Tag Archives: volunteerism

How will you leverage World Youth Skills Day?

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I love leveraging (exploiting!) days designated by the United Nations for my own program use. Why?

  • Many of the days have a lead agency that builds a marketing campaign around the day’s theme. Any press or others paying attention to that campaign might, as a result, stumble upon whatever it is I’m trying to promote if I’ve aligned my messaging with the day.
  • The lead agency marketing the day often creates a Twitter tag to go with the day, such as #humanitarianheroes for World Humanitarian Day on 19 August. I can use the tag on my own tweets about the activity I want to align with the day and any press or others paying attention to that hashtag might, as a result, stumble upon whatever it is I’m trying to promote.

So, for instance, those that promote volunteer engagement / volunteerism might want to pay attention to this: the Third Committee of the United Nations General Assembly, that addresses issues relating to a range of social, humanitarian affairs and human rights issues that affect people all over the world, proposed 15 July as World Youth Skills Day. “Recognizing that fostering the acquisition of skills by youth would enhance their ability to make informed life and work choices and empower them to gain access to changing labour markets, the General Assembly would, by the terms of the draft text, invite all Member States and international, regional and United Nations system organizations to commemorate World Youth Skills Day in an appropriate manner.” Here is the full text of document A/C.3/69/L.13/Rev.1. The UN General Assembly has now approved the designation, though the UN web site doesn’t reflect this at the time of this blog’s publication.

Millions of youth worldwide are unemployed, uneducated and un-engaged: 74.5 million in 2013, the majority of whom live in the developing countries. Teens and people in their 20s aren’t just bored – they are frustrated at how they are locked out of local decision-making as well as economic and life opportunities. These disengaged, disenfranchised youth are a growing concern of governments and various international organizations. For instance, you might recall that, in 2013, I was part of 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, a European Union (EU) body, to produce this paper: Internet-mediated Volunteering in the EU: Its history, prevalence, and approaches and how it relates to employability and social inclusion. As part of this project, I created a wiki of all of the various resources I used for my research, including a list of “>resources related to volunteering as a contributor to employability.

How could your nonprofit, non-governmental organization (NGO) or government program that involves volunteers or promotes volunteerism leverage this day?

  • Start asking teens and 20 somethings that have volunteered at your organization, or various organizations, if volunteering has taught them skills or given them experience they were able to use to get a job or to advance in their careers. Ask them if they have ever been asked about their volunteering experience in a job interview. Put together an article to publish on your web site about the comments from these young people. And hold on to this data: maybe you could use it in a grant application to get more resources to help you involve even MORE youth volunteers. Compiling this information would be a wonderful task for a volunteer or group of volunteers – maybe even youth volunteers?!?
  • Be on the lookout for a Twitter tag that might develop in conjunction with this day. I’ll certainly share such as soon as I know about it here on my blog. You can use this hashtag for tweets leading up to World Youth Skills Day that relate to youth volunteering at your organization that are learning skills they need for the work place and adult life.
  • Publish a blog for World Youth Skills Day talking about how and why your organization recruits and involves teen and 20 something volunteers specifically, and how this involvement not only benefits your programs, but communities as well – today and in the future.
  • Think about an event you might be able to host at your organization related to World Youth Skills Day.

Pay attention to the UNESCO-UNEVOC International Centre for Technical and Vocational Education and Training and to the United Nations Volunteers programme, part of UNDP, on Twitter and Facebook – those are the two most likely candidates to be the lead agencies for World Youth Skills Day. Even if it turns out to be another UN agency, I suspect UNEVOC and UNV will somehow be involved in activities related to the day. And I’ll share here on my blog what I learn.

Initial feedback on UNV plan to integrate volunteerism in development

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United Nations Volunteers has proposed a plan to further integrate volunteering in peace and development action. UNV is now collecting feedback on the Zero Draft to revise it before submission to the UN General Assembly in 2015.

