Tag Archives: volunteers

Debate: volunteer manager qualifications

4 Replies

What should the qualifications be for a person that is responsible for volunteers at an organization?

That’s a hot topic right now, and there is a LOT of disagreement about it. Heck, we can’t even agree what to call such a person! (volunteer manager? volunteer resources manager? volunteer coordinator? director of community engagement?)

My view:

If an organization views this person as merely the purveyor of free labor, and sees this person as the primary manager of volunteers in a single activity – volunteers staffing the gift shop or the help desk, working in the food pantry (more with the food than the clients), serving food in a shelter, cleaning up beaches on one-day events –  then the qualifications are going to be quite low. The person in charge of volunteers will report to the head of human resources, won’t be a senior manager, and will be judged on whether or not all shifts are filled and all tasks are completed. Those are skills that can be taught to someone on the job – no need for volunteer management credentials – though some volunteer management workshops would be helpful.

This is how most corporate folks and very traditional organizations view managers or coordinators of volunteers. This is how most volunteer management workshops and most volunteer management conferences view those responsible for volunteers at an organization.

By contrast, if an organization views this person as responsible for:

  • community engagement, demonstrating that the community invests in the organization and believes in its mission
  • building the capacities of other employees to involve volunteers in their work and supporting employee involvement of volunteers in a variety of roles, including in leadership roles
  • being up-to-date on legal issues, political rhetoric and trends that can affect volunteer involvement
  • creating ways for volunteer involvement to relate directly to the organizations mission

then the qualifications required for the person in charge of volunteers are MUCH higher. The manager of volunteers or director of community engagement is not merely the purveyor of free labor; this manager has a direct role on program delivery and, therefore, should report to the director of programs – if not directly to the Executive Director! And credentials are essential – though not necessarily a certificate in volunteer management.

Here’s all the places this is a hot topic right now – check out what’s being said and join the conversation!:

Also see:

Photos & videos by & of volunteers online – privacy issues?

2 Replies

Following up on the post from yesterday regarding why nonprofits, NGOs and other mission-based organizations shouldn’t use stock photos, let’s talk today about privacy issues with photos of volunteers, particularly children.

Back in 2010 on UKVPMs, a discussion group for volunteer managers in the United Kingdom, someone wrote:

I have vague memories of this issue being discussed before, but I’m looking into guidance (mainly for volunteers, but also for paid staff and service users) around people posting photo’s or video clips etc on You Tube and similar sites. If working with children and/or  other vulnerable groups, are there clear legal responsibilities we need to be aware of ? I don’t have a deal of experience in this area, so don’t know how much vetting the sites carry out themselves and how reliable this might be. Is data protection an issue

Video and photo-sharing sites do NOT vet any photos or videos submitted to their sites, just as the phone company isn’t responsible for what you are saying in a phone conversation.

It’s important to remember that, in most countries, you cannot legally control what people take photos of or film at a public event. Think of it as the picnic in the public park rule — you cannot control someone taking photos or film of you if you are having a picnic in a public park, regardless of whether or not kids are present.

That said, you should ask your staff and volunteers (same rule for all) to adhere to certain rules regarding taking photos or filming at any of your organization’s activities, public or not, and to adhere to certain rules regarding what they do with that film and video. You need to determine what those rules should be. You need to let volunteers know this includes whatever they do with their cell phones (so no one can say — “Oh, I thought you just meant cameras“).

Do all of your staff and volunteers already sign photo release forms, saying that photos may be taken of them at organization activities in which they participate and may be used in your own outreach activities (your web site, your blog, brochures, slide show presentations, posters, etc.)? Do parents of all children participating in your programs sign such a form? If not, you definitely should get busy getting such a form put together and signed by everyone now, and everyone who joins later. You can find lots of examples of photo release forms on Google.

I don’t know how much these releases would count in a court, but they do create awareness among participants that photos are sometimes taken. I haven’t lost any volunteers over the signing of such a policy — has anyone else? (I’d be interested to hear how you handled such in the comments section below — or did you lose the volunteer altogether?).

