Tag Archives: volunteers

the challenge of spontaneous volunteers

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Last week, on Wednesday, a tornado struck in Mississippi, killing 10 people and destroying or damaging hundreds of homes. It struck at night. While watching live coverage on MSNBC, at a news conference held just hours after the tornado in Mississippi, I heard Kenny Holbrook, Fire Chief in Holly Springs, said this, in response to a question about the biggest problem police and fire staff faced during and after the tornado:

The biggest problem we had was spontaneous responders – if you can use that word, spontaneous responders. They just came. And understand that, you know, in an emergency situation like this, everyone wants to help, but this morning, like I say, as of last night, people that were not a member of the law enforcement, EMS, or fire community, we withheld sending them out doing the emergency work. Now that that is finished, we can utilize a lot of this help in the private sector. We can’t assume the responsibility. We don’t know what training people have. So that’s been the probably the hardest part of managing: hundreds of people that you have never met until that moment. 

What Mr. Holbrook is saying is that spontaneous volunteers – people that neither he nor other emergency responders knew, people had no affiliation with any official government agency – showed up at and called police stations and fire stations in the minutes and hours following the tornadoes, wanting to help, in overwhelming numbers, which meant an enormous amount of time had to be spent explaining to those volunteers why they could NOT be involved yet, why they would have to wait hours, even days, to get to be involved – and even then, they might not be able to be involved ever.

It’s a fascinating problem to have: during and after a crisis, there is a deluge of people wanting to help. It may not really sound like a problem, but it is: dealing with these people can take trained people away from actually responding to disaster, as illustrated above. People who have experienced a disaster are especially vulnerable, and need people interacting with them that are trained in disaster response and have been properly screened. Spontaneous volunteers, with no training, can actually cause MORE problems after a disaster than they help: engaging in inappropriate or unsafe activities, providing inaccurate information to survivors and the press, exploiting victims, stealing from damaged or abandoned homes or vehicles, and more.

If your organization responds to disasters in some way, consider recruiting and training volunteers who, after a disaster, will do nothing but deal with people that want to volunteer or donate items in the hours immediately after a disaster. There are people (like me!) who would be happy to go through training NOW in order to be at, say, a fire station within minutes of a crisis and have one job: dealing with any individuals or groups who call or drop by and say, “We’re ready to volunteer!” or “We’ve got a truck load of clothes for the survivors!” Those volunteers can capture names, phone numbers, and services or items offered, can explain why the individual or groups should NOT come to the area at that time, and can explain where to find updated information online (a web site, a Twitter account, etc.) specifically for volunteers and in-kind donations. Also, I’ve blogged about the many things spontaneous online volunteers can do after disasters – not just nice things for online volunteers to do, but critical services that might not be able to be done otherwise.

Fire stations, police stations, animal shelters, schools, other agencies that deal with disasters: plan now for how you are going to deal with spontaneous volunteers! These FREE resources from a variety of agencies can help:

Managing Spontaneous Volunteers in Times of Disaster: The Synergy of Structure and Good Intentions – a free online publication from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

Preventing a Disaster within the Disaster – Effective Use & Management of Unaffiliated Volunteers – manual from a training for National Service participants and program directors by the Corporation for National and Community Service and the Points of Light Foundation & Volunteer Center National Network.

Guide to Managing Spontaneous Unaffiliated Volunteers – from the Western Massachusetts Medical Reserve Corps, for its local affiliates.

Spontaneous Volunteer Management Resource Kit – from the Australian Government Department of Social Services.

What I learned launching my first online petition

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logoLast week, I launched my first ever online petition. I chose change.org as the platform. You can read more about the petition, and why I started it, at this blog, OPB & Congress Think Volunteers are Free.

My goal was to have 100 signatures by Sunday evening, and then I would set a new goal Monday morning. I had four days to get there. I thought that goal would be oh-so-easy to meet: I have more than 300 friends on one of my social media accounts, and they are real friends, people I know personally, many of which I’ve known for years, and they are very active on social media and they “like” or respond to much of what I post (about Star Wars, about politics, about my dog and/or cat, etc.). I just knew 100 of them would happily sign the petition well before Sunday evening, just because I posted a status update about it and they love me (grin).

I also tweeted about the petition several times, at different times during different days, to my more than 2000 followers on my professional Twitter account, using various keywords (even tied it to Star Wars: The Force Awakens!), to my almost 600 followers on my personal Twitter account, to my more than 350 friends on Facebook, made up mostly of colleagues and neighbors rather than close friends, and to my Facebook page, which has almost 1000 “likes” (though I didn’t have much hope for that – Facebook, either via my account or my page, hasn’t proven a good way of reaching folks regarding my work or even my vacations). I also did “mention tweets” and direct tweets to various associations of managers of volunteers – DOVIAs – asking them to share the petition with their members. And I gave GooglePlus a go as well.

As of the end of the day on Sunday, at 11 p.m. Pacific Coast USA time, I had 94 signatures. That’s what I still have as I publish this blog on Monday. And most of those did NOT come because of any social media activities. Rather, they came because I emailed or direct-messaged about 80 friends and colleagues and asked each of them, separately, personally, to sign it. THAT laborious method got me far, far more signatures than any of the aforementioned social media blasts, no matter how often I blasted.