I’m still digesting the report, but at first read, the two recommendations that got me the most excited/agitated:

  • Strengthen the evidence base for the impact of volunteerism through concerted research…

and

  • Exchange practices in the areas of volunteer management, safety and security, innovative approaches such as online volunteering, inclusion of marginalized…

Regarding the research recommendation – hurrah! Research is so needed, particularly regarding what works, and what doesn’t, in

  • engaging groups of volunteers onsite in one-time, just show up activities – not just park cleanups, but hackathons and edit-a-thons
  • involving youth as volunteers,
  • involving teams of volunteers online
  • microvolunteering online
  • involving volunteers from other countries (organizations wanting to or expecting to host such volunteers need guidance on assignment development, necessary support for volunteers, training for those that will work with such volunteers, etc.)
  • measuring the impact of non-traditional volunteer engagement, such as hackathons and edit-a-thons, group volunteering, and episodic/microvolunteering (online or onsite), on the participating volunteers, on the organizations they support, on the causes they support, and on the communities in general
  • involving volunteers that represent a range of cultures and languages in group volunteering, online volunteering (particularly in teams), and traditional volunteering (commitment of more than just a few days, with a set time and place to be regularly)
  • recruiting volunteers from among ethnic and religious minority groups and creating a welcoming environment for such
  • using volunteering as a way to build cultural understanding among different religious, ethnic, economic or age groups
  • the costs of involving volunteers (because, of course, volunteers are never cost free; there are costs associated with engagement them)

I hope there can also be a promotion of the growing body of research regarding online volunteering  / virtual volunteering.

Regarding the volunteer management recommendation: I’m even more excited about that than the research recommendation. Without more promotion of the necessary systems and practices needed to support and engage volunteers, no other action recommended in this plan will work – every other recommendation will be doomed to failure. For too long, campaigns have focused on encouraging people to volunteer, rather than helping organizations to involve volunteers. I’ve been recommending this action since I first became involve in UNV back in February 2001, while directing the UN’s Online Volunteering Service and managing the online components of the United Nations Information Technology Service (UNITeS). I can’t take the credit for it finally being a priority, however.

That said, I STRONGLY disagree with the suggestion from the report that, as a part of the promotion of volunteer management, that we:

Advocate for the implementation of  the methods suggested in the ILO  Manual for Volunteerism  measurement; Member States to integrate the ILO  methodology in their household surveys.

The ILO Manual has NOT been agreed to as the measurement of volunteerism by most volunteer-involving organizations. Far from it; the ILO manual uses the old-fashioned, highly controversial method of measuring volunteerism by assigning a monetary value to volunteer hours. This kind of measurement for the value of volunteerism is something that has caused a tremendous backlash from unions and other working people, who see this as fuel for corporations and governments to say to nonprofits and non-governmental organizations, “Cut paid staff and replace them with volunteers.” Did UNV learn NOTHING from the backlash from the UK’s “Big Society” push which used a similar measurement for the value of volunteers?

There are much better ways to measure the value of volunteers. It’s time for UNV to promote those more modern ways.

Also, volunteers as are not free, I would have liked to have seen this statement explicitly in the report. It would have been nice to see an explicit statement saying, “Corporations and governments have to be prepared to help fund organizations in the engagement of volunteers.”

I’ll be reading the report more thoroughly in the coming days and formally responding via UNV’s mechanism for such. I encourage you to do the same.

global survey on volunteer management software – revisited

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In 2012, Rob Jackson (robjacksonconsulting.com) and Jayne Cravens (coyotecommunications.com) — ME — 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.

We promoted the survey every way we knew how – emailing our contacts directly, posting to various online discussion groups, posting repeatedly to our social networks, and asking others to share the survey with their readers and networks. Then we published 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.

It’s the two-year anniversary of this survey, and we think the results are still quite useful. Software companies and designers: you can learn a LOT from this report to improve your products and your communications with customers!

