Stay tuned!

 

A volunteerism blog, not a political one

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During this election season in the USA, there has been a lot of talk about the role volunteers played in the work of various campaigns, including the presidential campaign. But most of it has focused on the “free labor” aspect. Yet, as we all know (right?!), volunteers are NOT free.

 

The reason volunteers were effective in various campaigns this time around – and, well, always – isn’t because they were unpaid labor. Rather, it was because volunteers were the best people for certain tasks, and could do certain tasks far better than paid staff.

 

I got a lot of phone calls related to the election for the last three months. I realized after several of them that, when the person said, “I’m calling from the such-and-such campaign…”, I almost always interrupted them at some point, even if they were calling from a cause or campaign I supported, to say, “Hi, I’m sorry to interrupt, but I have absolutely no money to donate to the campaign whatsoever.” But when the person said, “I’m a volunteer, and I’m helping with the such-and-such campaign…” I let them finish their spiel and answered all of their questions (but still couldn’t give money).

 

I thought about why I was doing that, why I was being so much kinder to the volunteers, and the answer was, for me: the people that are volunteers are supporters of such-and-such campaign, no question. A lot of people will do anything for a paycheck and, therefore, I wonder if the motivation for the political call from someone who is being paid isn’t actually all about the commission they are trying to make for every person that donates. With a volunteer, I know, absolutely, that that person is volunteering from a passion for that candidate. And I want to be a part of that.

I ended up volunteering for a campaign because one of those callers said, up front, that he was a volunteer and he was NOT calling for money – rather, he was calling to see if I would be voting, if I would be supporting a certain presidential candidate, and if I wanted to volunteer. And I said yes. And there was something so warm and energizing about sitting in another volunteer’s house, with lots of other volunteers, calling potential voters on my cell phone, rather than being paid to sit in a corporate-esque phone bank making calls – do you think people could hear that in my voice? I do.

 

That is not to say people that are paid to work on campaigns don’t have passion. I have been paid to do public relations and marketing, and I’m quite passionate about the causes I’ve been paid to promote – I’m not sure I could do the same for something I don’t really feel personally supportive of. I used to cringe when I worked at the UN Volunteers program and people would try to say that UN Volunteers had more passion than UNDP workers in the field – having worked in the field, I could never tell the different in what contract someone had just based on the passion they exhibited, or didn’t in the field.

 

But the fact remains that, often, the public responds more positively to someone that says, “I’m a volunteer” than they do to a person that says, “I’m an employee.” And exactly the opposite is true as well in certain situations – some people will refuse to work with “just a volunteer”, even if that person has more qualifications and expertise than a paid employee of the same organization.

It goes back to what I’ve said again and again: for some tasks, volunteers are the best people for the job, and for some tasks, employees or paid consultants are the best people for the job, and it does NOT have to do with saving money!

Also see:

Writing a mission statement for your organization or program.

Going all-volunteer in dire economic times: use with caution

The Value of Volunteers (and how to talk about such)

Update on a virtual volunteering scam

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I’ve been researching and promoting virtual volunteering since 1995. It’s a subject I feel passionately about. It’s real volunteering. I’ve seen how organizations all over the world, large and small, benefit from online volunteers, and I have accomplished a lot as an online volunteer myself.

So you can imagine how angry I got when I discovered this online volunteering scam back in January 2011: Community Service Help, Inc., which SELLS community service hours. This company charges a fee, and then gives a customer access to videos, which the person doesn’t ever have to actually watch; in return for saying he or she watched the videos, the company writes a letter for the courts, saying the person did community service.

I kept digging about this scam, writing about it again in July 2011, and again in November 2011. My blogging and research resulted in a nasty phone call to my home, as well as numerous comments on my blogs calling me the most vile names you can imagine. If you look in the comments of my blogs, you will also see posts by court representatives who have seen this scam, as well as the mother of someone that was ripped off, who is trying to get their money back.