Why didn’t others sign? I asked friends and colleagues who didn’t sign, specifically, directly, individually, why they didn’t sign, and the vast majority who responded said they never saw any messages on social media about the petition, especially not the status updates on Facebook. In addition, a few, all managers of volunteers or working somehow in volunteerism, said they were prohibited from signing a petition by their workplace – which is entirely untrue, but they’ve been made to believe that their employer doesn’t allow them to be politically active at all, other than voting.

So, what have I learned in trying to get signatures for my petition:

  • Even when a petition is all about a very hot topic among those that you want to sign the petition – in this case, funding volunteer management, and the target group is those that work with volunteers or promote volunteerism (though absolutely anyone can sign) – that isn’t enough to get people to sign.
  • Direct, person-to-person, customized emails or direct messages, sent individually, from me – messages that I did not cc anyone else on, but each going only to one person, are, by far, the most effective way to get signatures on a petition. BY FAR. I had a 85% sign rate from individuals I messaged directly via email or Facebook. However, I’m reluctant to DM absolutely every one of my 300+  close, personal social media friends… that seems so overwhelming, to them and me.
  • I have some really great friends.
  • Setting a goal for how many people I wanted to sign, by a particular date, really pushed me to keep pushing. I did 10 times more work over the weekend to promote this petition than I had planned to, but I was determined to reach that goal, rather than to be hurt and give up early.
  • Facebook status updates, whether via a personal account or a page, are rather useless in promoting a petition (or most anything), because most of the people that are your Facebook friends or have “liked” your page will never see it – Facebook will never show them those messages in their newsfeed, because they see only “Top stories.” The more people that like that status update, the more people that will see it, so if you are going to do a petition, direct message several people and get at least 10 people to “like” that status update about your petition if you want it to be seen by anyone!
  • We are all drowning in a sea of online information. It has never been harder to reach people! So much noise!
  • You have to get organizations to promote such petitions to their members, because without organizations talking about such, organizations like DOVIAs, this petition will never reach much over 100 people, and will have no hope of going viral, let alone any media outlet paying attention to such. And with that said: thank you, Northwest Oregon Volunteer Administrators Association (NOVAA), based in Portland, Oregon, for helping to raise awareness about this petition!
  • There is a huge misunderstanding by too many managers of volunteers that they are prohibited from signing online petitions, or sharing such petitions. They are absolutely allowed to sign such, as individuals rather than representatives of their organization (though many organizations DO allow this), and they may share such petitions, they are allowed to, so long as they don’t tell people in their message whether or not to sign it but, rather, say, “Interesting: a person/organization has started this petition that says such and such. How do you feel about it? Share in the comments below.” If people sign, that’s their choice – you’ve just informed them of an activity. You can do this about a petition regarding volunteer management – but probably not a political candidate.
  • Associations of managers of volunteers like to complain at conferences and in online discussion groups about how volunteer management isn’t funded – but when they have a chance to make a difference on the issue, they are silent. Very disturbing.

So, what now? Well, today, with still just 94 signers, I’ve:

  • Sent a personal email, individually, to more than a dozen colleagues that are managers of volunteers, that work at nonprofit centers, or that are somehow associated with volunteer leadership, asking them to please consider signing the petition, commenting on it, and promoting it.
  • Posted to several LinkedIn groups.
  • Posted again to Twitter, particularly my pro account, and I will be posting at least twice a day, every day this week, at different times of day, using various keywords.
  • Commented and liked the NOVAA Facebook page where they talked about this petition, so that they are thanked and so that their status update might show up in more members’ newsfeeds.
  • Hope that another association of managers of volunteers – a DOVIA – will decide, oh, hey, this is exactly the kind of thing we need to be doing in order to represent the interests of our members! 
  • Blogged about this experience as a learning experience regarding online communications (and you are now reading this blog!)

And I hope if you have read this blog you will SIGN THIS PETITION.

My next goal is 106 more signers by midnight New Year’s Eve – that would put me at 200 signers and maybe, just maybe, the petition will get the attention of the media. But I’m not holding my breath.

UNV announces Online Volunteering Award 2015

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UNLogoToday – 30 November 2015 – the United Nations Volunteers (UNV) program announced winners of the UNV Online Volunteering Award 2015, celebrating both volunteers and volunteer hosting organizations on the UN’s Online Volunteering Service, and launched a global voting campaign for the public’s favorite, to be announced on December 5.

Profiles of the five organizations chosen for the award, and their online volunteers, are here (and this is where you vote as well). The organizations are Association des Agriculteurs Professionels du Cameroun (AGRIPO), Fundación de Comunidades Vulnerables de Colombia (FUNCOVULC), Hunger Reduction International, Seeds Performing Arts Theatre Group in Papua New Guinea, and a digital media campaign run by UN Women. Each effort also has a tag regarding which sustainable development goals it supports.

If you know me, then you know which one of the winners immediately jumped out at me and what I voted for: Seeds Performing Arts Theatre Group in Papua New Guinea. The group uses live theatre performance to raise awareness on issues affecting the local rural population, including violence against women, and to inspire and implement social change. Seeds teamed up with a group of online volunteers via the UN’s Online Volunteering service to develop a screenplay for a video about the specific gender-based violence associated with witch hunting. The traditional belief in sorcery is used to justify violence against women in Papua New Guinea, and inhumane treatment of innocent women accused of sorcery is common in rural parts of the island as sorcery is thought to account for unexplained deaths or misfortunes in a family or village.