Do you already have a policy regarding how your organization identifies children in photos? (first name only, no names at all, etc.) Make sure all staff and volunteers know this policy. If you don’t have such a policy, again, look on Google — lots of organization’s share their policy. Some I found:

With the photo release and children-in-photos policies taken care of, talk with staff and volunteers and involve them in the development of further policies regarding taking photos and film during organization activities, and how they use these photos and videos. Reinforce your confidentiality policies and children-identification-in-photos policy during these conversations. Be clear about what cannot be filmed or posted under any circumstances (personnel discussions, staff meetings, counseling sessions, etc.). I find that involving people in the conversation about policy development (asking for their feedback in my online discussion group for volunteers, at onsite meetings, informally when we meet, etc.) better guarantees people will embrace it and make sure it is enforced.

If you are going to prohibit all such photo and video-taking, you need to have very clear reasons why (in writing and in conversations), and you need to talk about what the consequences will be to staff and volunteers if the prohibition is violated. You also need to consider the consequences of such a draconian ban — you will be losing out on a significant public outreach tool. Volunteers can create a LOT of interest among their friends, family and associates for your organization when they share photos and videos of their activities as a volunteer. Also, you will probably lose more volunteers over such a draconian ban than you will if you allow photos to be taken.

One of the guidelines I have is to ask staff and volunteers to always announce to their colleagues “I’m taking photos/video now!” before they start doing so, and to respect the wishes of people who say they do not want to be filmed. Ask staff and volunteers to respect the wishes of their fellow volunteers who may contact them and ask that an image that features them on their own Flickr account (or other photo-sharing site) or YouTube account to be removed (note that these accounts are owned by them, not you). Ask staff and volunteers to share links to videos and photos with the organization, as a courtesy. Talk with volunteers about what a photo dispute might look like and how such could be negotiated/mediated (you could give them two or three fictional scenarios for discussion). And, as noted above, ask for their own suggestions for policies.

For whatever you come up with in terms of guidelines, you will have to reinforce the message frequently — you can’t just deliver the message once and expect it to be heard.

Related blogs and sites:

Social media policies for mission-based organizations

Forget the stock photos; make your own photo archive

Photos of me at work

Tags: photos, communications, communicating, mission, outreach, story, news, volunteering, volunteers, community, engagement, volunteerism, smartphones, PDAs, camera, phone, cell

Don’t use stock photos; make your own photo archive

Leave a reply

One of the many online communities I’m on had a posting by someone from a nonprofit organization looking for stock photos of volunteers to use in a brochure they were producing.

And I cringed.

Stock photos are professionally-produced photos made available for companies and organizations to use to express a certain notion or idea. Stock photos are also of people who have no affiliation with the company or organization that uses them on their web sites, in their brochures, etc. You see stock photos in picture frames for sale.

A stock photo used by a nonprofit organization on its web site, in its brochure, or on a poster is obvious — and dishonest. To me, it screams, “These are professional models who don’t actually volunteer here/aren’t actually clients here!”

Unless the identity of your volunteers or clients needs to be protected (and that certainly does happen — for instance, with domestic violence shelters), you should have a folder on your computer system (on your local network, in the cloud, whatever) filled with digital photos showing genuine volunteers, clients, staff and others, ready for use in your marketing materials and fund-raising proposals.

The good news is that you can easily compile such a stock photo archive!

Begin by ensuring that you have a signed photo release for every volunteer at your organization. Volunteers should be asked to sign such a form at the time they attend the first orientation or volunteering session or with their completed volunteer application. If you intend to take photos at an activity or event where clients will be present, you will also need to get a photo release form for any clients (or anyone else) who might be photographed. You can find samples of photo release forms by typing in this phrase into Google.com or your favorite online search tool:
photo release form

Next, make sure every paid staff member, every unpaid volunteer, every client and every parent or guardian of a client knows your organization’s policies regarding taking photos in association with your organization’s activities (again, just type photo policy into Google.com or your favorite online search tool to find examples of such), and within the boundaries of those policies, invite them to take photos in association with your organization’s activities and to share these photos with your organization. With most smart phones and other handheld tech coming with a camera, your volunteers and clients may already be taking photos. Remind everyone associated with your organization, via regular meetings or regular online or print communications, both of these policies and that you would like such photos shared with you (people need to hear messages more than once in order to have them in mind).

Note in your event or activity announcements if photos might be taken. Whoever takes photos should identify him or herself to those being photographed. This should be a part of your photography policies that you have communicated organization-wide.