I have written the Florida State Attorney General’s cyberfraud division, the Consumer Services Department of Miami-Dade County, numerous parole and probation associations, the Corporation for National Service and AL!VE to PLEASE investigate or, at least, take a stand regarding these scam companies – to date, they have done nothing.

Today, I got an email from a TV reporter in Atlanta, Georgia who used my blogs about this scam to create this excellent, DETAILED video about this scam and the people behind it. Thanks Atlanta Fox 5! Of course, after an NBC affiliate in Columbus, Atlanta did a similar, shorter story, the scam company put a tag on its web site noting as featured on NBC news!. So we can only imagine what the scam company will do with this Fox TV piece!

And as I’ve noted before: I’ve been lucky enough to have involved some court-ordered folks as online volunteers – I say “lucky enough” because they have all of them have ended up volunteering for more hours than they were required to do, and been really great volunteers. And, no, I did not charge them!

Also, here’s free information on Finding Online Volunteering / Virtual Volunteering & Home-Based Volunteering with legitimate organizations.

July 6, 2016 update: the web site of the company Community Service Help went away sometime in January 2016, and all posts to its Facebook page are now GONE. More info at this July 2016 blog: Selling community service leads to arrest, conviction

Also see:

What online community service is – and is not

Online volunteer scam goes global

Courts being fooled by online community service scams

My voluntourism-related & ethics-related blogs (and how I define scam)

Magical paychecks

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I’m on a lot of online communities, most focused on nonprofits in some way. And recently, on one of them, someone posted this:

I need to have some kind of porn blocker software on the computers at our office, since volunteers have access to the computers.

Sigh.

Yes, that’s right: while employees, because of their paychecks, aren’t at all inclined to do anything inappropriate on work computers, volunteers, who are unpaid, just can’t stay away from online pornography.

Sigh.

I’ve heard people at nonprofit organizations talk about extensive training and supervision for volunteers regarding confidentiality, working with children and working with money, who then balk when I suggest exactly the same training and supervision is needed for paid employees.

Paychecks are NOT magical! A paycheck doesn’t make someone more knowledgeable than a volunteer, more experienced, more trustworthy, more respectable nor safer.

I love a paycheck as much as anyone! But it doesn’t give me super powers.

More about working with volunteers.

Results of survey re volunteer management software

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At last! The results of the survey of volunteer management software launched by Rob Jackson (robjacksonconsulting.com) and Jayne Cravens (coyotecommunications.com) — ME — are compiled and ready for release!

In March and April 2012, Rob and I drafted and circulated a survey regarding software used to manage volunteer information. The purpose of the survey was to gather some basic data that might help organizations that involve volunteers to make better-informed decisions when choosing software, and to help software designers to understand the needs of those organizations. We also wanted to get a sense of what organizations were thinking about volunteer management software.

At long last, we’re publishing the results of the survey here (in PDF). It includes an executive summary of our findings, as well as the complete responses to questions and our analysis of such. Rob and I did not have time to analyze all of the comments made in answer to some questions; for all questions, we listed the comments made, but we did not always offer any observations about such, or group the responses into categories.

We welcome the efforts of other researchers to offer their own analysis of the data provided.

Software companies and designers: you can learn a LOT from this report to improve your products and your communications with customers!

Have a comment about the survey? Offer it below, or via UKVPMs.

Thanks to everyone who responded to the survey!

 

Have you ever changed your mind?

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Have you ever changed your mind? Have you ever decided to let go of a long-held opinion and embrace one you had long opposed? Particularly regarding issues that affect your approach in your professional or volunteering work?

I have. A few examples:

  • I thought instant messaging was a useless distraction. A colleague changed my mind.
  • I thought Twitter was a useless distraction. Actually using it, and following people like Howard Sherman and Rob Jackson and Skepchicks, convinced me otherwise.
  • I used to think it was ethically unacceptable, under any and all circumstances, for a for-profit company to involve volunteers. I had railed against it more than once. It took Triumph Motorcycles to change my mind.
  • I don’t like certificates in return for volunteering. I don’t value them. And I thought most other people did too. But a member of my staff was passionate in her conviction to try it. So we tried it. They turned out to be one of the most popular features of the UN’s Online Volunteering service.