After voting, you are encouraged to copy the following message to your profile on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn or whatever social media channel you use:

Just voted for my favourite Online #VolunteeringAward winner. You can, too! https://goo.gl/CTGVfS #ActionCounts #GlobalGoals” and encourage others to recognize the true value and worth of online volunteers!

In 2014, according to UNV, more than 11,000 online volunteers undertook more than 17,000 online volunteering assignments through the service, and 60 percent of these online volunteers come from developing countries. I had the pleasure of directing the service at UNV for four years, from February 2001 to February 2014, successfully moving the platform from NetAid to UNV entirely, engaging in various activities that made the service the first link when searching the term online volunteering on Google (I also made it #1 when searching the term virtual volunteering, but that’s no longer true), vastly increasing the number of online opportunities available for organizations on the platform and authoring materials to support organizations engaging online volunteers that are still used by UNV. I still promote the site to any organizations working in or for regions in the developing world as the best way to recruit online volunteers.

Also see:

The Virtual Volunteering Wiki

The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook

My research on Theater as a Tool for Development/Theatre as a Tool for Development

Judgment & reputation online – and off

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This week, I’m blogging and launching new web resources based on my experience in October as the Duvall Leader in Residence at the University of Kentucky’s Center for Leadership Development (CFLD), part of UK’s College of Agriculture, Food and Environment.

Monday, I blogged about one of my workshops regarding Democratizing Engagement. Specifically: has the Internet democratized community, even political, engagement. Tuesday, I launched a new web page about online leadership. Wednesday, I blogged about things I learned while in Kentucky for this program and presenting separately for the Kentucky Network for Development, Leadership and Engagement (Kyndle).

Today, it’s about a comment made repeatedly in student evaluations for one of the classes that invited me to lecture, one that’s given me pause ever since.

My visit at the University of Kentucky was focused on leadership development, and community development and engagement, as both relate to the use of online media. And as guest lecturer in CLD 230 Intrapersonal Leadership, my topic was “How to use social media and online collaborative tools to demonstrate leadership and to support a team.” During my lecture, I noted that text-based online communi­cations, unlike video conferencing, hide our weight, ethnicity, hair color, age, and other physical traits from each other online. That means, online, people are judged by the quality of their online performance, not their physical appearance or regional accent. As Susan Ellis and I note in The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook: “Today’s preference to actually see and hear each other online is a double-edged sword: it can make electronic communication more personal and personable, but it can also inject offline prejudices evoked by how someone looks.” I pointed out that, online, via text-based communications, I can’t judge people regarding how they look but, rather, by the quality of the character they show through their words.

The comment ended up on many of the students’ “guest speaker reflection” form the instructor, Grace Gorrell, asks all students complete during class. The comment struck a chord with many of these students, most of them in their teens or 20s. And that’s given me pause: about society’s obsession with appearance, and about stereotypes. Young people are quite aware of those two factors affecting people’s lives, including their own – and probably quite worried about such. There are advantages, and disadvantages, to being perceived as attractive during a job search, and even a Harvard degree doesn’t level the playing field for African-American graduates in the job market, a study by a University of Michigan researcher found. It’s likely that these students have experienced first hand or witnessed first-hand preferences given because of someone’s appearance, perceived ethnicity or age, accent, etc., or discrimination because of the same. I think these students really like the idea of being evaluated purely by their work and communications skills – by their character.

Are we giving young people the information they need to portray themselves online as worthy of employment, of being involved as a volunteer, of inclusion? Are we teaching them how to build trust among people they work with, with their neighbors, and with those they will encounter online – and why this is important?

And are we continually exploring our own prejudices that may be affecting how we work and interactive with others?

Updated April 15, 2021: A comic strip demonstrates the challenges women face online. It’s developed by Kenya ICT Action Network (KICTANet). In a story of three differently aged, differently shaped and differently employed women, we see what violence can look like online, how the seemingly harmless can actually contribute to it, and what we can all do to prevent it and to create a safer space for women online.

Also see:

Things I learned in Kentucky last month

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This week, I’m blogging and launching new web resources based on my experience in October as the Duvall Leader in Residence at the University of Kentucky’s Center for Leadership Development (CFLD), part of UK’s College of Agriculture, Food and Environment.

Monday, I blogged about one of my workshops regarding Democratizing Engagement. Specifically: has the Internet democratized community, even political, engagement. Yesterday, I launched a new web page about online leadership.