What we learned:

We learned how much managers of volunteers love spreadsheets, even those that have specialized software for managing volunteers.

We also learned a lot from this report that has nothing to do with software. In the survey, we asked a lot of questions that didn’t relate directly to software, like about how many volunteers these organizations managed, as well as what volunteers did. And the answers about what volunteers do at various organizations were surprising.

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.

The thing I have learned since then: I’m not sure volunteer management software is what every organization needs to track and schedule volunteers. The more I talk to people working with volunteers, the more I think that seeking function-based software (scheduling, performance, etc.) rather than volunteer-management software is the answer for a lot of organizations. I’ll write more about that soon.

Perspectives on Volunteering: Voices from the South

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A new book on volunteer activity is in the making for the ISTR Book Series: Perspectives on Volunteering: Voices from the South. The aim of this volume is to articulate and examine theories, and perspectives on volunteering in the “South”, meaning presenting various angles of volunteer activity in countries considered developing countries and countries in transition. Comparative issues of all countries are welcome as well as examples of volunteering in  North/South or South/South experiences.

There is a group authors already involved in this publication. “We are interested in would be authors that are working on these issues. To researchers with an interest in this topic, this is an open invitation  to attend a meeting at the ISTR conference in Muenster [Germany]. For those who cannot attend and are interested, please contact the editor.”

Place: University of Muenster (Germany). Room Vom Stein Haus  VS-17
Time : Friday, July 25.   12:30 PM.
parallel to the International Society for Third Sector Research (ISTR) International Conference

Editor:  Jacqueline Butcher, Ph. D
RSVP: jacqueline.butcher@ciesc.org.mx

More info:

The chapters in this book approach volunteering through a series of essays and case studies that present recent academic research, thinking and practice on volunteering. Working from the premise that volunteering is “universal” this collection draws on experiences from Latin America, Africa including Egypt and selected parts of Asia. There is a focus on developing countries and countries in transition documents a fresh set of experiences and perspectives on volunteering. These accounts complement the conventional focus in the literature on ‘the developed’ world – largely northern or western experiences from Europe and North America. While developing countries and countries in transition are in the spotlight for this volume, the developed country experience is not ignored. Rather it is used in this anthology, as a critical reference point for comparisons, allowing points of convergence, disconnect and intersection to emerge.

The primary aim and contribution of this anthology will be to articulate and examine the opinions and perspectives on volunteering in the South. The second objective is to provide a counter point to the dominant conceptual and empirical account of volunteering. Consequently, in identifying chapters the proposed editor did not discount evidence from northern and western countries and rather included this where possible in survey and quantitative studies as a useful reference point and basis for comparison. Finally, the tertiary objective promotes the fuller complexity and texture on volunteering, highlighting its promotion through an appreciation of its potential and promise for expression and impact in different cultures and contexts.

Authors and suggested chapters to date:

Section 1: Volunteering: An introduction and theoretical framework

Chapter 1: Volunteering: a complex social phenomenon
Jacqueline BUTCHER

Section 2: Patterns of Volunteering

Chapter 2: The economic value of volunteering: Comparative estimates among developing, transitional, and developed countries.
Lester SALAMON and Megan HADDOCK

Chapter 3: The effects of volunteering on poverty and development in China, Ghana, Kenya, Mozambique, Nepal and the Philippines
Volunteer Services Overseas (VSO) and the Institute of Development Studies, Sussex University.