When photographing at events where people may not know me, I ask that whomever kicks off the meeting to announce that I’m taking photos that could appear on our web site or in printed materials, and that if anyone does not want their photo used, they should raise their hand any time they see me taking a photo they might be a part of so that later, when going through photos later, I will delete any photo of a person who is raising their hand, or crop them out of the photo. This worked really well when I took photos at community meetings in Afghanistan (more about Taking Photos in the Developing World, a resource I developed while working in Afghanistan in 2007).

Frequently encourage volunteers, employees and clients to share photos they have taken at your events or during volunteering activities with your organization (they need to hear this message more than once!). The best way to share photos is, IMO, via Flickr (photos can be shared with just your organization, without sharing them with the entire world) or via Drop Box (don’t accept photos via email – it uses too much bandwidth and will slow your emails down!).

As photos come in to you, create a folder on your computer or drive for photos you might want to use on your web site, in a brochure, in a fundraising proposal, etc. Look for photos that have at least one of these qualities:

  • shows action
  • shows smiles
  • shows diversity
  • teens
  • seniors

If you don’t have software or an operating system that allows you to organize and search photos easily, create a naming system for photos, sub-folders and files on your computer so you can easily find photos for certain kinds of images, such as photos that show:

  • female participation
  • senior/elder participation
  • multi-cultural participation
  • physical action
  • enjoyment/happiness
  • caring
  • etc.

If you can afford to use a professional photographer and have photo setups, where volunteers pretend to be in the middle of a service activity, or where staff pretend to be engaged in their work, great! It’s okay to set up a photo — just use your own folks, not professional models.

Stay genuine! That attracts people much more than even the slickest of stock images.

March 26, 2018 update: I was working on a very large PR campaign with a colleague. I wanted to solicit photos from various sources to use in our campaign, photos of people engaged in an activity that related to our campaign. She wanted to use stock photos. I relented for various reasons. A year later, I stopped at a gas station in Kentucky, and while inside, looked up at a poster about job opportunities with this particular company. There was a series of photos that I guess were meant to represent people that work for the company. And among that series of photos was one that we had used prominently in our own campaign, which had nothing to do with gas stations… I realize it’s unlikely that anyone else made the connection, and I certainly don’t dislike gas stations – I’m quite fond of their services. But it was a reminder of why using stock photos is often a very bad idea.

March 8, 2021 update: Here is a fantastic blog about a company that created its own photo stock library, using its own assets (it’s own offices). I think going round your building with a smartphone, taking snaps and adding insta filters will always trump purchasing stock images. What a great task for volunteers to undertake for your organization!

latest moment of volunteer management madness

2 Replies

Many of my blogs and web pages are inspired by first-hand experience as a volunteer or as a volunteer manager. And, sadly, it’s often bad experiences, usually as a volunteer myself, that lead to new blogs and web pages.

Of course I don’t name the organizations that inspire these blogs, and I try to put a very positive spin on these, to help other nonprofits, NGOs, libraries, schools, public sector agencies and other mission-based organizations to not make the same mistakes I’ve experienced. I consider them learning experiences, and I want others to learn from them as well.

Here’s some of these blogs and web pages that were inspired by my own experiences as a volunteer:

Here’s the latest moment-of-volunteer-management-madness inspired by a real organization:

This particular multi-state organization has leadership volunteering roles, on the local level, to handle the organization’s project management, including the management of local volunteers, in individual communities. But often, some of these local leadership roles are not filled, because no one is interested or no one has the time to do all of the tasks a particular role requires. Therefore, the lead volunteer for all other leadership volunteers in that community gets saddled with all the roles that aren’t filled, in addition to all of his or her other volunteer responsibilities.

One group of leadership volunteers in one community had a brilliant, oh-so-logical idea for lessening the burden on the lead volunteer and getting necessary tasks done: allow volunteers to commit to completing individual tasks, rather than the entire, hard-to-fill, leadership roles. For instance, allow one volunteer to be in charge of the online community for local volunteers, another volunteer to be in charge of updating the web site, and another volunteer to help with designing paper fliers – which, altogether, are most of the duties of the communications manager volunteer.

There were people ready to assume these much less-intensive volunteer roles. That means all the tasks of that role get done, the local lead volunteer manager – a volunteer herself – wouldn’t be overburdened trying to do these tasks as well as her other responsibilities, and maybe, after a few months, one of these task-based volunteers would decide, hey, I think I could do the entire job myself – I’m ready to commit to the entire leadership role! It’s a fantastic opportunity to cultivate new leadership volunteers – people who might get a taste of the experience and decide they would love to take on a more substantial role.