Today’s topic: things I learned while in this program, as well as before, during and after presenting in my hometown in Henderson, Kentucky for the Kentucky Network for Development, Leadership and Engagement (Kyndle), serving Henderson, McLean, Union and Webster counties in northwestern Kentucky:

  • People under 30 love Instagram. When I asked University of Kentucky students, and a small group of high school students, what they were using, they said Twitter and Instagram more than anything else. Snapchat also was always mentioned, though not as widely used. Periscope got mentioned a few times as well. Facebook is long gone as a regularly-used tool by the students I addressed.
  • Different communities, neighborhoods and cultures use vastly different online communications tools: I thought Topix, an online forum founded in 2002, was long gone, like Cupertino’s first official online community for its citizens, built on FirstClass. But, no – Topix still very popular in some communities, probably because of the ease of anonymity in participating in its online discussions/debates.
  • I’m not the only one that thinks nonprofits are using social media too much as an old-fashioned advertising tool and not nearly enough as an engagement tool – this article in the Chronicle of Philanthropy came out on the Friday I left Lexington. It is amazing to me that I’m still talking about this – something that I first read about back in the 1990s via the Cluetrain Manifesto.
  • Twitter remains so much better than Facebook when it comes to promotion and networking and engagement. I tweeted a lot, and was almost always retweeted or “liked”, and got lots of replies. By contrast, Facebook resulted in few “likes” – and maybe two comments.
  • Email is still a killer app. An email about one of my evening workshops, sent to various student organizations by a student energized by one of my earlier workshops, resulted in probably twice as many people as expected attending that evening event. In addition, my appointment for this residency was because of an email I sent to faculty at the CFLD last year about The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook and my ties to Kentucky.
  • People under 30 are volunteering, they are passionate about various causes (particularly the environment), and they want to volunteer even more! And they do not see their community service and political activism as merely getting tasks done: they see it as building community, as career exploration, as career preparation, and as fun. And they will stuff envelopes if you tell them why that really, really matters… and give them pizza.
  • A lot of people over 30 have given up on using social media, because they have no idea how to control the onslaught of content that came their way – they felt flooded with useless information, rants and hurtful comments, so they stopped signing on. Facebook in particular makes it oh-so-difficult to figure out how to put different friends on different lists, to hide people without unfriending them, to prevent certain friends from seeing a status update, to unlike pages, etc.
  • GooglePlus just doesn’t get talked about… except by me, who still finds it valuable…
  • If I didn’t attempt to use humor in my workshops, I might offend fewer people, but wow, I, and my audiences, would die of boredom.
  • Lexington, Kentucky is a jewel of a city, and my hometown of Henderson is infinitely more fun than it was when I was growing up there.

That’s what I learned. I wish I had thought to survey the students while I was there – I could have found out even more. They were a gold mine of information. I also talked to faculty and nonprofit staff from different organizations, and they were all lovely and interesting and fun – but I cannot lie: the students were my favorite audience.

Using volunteerism to build clients’ skills

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graphic by Jayne Cravens representing volunteersPerhaps your organization has volunteers that help your employees or that help clients. But have you thought about volunteer engagement as a central part of your initiative’s program delivery? Have you thought about your clients in volunteering activities, as volunteers themselves, as a way to meet your organization’s mission?

Here’s an example: Adelante Mujeres is a nonprofit in Western Washington County, Oregon, about 30 minutes west of Portland. It provides education and empowerment opportunities to low-income Latina women and their families, in order to ensure their full participation and active leadership in the community. Its Chicas Youth Development works with more than 400 Latina students, grades three through 12, with the goal of instilling the importance of community leadership and civic engagement, and cultivating their skills for school, for future studies, for careers, and for life. The students, as volunteers, provide tech help at public libraries, pick up trash, plant trees and engage in other activities around the area. The participants in this program are role models for younger girls in the community, encouraging those younger girls to become volunteers, and leaders, themselves. The Chicas program has been selected as a 2015 Oregon Governor’s Volunteer Award Winner.

Here’s a theoretical example: a nonprofit serving people who are homeless could invite those clients to volunteer with the organization, or could work to help them volunteer at other organizations, so that they can build their skills, accomplish things that can be put on a résumé, and meet people that could be potential references for jobs.

Here’s anoter: a nonprofit that helps combat veterans re-integrate into society could help organize group volunteering activities so these clients can engage in a social activity together and have a positive result at the end of the day.

Too often, volunteerism is talked about only as something to supplement the work of paid staff, or as outsiders helping clients. By contrast, this other type of volunteering is integrated into a nonprofit’s program, into its mission-based activities. Volunteering is offered as an activity for clients to undertake themselves, as a part of accomplishing whatever it is a nonprofit wants to accomplish.

Congrats to Adelante Mujeres for this recognition of its outstanding program. And if you have other examples, please share them in the comments!

Also see

List of resources related to volunteering as a contributor to employability, compiled as a part of Internet-mediated volunteering – the impact for Europe, a paper and wiki I researched and compiled as part of the The ICT4EMPL Future Work project, a European Union initiative that aimed to inform policy of new forms of work and pathways to employability mediated by ICTs. The overall ICT4EMPL project produced a series of reports on the state of play of novel forms of internet-mediated work activity: crowd-sourced labour, crowdfunding, internet-mediated volunteering and internet-mediated work exchange (timebanks and complementary currency).

Ideas for Leadership Volunteering Activities – A long list of ideas to create or lead a sustainable, lasting benefit to a community, recruiting others to help and to have a leadership role as a volunteer. These can also be activities for a Capstone project, the Girl Scouts Gold Award, the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award (U.K.), a mitzvah project, or even scholarship consideration.

Volunteering in pursuit of a medical, veterinary or social work degree / career – a guide to volunteering activities that will help build your skills and give you experience applying skills to work in these fields.