Chapter 4: Youth, service and volunteering: A comparative perspective in developing nations.
National Youth Service (NYS)

Chapter 5: The global perspective in corporate volunteering: a focus on the South.
Ken ALLEN

Section 3: Empirical approaches

Chapter 6: Organic/ indigenous practices of volunteering in Uruguay: The influence on Public Policy.
Analía BETTONI and Javier PEREIRA

Chapter 7: Solidarity and Volunteering: a Mexican Study.
Jacqueline BUTCHER and Gustavo VERDUZCO

Chapter 8: Individual volunteering and giving: How and why ordinary individuals give in the context of South Africa: a case study of Gauteng Province.
Susan WILKINSON-MAPOSA

Chapter 9: Promising practices from national programs across the African continent: Preparing youth for citizenship , employment and sustainable livelihoods.
Helene PEROLD and Karena CRONIN

Chapter 10: A typology of local and International volunteering experiences from Tanzania and Mozambique.
Helene PEROLD

Chapter 11: Volunteering at the grassroots: Celebrating the Joy of Volunteering in India
N. DADRAWALA

Chapter 12: Beyond images and perceptions: How important is voluntary action in Buenos Aires?
Mario ROITTER

Chapter 13: Employee volunteering in South Africa.
Fiona BUDD

Chapter 14: Models, developments and effects of trans-border youth volunteer exchange programmes in eastern and southern Africa.
Jacob MATHI

Chapter 15 : Volunteerism and the state: understanding the development of volunteering in China
Ying XU and Ngai PUN

Chapter 16: NGO management of volunteers: the case of Egypt.
Hisham EL ROUBY

Section 4 Conclusions -Volunteer participation.

Chapter 17: Conclusions about experiences and perspectives that come from the South.
Jacqueline BUTCHER

More information about the editor:
Dra. Jacqueline Butcher García-Colín
Directora, Centro de Investigación y Estudios sobre Sociedad Civil, A.C.
conocimiento  para la acción social
Tecnológico de Monterrey, Campus Ciudad de México
Escuela de Humanidades y Ciencias Sociales

Growing backlash against volunteerism?

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I first learned of people being against volunteerism back in 1997, when a three-day bipartisan presidential summit aimed at boosting volunteerism and community service efforts across the USA kicked off in Philadelphia.  I was directing the Virtual Volunteering Project at the time. There were arguments from both the far-right and the far-left, and I did my best to compile them. When I would bring up these arguments at various volunteerism conferences or on online groups, my colleagues usually just scoffed – it’s just extremists, it’s not something we need to worry about. 

Since then, I’ve kept an eye on these arguments against volunteerism, because I feel strongly that the arguments must be addressed. Organizations recruiting volunteers need to have these arguments in mind when they are crafting recruitment messages and when they are talking about the value of volunteers. When organizations ignore these arguments against volunteerism, or deny them, they end up with dysfunctional volunteer engagement programs, lack of support for volunteer engagement and, sometimes, very pad PR.

This came to mind over the weekend when I saw this comment in a friend’s Facebook feed:

I’d rather find the means of capitalization and pay people to do the work at hand than to bother with the volunteer work ethic or ability. I was never more personally insulted than as the president of the board of my church.

If you are talking about volunteer involvement as a way to save money, and volunteer contributions in terms of monetary value, then you are part of the problem – you are creating the fuel for these political arguments against volunteerism. And if you are not asking volunteers why they are leaving your organization, and addressing those reasons, you are creating ex-volunteers who are sharing their views with friends and colleagues and further creating a bad image not just for your organization, but for volunteering as a whole.

My other blogs and web pages on this controversy:

Note that the links within some blogs may not work, as I moved all of my blogs from Posterous to WordPress a few months ago, and it broke all of the internal links. Also, some web pages on other organization’s sites have moved since I linked to such, and I either don’t know or haven’t been able to find a new location for the material.

I can still inspire old school

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Months ago, I did a Volunteer Engagement 101 Workshop in Portland. Here’s feedback from such – which shows I can still inspire old-school action regarding volunteer engagement (not just the cutting edge Internet stuff):

I recently attended your volunteer management training for AmeriCorps
members in Portland…

Before Photo Vol BoardI just wanted to email you some before and after photos of my bulletin board at work. This bulletin board sat empty for the first almost 2 months of my service.