So, great idea, right? Well, not according to the organization. An employee representative who attended the local meeting where this idea was introduced quashed the idea. She said that the entire role has to be filled by one person and absolutely cannot be divided among several volunteers. Since no one is going to take that role in its entirety, all those tasks are going to be assumed by the already over-burdened team leader.

What a mistake! What a missed opportunity to cultivate new volunteers and new leaders!

Well, at least I got a new blog out of it…

 

People with disabilities & virtual volunteering

2 Replies

I said it back in the 1990s, and I’ll say it again: Online volunteering / virtual volunteering can allow for the greater participation of people who might find volunteering difficult or impossible because of a disability. This in turn allows organizations to benefit from the additional talent and resources of more volunteers, and allows agencies to further diversify their volunteer talent pool.

In addition, ensuring that your volunteering program – online or onsite – is accommodating for people with disabilities will end up making your program more accessible to everyone. For instance, if you make sure your online training videos have captioning, don’t be surprised when people who have no hearing problems at all thank you, since they can mute the video and watch it at work or in a public area without disturbing people around them.

People with disabilities volunteer for the same reasons as anyone else: they want to contribute their time and energy to improving the quality of life. They want challenging, rewarding, educational service projects that address needs of a community and provide them with outlets for their enthusiasm and talents.

I was reminded of this recently when a fantastic testimonial from Alena Roberts for the Matilda Ziegler Magazine for the Blind was recently reposted to Inclusive Planet about online volunteering / virtual volunteering.

Here are 11 people’s testimonials about how virtual volunteering allowed them to volunteer, despite their disabilities, compiled by the Virtual Volunteering Project, that remain as powerful as when they were first-published back in the late 1990s.

I told this story back in April 2009, but it’s a good time to repeat it now:

Back in the late 1990s, when I was directing the Virtual Volunteering Project, I recruited and involved online volunteers myself to support the Project, feeling that it would be inappropriate to offer advice to other organizations to involve online volunteers unless I was engaged in the practice myself. The only recruiting I did was via the Project’s web site, on a page that was purposely not easy to find; online volunteers were oh-so-easy to recruit even back then, and by making the page harder to find, I regularly received applications from candidates who I knew were actually reading my web site.

One day, an application came in from a guy I’ll call Arnie. It was clear from Arnie’s application that he was… different. His answers to questions on the application were child-like (though everything was spelled correctly), and didn’t at all sound like they were coming from a man in his 40s (he shared his age despite my not asking for it). Among other things, he said that what he wanted to do most as an online volunteer was to share images and messages from the Virgin Mary, a skill set that I didn’t really have a need for at that time… But I kept reading Arnie’s application and thinking, well, while I know this person is very likely mentally disabled based on his answers, he spells just fine and he’s REALLY enthusiastic. There’s really no reason to say no outright. I’ll put him through all of the regular online screening steps and give him a trial assignment and see what happens, just like I do with all volunteers.

Unlike most other online volunteering applicants, Arnie followed all of the directions on the online orientation immediately, to the letter, and within just a couple of hours rather than a couple of days. I don’t remember what the first assignment was that I gave him, but just as the directions in the online orientation stated, he wrote back (within probably an hour) and said that he didn’t feel he could do what was asked for, so could he please have a different assignment? I think the revised assignment I sent him was regarding a list of names of people who had given me their business cards at conferences, but back in the 1990s, many people didn’t put their email addresses and web site addresses on their cards. I asked him to use Google to find that information for me, if possible. The next day, the finished assignment was waiting for me, with profuse apologies for each person he couldn’t find online, and a request for a new assignment.

I slowly became a bit obsessed with trying to create assignments for Arnie. He could do only basic things online, like looking up information, and he needed explicit directions on how to do every task, but he was SO enthusiastic about it all. I started saving things for Arnie to do that I could have done myself in far less time than it would take him to do. For each assignment he always wrote back promptly if he thought an assignment was too difficult, or wrote back to say how happy he was at the assignment, how excited he was to do it, etc.

I think Arnie’s favorite assignment was when I asked him to visit 20 or so web sites that were supposed to be targeted at children; I was putting together a list of things online mentors and young people could do together online, and I wanted to know if these web sites were worthwhile. A paid consultant could not have provided the thorough, brutally honest assessments that Arnie did. Things like

I did not like this site at all, Miss Jayne. It was confusing! I did not know how to use it! It is a bad web site for this reason.