Nov. 11, 2015 update: Team Rubicon “seeks to provide our veterans with three things they lose after leaving the military: a purpose, gained through disaster relief; community, built by serving with others; and self-worth, from recognizing the impact one individual can make.” It does this through volunteering, uniting the skills and experiences of military veterans with first responders to rapidly deploy emergency response teams.

June 26, 2016 update: The Washington County, Oregon Sheriff’s Department has a search and rescue team and membership is reserved for teen volunteers. Participants learn leadership skills, basic First Aid, some first responder skills, the basics of police investigations and more, and become eligible for college  scholarships. 

Oct. 23, 2019 update: High school students in New  York state studying building trades and construction participated in state and federal parks systems historic preservation projects as volunteers via HistoriCorps, a nonprofit organization who organizes volunteers to save and sustain historic places for public benefit. The students are helping to preserve the history of the nation’s public lands while also receiving an important real-world, hands-on education. Also see: Volunteering on public lands in the USA (national parks, national forests, national monuments, federally-managed historic sites, Bureau of Land Management land, state parks, wetlands, etc.)

Supervising online volunteers in court-ordered settings

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graphic by Jayne Cravens representing volunteersA comment was submitted on one of the most popular blogs I’ve ever written, What online community service is and is not. That blog called out a company that is selling what it calls online community service hours, but which is, in fact, a ruse: customers pay a fee and receive access to videos, which they are supposed to watch, and in return for claiming to watch them, the company gives the “volunteers” a letter from a nonprofit saying they performed online community service. As someone that has been promoting virtual volunteering since the 1990s – and quality standards in all kinds of volunteer engagement – it continues to have me outraged.

I no longer approve comments on that blog, which has more than two dozen, because, for the last three years, most of the comments I get about this blog are from trolls affiliated with the company, ranting about how I hate hard-working people that don’t have time to do traditional onsite service (a rant that can come only from someone who has not actually read the blog) or name-calling such as this:

fanmail

Yes, really. Welcome to my world.

But a recent comment from Mark Waterson wasn’t either of those. I didn’t want his comment, and my response, to get buried in the sea of comments on that blog, so the blog entry you are reading now is devoted to this comment.

Mark says in his blog comment:

“This article points out online community service options that are legitimate, but really misses the point of why those other organizations exist. If you are doing community service for court, you need an official signed letter of someone in the nonprofit organization who “supervised” you saying you have completed X hours of community service. Your alternatives, while more legitimate, do not offer this, even at a price, and so no one doing court ordered community service can even consider your suggestions as possible alternatives for their purposes.”

Mark is incorrect, however, on this issue. Many of the online volunteering options I recommend on this page DO provide an official signed letter by the nonprofit organization who was assisted by the volunteer, stating how many hours the person gave as an online volunteer. And I have been one of those nonprofit representatives that wrote and signed such a letter for someone doing court-ordered community service through virtual volunteering. As I state on many of my pages for volunteers, a person needs to ask the nonprofit he or she wants to help – whether that nonprofit is down the street or across the country – BEFORE volunteering if staff would be willing to write and sign such a letter. Indeed, many will say no – even for onsite, face-to-face volunteers – but you will find some that will say yes if you keep looking, as I suggest on my pages.

As volunteerism expert Susan Ellis frequently points out, there are very few onsite, traditional volunteering activities where a volunteer is supervised the entire time he or she is performing service. Instead, the volunteers is trained, then given a desk, or a work space and materials, or a phone, or a garbage bag and some gloves, and then they do MOST of their volunteering largely unsupervised. As someone who has been fooled more than a few times by a volunteer sitting at a desk, looking at a computer screen for hours, and pretending to work – and after a day or two, I find out nothing is getting done – I’ve realized that volunteer supervision is much more than eyes-on-the-volunteer, or sign-in sheets at the door.

vvbooklittleAs Susan and I discuss in The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook, there are many ways to supervise online volunteers, to ensure the work is getting done, that the quality of the work is up-to-snuff, and that the volunteer is getting the support he or she needs, such as regular Skype calls, regular emails back and forth, shared work spaces, regular reviews of work to date, etc. In taking those steps, you are going to know very quickly if you are talking to the person actually doing the work.

Could someone fake online volunteering service? Sure, just as people can fake onsite service: hand the volunteer the plastic bag and the gloves, send them down the road to pick up trash, and when they are out-of-sight, a friend brings them a full bag of trash to return to you. Ta da! Or put three volunteers at your information booth, walk away for five hours, and return, not knowing that one of the volunteers paid the others to lie about her time at the table.

Let’s imagine a volunteering scenario: a father gets a DUI and has to do a certain number of hours of community service. He finds a nonprofit that needs 400 photos on Flickr that each need to be tagged with a unique set of keywords, and because each set of keywords is different, it has to be done manually. He signs up to do the work, is accepted to do the work, but his son actually does the work. But here’s the thing: he could also do that as an onsite volunteer: he could go onsite, sit at a desk, and play Tetris until someone passes by, then switch to the Flickr screen and pretend to work until they are gone; meanwhile, his son back at home is actually doing all the work. Here’s a similar scenario: a mom gets assigned court-ordered community service and she signs up to help a nonprofit translate brochures and speeches into Spanish from English. She comes into the nonprofit, sits at a desk, but she plays Scrabble whilst her daughter back home does all the translating.