I’m open to being wrong, or to admitting I haven’t been fully-informed, or to new facts. I’m open to having my mind changed – through solid facts and examples. I like working to change minds – you have to like it if you are going to work in communications / outreach – but I also have to be as open as I want others to be.

But beware: if you want to change my mind, I need facts, and lots of them!

Okay, now you: share in the comments how you have had your mind changed with regard to your work or volunteering.

Say it! Say it! “MANAGERS OF VOLUNTEERS”

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graphic by Jayne Cravens representing volunteersImagine you work with youth. You help a group of youth to develop skills or explore careers or improve their grades or appreciate the arts or practice an art form – whatever. Maybe you are a choir teacher or a Girl Scout leader or a tutoring program coordinator. There’s a big, national conference on working with youth coming up, and you think, great, I am so going to that! I want to get lots of tips to help me be a better leader and supporter of youth!

You arrive at the conference, and the opening speakers are all people who go on and on about how important it is to work with youth. Corporations that fund youth programs are lauded, youth are lauded, parents are lauded, politicians and celebrities that say Youth are great! are lauded – but no one ever mentions the people like you, that actually work with youth, that design and lead these programs and make them happen.

You didn’t come to the conference to be convinced to work with youth; you already work with youth. You know how great working with youth is. You have every intention of continuing to work with youth. You came to the conference to get the knowledge and tools you need to work more effectively with youth. And you were expecting for youth workers such as yourself to at least be mentioned on the first day of the conference.

That would be a really crazy scenario. But it’s how a lot of managers of volunteers feel about current national or international “volunteerism” conferences: these are focused on celebrating volunteerism, and that’s nice, but those that actually work with volunteers, that make that volunteer involvement happen, don’t get mentioned on the first day amid all the celebration of volunteers and the celebrities and politicians that love them.

Volunteers are not free. Volunteers also do not magically appear to build houses or clean up a park or tutor young people. In fact, successful volunteer engagement is absolutely impossible without someone coordinating all of the people and activities, training people, screening people, etc. – that person could be a volunteer himself or herself, it could be a paid person, it could be an employee on loan from a corporation, but make no mistake, that person, that volunteer manager, is real and absolutely essential – and deserves to be named at some point during the opening activities that kick off, say, the National Conference on Volunteering and Service?

After attending five of the national conferences on volunteering in the USA, I stopped attending (I think my last one was in 2004). By my last conference, I was tired of managers of volunteers being ignored amid all the celebrations of celebrities and politicians who think volunteers are so swell and magical, and tired of seeing and presenting the same workshops over and over. I was tired of my ideas for advanced volunteer management topics being rejected – organizers wanted only very basic workshops introducing the concept of virtual volunteering (a practice that by the year 2001 was already more than 30 years old!), if at all, and certainly nothing more advanced than that. I gave up.

It took the 2006 NetSquared conferences to remind me of what a conference for those that work with volunteers could be. Here’s why I loved that conference – it would be so great if those that organize the NCVS conference (which will be in Washington, D.C. yet again!) would read it, think about it, and rise to the challenge of presenting such a conference!

If they did, I would so be there….

Note: this blog is in response to a series of tweets by people associated with the NCVS who were miffed (maybe even outraged?) that the conference’s lack of recognition for those that manage volunteer programs was being talked about online. It’s a shame that, instead of listening and considering, they got defensive, even accusatory (apparently, because I wasn’t there, I’m not supposed to talk about it). It’s not too late to turn this into a win, to consider the criticism and really think about ways to take the conference to the next level – and to ensure volunteer managers are acknowledged. I’d be the first to publicly laud organizers if that happened.