It wasn’t until your presentation that I knew exactly what I needed to do. I needed to let everyone know that walks through our doors who to contact if they’d like to volunteer, how to sign up to volunteer, and what vol opportunities we have.

After Photo Vol BoardSo, I took this information and created a large volunteer board. It’s very large and it’s one of the first things people see when they walk in our doors. It’s a work in progress but I wanted to share. Thanks for sharing your time and knowledge with us! You were very inspirational and informational!!

Thanks again,

Lynn Foster, North HELP Center, Volunteer & Resource Specialist, AmeriCorps OSSC

I try. I really do.

coyote1

 

Anger motivates volunteers as much as sympathy

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For years, during my workshops on volunteer engagement, I have half-jokingly said I have never volunteered out of the goodness of my heart or to be nice – because I’m not at all a nice person – and have, instead, volunteered because I’m angry about something. I have used this as a way to introduce audiences to the plethora of motivations of volunteers, to help them create better recruitment and engagement schemes.

Now, I have some science to back me up!

Someone sent me this link today: “Anger motivates volunteers as much as sympathy.”  The authors of the study are Dr. Robert Bringle and his students Ashley Hedgepath and Elizabeth Wall at Appalachian State University.  

And it’s not the first study that’s said this: Ilana Silber published “The angry gift: A neglected facet of philanthropy” in 2012. 

It’s a mistake to think that all volunteers are motivated only by kindness or selflessness. There are all sorts of motivations for volunteering. People volunteer because they:

  • like the idea of being associated with the particular organization or activity
  • want experience to put on job applications
  • want to meet people, as friends or for their social or business connections
  • think the activity looks fun
  • like the people that have invited them to volunteer, or like the people volunteering
  • are curious
  • are bored

and, yes, because they are angry about something – about how many discarded pets are at shelters or women’s lack of access to reproductive health information or domestic violence or barriers to girls in STEM-related careers or the condition of the environment and on and on.

And all of these are GREAT reasons for volunteering. Do you welcome all of these volunteers at your organization?

Also see:

Making certain volunteers feel unwelcomed because of your language

Do you welcome people with your language?

Screening Volunteers for Attitude

Mission statements for your volunteer engagement

Welcoming immigrants as volunteers at your organization

Advice for unpaid interns to sue for back pay

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The outcry against unpaid internships continues. The latest is from HuffPost College:

Four Ways You Can Seek Back Pay For An Unpaid Internship

Amid its advice is this:

New York has also taken a stronger stance against internships at nonprofits. Federal rules say unpaid internships in government agencies or nonprofits are “generally permissible,” but New York (PDF) says nonprofits still must pay their interns except under limited circumstances. Namely, certain nonprofits may have unpaid interns enrolled in educational programs, as trainees receiving formal instruction, or as volunteers who do completely different tasks than paid employees. The state has an even stricter 11-part test (PDF) for internships at for-profit companies.

Nonprofits and NGOs: you need to be paying attention to this controversy. You need to be thinking about why any task at your organization that is being done by a volunteer – and that includes unpaid interns – beyond “We don’t have money to pay someone to do that.” You need a mission statement for your volunteer engagement and you need to be talking about the value of volunteers far beyond dollar/Euro or other monetary value for their hours!

My other blogs on this controversy:

Note that the links within these blogs may not work, as I moved all of my blogs from Posterous to WordPress a few months ago, and it broke all of the internal links. Also, some web pages on other organization’s sites have moved since I linked to such, and I either don’t know or haven’t been able to find a new location for the material.

How I ended up at a Philly Tech4Good event

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When I get to travel for work outside of my home near Portland, Oregon, I do a search on Google and Twitter to see what people and organizations might be worthwhile to connect with while in a particular area. I look for volunteer centers, international nonprofits, nonprofit development/support centers, nonprofits focused on computers and the Internet in some way, and academics that have done research or teach regarding nonprofit management or international aid work. I write each of those organizations, departments or people and ask if we could meet, just so I can hear about their work and so I can offer any advice or resources, in an informal setting.