I think that any volunteer manager of quality would sniff out these scams quickly, through their discussions with the volunteer, review of work, etc. And that would be true of onsite or online volunteers.  TMZ implied that Lindsay Lohan faked her virtual volunteering to fulfill court-ordered community service (be sure to scroll down to the comments – yes, I commented) – it would have been so easy for the nonprofit to know if she did the work or not, through basic volunteer management 101 principles.

Does the tiny possibility that a volunteer can fake work done on a computer mean volunteers fulfilling online community service shouldn’t be allowed to do any online work even if it’s supposed to be done onsite at the organization, rather than via their own computer? No more volunteer web site designers, database data inputters, app designers, translators, editors, podcast producers, photo taggers, and on and on, if they are assigned service by the courts? Of course not. Whether this kind of work is being done onsite or online from the volunteers’ home or a nearby library, the likelihood that a volunteer is pretending to do the work while it’s actually a relative or roommate is so tiny, and so easy to sniff out. Fear of what might happen, in this case, isn’t at all justification of not allowing people assigned court-ordered community service to engage in virtual volunteering.

The biggest challenge to court-ordered folks finding virtual volunteering isn’t fear that they will fake their service by having someone else do it; rather, it’s finding virtual volunteering at all. And many nonprofits refuse to work with court-ordered community service folks period, onsite or online. They just don’t love ’em like I love ’em.

Even though I disagree with Mark, I thank him for writing – I’ve been wanting to expand on this issue for a while now.

Also see:

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

What online community service is – and is not – the very first blog I wrote exposing this company, back in January 2011, that resulted in the founder of the company calling me at home to beg me to take the blog down.

Haters gonna hate, the latest update on Community Service Help and other similar, unethical companies

Community Service Help Cons Another Person, a first-person account by someone who paid for online community service and had it rejected by the court.

Update on a virtual volunteering scam, from November 2012.

Courts being fooled by online community service scams

Online community service company tries to seem legit.

Online volunteer scam goes global

Contradicting myself?

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In the same day, online, I applauded an organization that involved volunteers to help preserve historic sites on US public lands, and then questioned California for relying so much on volunteers to maintain state parks.

Am I a hypocrite?

No. Well, at least not about this.

The nonprofit HistoriCorps engages volunteers to work on historic preservation projects in USA. Individual projects might last from a week to more than two months. Cultural and historical sites in the USA are at risk because of drastic budget cuts by state and federal governments – many could already be beyond saving. This program could never repair everything that needs repairing, but what it can do, through volunteering, is educate people about those needs and about the consequences of those budget cuts. This program repairs a small number of sites every year, but maybe even more importantly, it also creates passionate advocates for US historical sites. It also is a way for historic sites to involve Americans in a deeper way than just as a visitor. This program builds job skills, gives people construction experience, and engages youth. From the web site: “Projects offer unending opportunities to tell America’s greatest stories, making historical connections real, and cultivating among those involved an appreciation of the heritage, balanced use and stewardship of our nation’s special places.” Even if there was enough money to hire paid staff to do all of the work needed to preserve these historic sites, it would be a great idea to reserve some work for volunteers, to keep those many benefits for historic sites and volunteers alike.

By contrast, this story from the Nonprofit Quarterly about volunteers in California state parks pretty much says, We don’t have enough money to pay people to do the work of keeping state parks open, so we need people to work for free. Ugh. Volunteer engagement in this case isn’t presented as building community or engaging under-served populations or building awareness or giving people a deeper experience at the parks – it’s presented as being about having an unpaid labor force to get the work done. I’m very grateful that volunteers are keeping California state parks open – I’m a California state park user. And just as with HistoriCorps, absolutely, let’s keep volunteers involved in trail repair, invasive plant removal, habitat restoration, rehabilitation of historic orchards, etc., so that not only can the work be done, but also, so volunteers can have a deeper relationship with the parks they love and become advocates for state parks – and state funds for those park.

In fact, I think that, in both these cases, volunteers are helping for the same reasons: their love of these sites. And I think the results are quite similar: volunteers get work done but, more importantly, volunteers are seeing first hand the consequences of cuts in government funding. The contrast really is a matter of language and attitude about volunteer engagement. So, let me say it again: watch your language regarding volunteer engagement. Saying,”If they don’t do this, we’ll close!” can also mean, “Volunteers are free! We don’t have to pay people! Hurrah!”

For more on the subject of the value of volunteer or community engagement:

Yes, I love court-ordered community service folks

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graphic by Jayne Cravens representing volunteersThe Oregon Volunteers Commission for Voluntary Action and Service recently hosted meetings all over the state of Oregon with representatives from nonprofits, religious organizations and government agencies that involve volunteers, and volunteers themselves, to gather information to use in the 2016-18 Oregon State Service Plan and prepare a report for the Oregon Legislature on how to strengthen volunteerism and engagement.

I attended the Washington County meeting. Not many people attended, unfortunately, but the attendees that were there were enthusiastic and ready to work. The second best part of the meeting, for me, was watching one of the commission board members begin to realize just what a pain in the neck requests to nonprofits from corporations for group volunteering activities can be.

The best part of the meeting, for me, was when Sarah Delphine of Hillsboro Parks & Recreation said she loved working with court-ordered community service folks, and I immediately demanded a high-five. Because, for the most part, I love them too. I’ve had good experiences with them as online volunteers.