Sometimes, my schedule fills up quickly, and I get to meet face-to-face with people I might never get to meet otherwise. Other times, I get confused email responses from people that find this old-fashioned “networking” idea as oh-so-strange.

Last week, I went to Philadelphia to present for the Mennonite Central Committee (MCC)’s  US National Thrift Shop Conference, about trends in volunteer engagement. I also contacted a few nonprofits, university offices and government offices to see if they would like to meet. The organizers of Philly Tech Week said yes (thank you, Brian James Kirk and Corinne Warnshuis!).

Philly Tech Week featured an event on the campus of Temple University while I was in the area:  Exploring Civic Volunteering With Technology: Kickoff for Commit Service Pledge. The event was to launch the Commitpledge.com web site that asks Philadelphia-area nonprofits to post tech-related volunteering opportunities, and for volunteers to offer their expertise through the web site to help with those opportunities.

The event also featured a panel discussion by Jeff Friedman, the new Director of eGovernment Business Development at Microsoft and recently a part of the Philadelphia Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics, Mayo Nissen, a New York-based designer who has been involved in urban improvement initiatives involving technology, and Anthony Pisapia, Associate Executive Director of Tech Impact, the nonprofit behind npCloud and VolunteerConnect.

The panelists talked not just about how tech helps nonprofits, but also how it helps governments better engage and support citizens – too many of tech-for-good initiatives leave out government programs, IMO, so this was great to hear.

Some good questions were asked, including:

  • How can big data help more in helping citizens?
  • How do we make products that result from hackathons sustainable?
  • How do we better address the disconnect between tech and who it should serve?

A moment I loved was when, in response to several panelist comments about how to find out what the community needs, an audience member said “Go to city council meetings!” She’s so right – nonprofits and individual citizens are being loud and clear about their needs, in government meetings, in their own meetings, on newspaper Facebook pages, on government program Facebook pages, and on and on. Quit wondering and start reading and listening!

My favorite moment, however, was when Anthony Pisapia said “Nonprofits are geniuses at innovation, but maybe not at technology.” I’ll be quoting this again and again! He’s absolutely right: nonprofits have expertise, and their staff and volunteers do amazing things with very little resources. In fact, they have as much, if not more, to teach the corporate, for-profit world as the other way around! Too many tech folks think nonprofits are incompetent or inefficient; in fact, nonprofits are some of the most innovative entities around.

There was also the inevitable questions of “What’s the difference in a social entrepreneur and a volunteer? Actually, what is a volunteer? Is our goal that, eventually, everyone gets paid for their work?” As I was an observer and outsider, I didn’t enter into that discussion during the event, but afterwards, did my best to answer the question one-on-one. That may turn into a blog…

If you will be in the Portland, Oregon area, and want to meet with me, contact me! Just tell me who you are, what your area of work is, and what you would like from me in terms of a face-to-face discussion.

I write a LOT about tech-related volunteering. Here are some of my resources:

 

Penn Social Impact Doctoral Fellows Program

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The University of Pennsylvania’s Nonprofit Leadership (NPL) Program invites doctoral student researchers to apply for the 2014 Penn Social Impact Doctoral Fellows Program.

Facilitated by Peter Frumkin, Director of the NPL Program, the program will explore emerging issues in the world of nonprofit organizations, voluntary action, philanthropy and international civil society. The program is June 7 – July 1, 2014 at The University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Students are expected to submit a draft research paper that they would like to refine and prepare for publication during the program. Housing near the Penn campus and $3,000 stipends are provided to all 2014 Summer Fellows.

Eligibility: Graduate students currently enrolled in PhD programs at degree-granting institutions

Submission deadline: Friday, March 14, 2014

Submission requirements: A resume, draft research paper (unpublished) on a topic related to the nonprofit sector, and an abstract. Send to Leeamy1@sp2.upenn.edu by March 14, 2014.