Oh how that point of view puts me on the outs with so many managers of volunteers! There are regularly rants on various online groups from people that hate working with court-ordered community service folks – or anyone being required to provide community service, including students volunteering as part of a class assignment. “They aren’t really volunteers! I shouldn’t have to work with them!” Gnashing of teeth, pulling of hair…

I approach management of volunteers as community engagement. I’m not just trying to get work done; I’m trying to build relationships and engage with the community, however I might define the community. Organizations I work for often want to engage a diversity of community members – and if they don’t, it’s something I push very hard for. And that includes engaging with community members who are far from perfect.

Let me be clear: I’m not going to involve anyone as a volunteer, online or onsite, that I don’t think is appropriate for the organization, court-ordered or not. I’m not going to create a volunteering assignment just to involve a particular kind of person or a particular group if I don’t think that assignment has real value to the organization where I’m working. I will tell a volunteer – or a group of volunteers, even from a very well-known Fortune 500 corporation – “No, I don’t think we can accommodate you as a volunteer. You might try looking on VolunteerMatch for something else.” My goal is to serve the mission of the organization, and that often means saying no to someone who wants to volunteer. I won’t lower the standards of the organization for anyone.

That said, I’ve worked with about half a dozen online volunteers that were ordered to perform community service by the court, and all have been terrific. And all were VOLUNTEERS, and I treated them as such.

Not everyone who has contacted me to volunteer online to fulfill a court order has ended up volunteering with me. Most disappear after I write them back – just as most people that inquire about volunteering in general disappear. Why do most folks disappear? Because it’s so easy to say “I want to volunteer with you!” So easy to send that email, send that text, make that call. But it’s much harder to actually do it, court-ordered or not – it dawns on folks that, oh, volunteering, online or onsite, really does take time and effort, and they fade away, off to look at some other shiny something they read about online.

My first communication with every person that wants to volunteer notes, among other things, that they have to get permission from the court or their probation officer BEFORE they start volunteering with me if they are wanting to volunteer to fulfill such an obligation. Many times, they don’t get the permission – the court or probation officer says no. So that’s another factor that’s kept the numbers of court-ordered folks I’ve worked with quite low. But for the half a dozen folks who did get permission to volunteer online with me: they were terrific volunteers. They got the assignment done, they did the assignment correctly, they did it on time, they stayed in touch – and, in addition, they volunteered more hours than they had to by the court. One guy stuck around for a few months doing small online assignments for me, going far beyond anything the court had asked for. And I thanked them, just like I did with any volunteer: they got listed on a web page that named them and what they did, along with all other volunteers, they got an email thank you from me, they got invited to focus groups, and on and on.

I really want to help people doing court-ordered service to volunteer. That’s why I created a web page specifically to help guide them. And that’s why I created a web page of where to find virtual volunteering & home-based volunteering with established nonprofits – because there are so many companies out there claiming to give court-ordered community service folks the hours they need for a small fee (please do NOT pay a company for online community service!).

You can involve court-ordered community service volunteers without lowering your standards for volunteers. But don’t say no to someone who needs volunteering time for a court or probation just because its mandatory service, because it’s not pure volunteering – whatever that is. Put the person through all the same screening and orienting you do for any volunteer candidate. If they make the cut, bring them on board. If you see volunteer management as community engagement, as something so much more than just getting work done, there’s no reason not to.

vvbooklittleWant to know more about the realities of engaging volunteers online? Hey, there’s a book for that! The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook is available for purchase, as a hardback book or an e-book. You will not find a more detailed guide for using the Internet to support and involve volunteers! It includes extensive information on safety and confidentiality, for those wanting to use such as an excuse for not involving online volunteers, court-ordered or not – and has specific advice regarding working with court-ordered volunteers.

Misconceptions re: VSO, UNV & Peace Corps

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Based on comments I’m reading on Facebook and emails I get, there are some misunderstandings among a lot of people about three major volunteer-sending organizations: VSO, UN Volunteers and even Peace Corps. These misunderstandings lead to frustrations about what these organizations are looking for in candidates, and also leads to some perfect candidates not even considering applying to any of these organizations. I’m going to try to tackle some of these common misconceptions into today’s blog:

I’m going to try to tackle some of these common misconceptions into today’s blog. But please know that none of the following statements are official statements by any of these programs. These are my views, based on my experience working with these organizations and observing their work for more than a decade:

  • Each of these organizations require at least a six-month commitment, and most of their assignments require a two-year commitment. These aren’t programs for “I want a feel good work abroad experience for a few weeks” – these are real humanitarian assignments that require a longer-term commitment than an extended vacation.
  • These organizations are not for unskilled people who want to “try out” humanitarian work. You need to have a great deal of real work experience and/or a Master’s degree to be in any of these programs. The average age of a UN Volunteer was 38 when I worked at HQ a decade ago, and I don’t think it’s gotten any younger. The average age of a Peace Corps volunteer, at the time of this blog’s publishing, is 28, but 7 percent of volunteers are over 50. You need an area of expertise and/or a project you have lead successfully that proves you could do a field assignment – and that project doesn’t have to be something you did outside of your homoe country – in order to be accepted in any of these three programs.
  • UNV, VSO and PeaceCorps are excellent options for seasoned professionals from the for-profit sector that want to apply their skills in the developing world – but you will need much more than just that experience to make the cut and get to be a part of these programs. You need to represent on your application work that you’ve done, paid or as a volunteer, with high-poverty communities, people with low-literacy skills, people that are at-risk for poverty, crime or exploitation, populations different from the one you represent, religiously-conservative communities, etc. These organizations want to know that you have experience that will help you get through the challenges in a developing country, that every circumstance abroad won’t be utterly foreign to you.
  • The application process for each of these organizations is highly competitive and the organizations reject MOST of the people that apply. These organizations want people who have résumés that show experience that proves applicants can do the job that is asked for. While I got a job at UNV HQ in 2001, I actually would NOT have qualified to be an actual UN Volunteer in the field at that time, because I lacked the experience to do so; I could support UN Volunteers, but I’m really not sure I could have been one myself at that time (now, I do feel I’m qualified, and have been accepted into the roster).
  • Demand for volunteers through these programs changes frequently. There may suddenly be a need for people that have a great deal of experience working in government, that can help a country transition after conflict or independence. There may suddenly be a need for civil engineers. And just because someone with HIV/AIDS education for teens, or someone that’s run a vocational program, or someone with experience creating farming CO-OPs isn’t needed today doesn’t mean such won’t be needed in the next two years, so it’s a good idea to apply for these programs now even if they aren’t asking for someone urgently with your particular area of expertise.
  • You might get accepted into the UNV program roster but never get a placement. Placement consideration starts with what skills are needed, and then recruitment or placement staff look at qualifying candidates in terms of a variety of factors, including nationality; if a particular country is funding a particular UNV assignment, they may want the chosen candidate to be from their particular country. It also can take many months between the time you are accepted as a candidate to the time you get a placement (if ever).
  • You will be paid if you are accepted and get a placement in any of these programs. All of these agencies like to stress that these aren’t jobs and you don’t receive a salary, but the reality is: you are paid. Your travel and accommodation expenses will be paid, you get medical insurance, and you will receive a living allowance to meet reasonable living expenses in-country during your assignment. In fact, as a UNV, you get a stipend that is often the same of what a local government worker in the country where you would serve would get. However, most would agree that the stipend is not enough to have money left over to send home, pay debts you have back home, etc.
  • You aren’t limited to the title “Peace Corps Volunteer” or “UN Volunteer.” You will, in fact, have a role that doesn’t have the word “volunteer” in it. You will be a maternal health care nurse, a clinic manager, an ESL teacher for women and children, a fisheries advisor, a communications manager, a public health educator, an IT manager, etc., with a local NGO or government agency in the country where you serve. You will have a specific role, and that’s what should be on your résumé or CV when you complete the assignment – that you did it under a UNV contract or whatever should be in your job description, because that is the contract under which you worked, but that title or role that describes what you did is what’s most important to a potential employer.

If the participants in these programs do receive compensation, what makes them volunteers? As someone who believes volunteer is merely a pay rate, and that it doesn’t have anything to do with level of skills, level of responsibility, motivation or commitment of a person doing that volunteer assignment, it’s a question I’ve struggled with. This is the conclusion I’ve reached: the United Nations, the US State Department, and various other entities that work overseas have different types of worker contracts. And in those agencies, when you call something a “job”, even just a “consultancy”, it comes with certain expectations on the part of the worker in terms of monetary compensation, because the people in these roles are doing this work full time as their careers, for many, many years. It’s how employees and consultants are paying for homes, putting their kids through school, paying family expenses, saving for retirement, etc. The vision of Peace Corps, VSO and UNV, at least on paper, is that the people that are volunteers through their programs aren’t necessarily people who are career humanitarians; they are professionals or highly-skilled people willing to give up six months to two years of their careers and fully compensated work in such to, instead, work as a part of a humanitarian endeavor overseas. Why do these agencies want these people? On paper, they say it’s because these programs can involve people in humanitarian work who aren’t career humanitarians, bringing in much-needed talent and experience that career humanitarians might not have – a bakery owner who goes to Africa for six months to help train local people in food safety and modern baking techniques, for instance. Or a police officer who goes to Afghanistan for six months and trains local police on recognizing and appropriately responding to domestic violence. The reality? I’m sorry to say that, for many agencies, it’s a way to save money; contracts through UNV, VSO and PeaceCorp are far, far cheaper than hiring someone as an employee or consultant outright.

A reminder that none of the aforementioned statements are official statements by any of these programs. These are my views, based on my experience working with these organizations and observing their work for more than a decade.

April 20, 2018 update: Here is a blog by Jasmin Blessing, a UN Volunteer with UN Women in Ecuador. It is a really nice example of what effective volunteering abroad looks like.

Also see:

Isn’t my good heart & desire enough to help abroad?

Using Your Business Skills for Good – Volunteering Your Business Management Skills, to help people starting or running small businesses / micro enterprises, to help people building businesses in high-poverty areas, and to help people entering or re-entering the work force.

How to Get a Job with the United Nations or Other International Humanitarian or Development Organization

Ideas for Funding Your Volunteering Abroad Trip – for those who want short-term volunteering opportunities abroad and who don’t have the high-demand skills needed for VSO, Peace Corps, UN Volunteers, etc.)