    • or

I liked this site very much, Miss Jayne. It was fun! I showed it to my mother. She thought it was fun too.

I was starting an online mentoring program at a local elementary school in Austin, and I invited all the online volunteers I had worked with to apply to be online mentors. Arnie was probably the first applicant. At first, my reaction was: he can’t do this. I have to tell him no. But then I kept thinking about it — *why* couldn’t Arnie talk online with a 10 year old? His tone would actually be perfect for a 10 year old. They would never know each other’s real name or be able to contact each other outside the web platform we would use for online exchanges, every message he sent would be screened, just like the other mentors. Why not let him go through the whole application process and see if he makes it? So, I did.

Among the screening required was two references who could attest to the candidate’s character and communications abilities. One of Arnie’s references was his doctor. When I called for the reference check, the doctor said, “Are you the Miss Jayne?! I’ve heard about you for a year now! Arnie lives to volunteer with you! It’s changed his life!”

I’m glad I was on the phone, so he couldn’t see me crying.

Arnie survived the screening process and was a wonderful participant in the program. His emails to his student were always perfect, full of questions and enthusiastic comments, written in short, simple sentences. The only thing I ever had to do was ask him to revise an email that had a religious reference in it, not as in “I went to church this weekend and it was fun,” which would have been fine, but as in “I hope you are praying to God every day!” Arnie quickly understood why that was inappropriate once I explained it to him, and it never happened again.

After more than a year of working together, Arnie wrote to say that he would need to take a break from volunteering, because he was getting “too full of worry” when he did assignments. I wrote him after a month saying that I hoped he was doing well, and he wrote back a lengthy, somewhat rambling apology for “letting you down.” I wrote him again to say that was NOT the case at all, wrote lots of encouragement and thank yous, etc. When I didn’t hear from him after a few months, I called his doctor, just to make sure he was okay. He was, but his doctor said he probably wouldn’t be using email anymore, that it had become too overwhelming for him. Sadly, I never heard from Arnie again.

What did I learn from all this?

I became a better volunteer manager for all volunteers because of Arnie. My descriptions of all tasks for volunteers became much more detailed and explicit. I better emphasized to volunteers that the time to drop out of an assignment was right at the start, and that there will be no hard feelings for doing so before the commitment has begun. I started reserving a diversity of tasks specifically for volunteers, and for my own list of tasks, I would always ask, could volunteers help me do any of this? I tried to identify a range of very simple starter assignments, so that new volunteers would not feel overwhelmed — or, if they did, they would know that online volunteering was not for them very early on. I look very much into what a volunteer can do, not what limitations a volunteer may have. I also learned that everyone, people with disabilities and otherwise, screen themselves when it comes to assignments, and it’s rare that someone will ask to volunteer for a task they are unqualified to do.

Since Arnie, I’ve worked with other volunteers with disabilities, though often, I haven’t been aware of such, since online volunteering often masks any disabilities a person may have. I can judge people online only by their abilities, rather than their appearance, if I stick to text-only communications.

When I’m working at a nonprofit organization, I involve volunteers not to save money, not to do what I can’t pay staff to do, but rather, to involve the community in the work of my organization, to create an army of advocates for our work, and to make my work more interesting with input from many more people. I’ll continue to strive to create inclusive programs, not only because it’s the right thing to do, but because, in the end, it helps me be a better contributor.

2014 update:

vvbooklittleThe influence of this experience, and many others, as well as extensive research, can be found in The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook. This book, which I wrote with Susan J. Ellis, is our attempt to document all of the best practices of working with online volunteers, from the more than three decades that virtual volunteering has been happening. It’s available both in traditional print form and in digital version. If you read the book, I would so appreciate it if you could write and post a review of it on the Amazon and Barnes and Noble web sites (you can write the same review on both sites).

There’s also The Virtual Volunteering Wiki: a free resource featuring a curated list of news articles about virtual volunteering since 1996, an extensive list of examples of virtual volunteering activities, a list of myths about virtual volunteering, the history of virtual volunteering, a list of research and evaluations of virtual volunteering, a list of online mentoring programs, and links to web sites and lists of offline publications related to virtual volunteering in languages in other than English.

And there’s also our LinkedIn Group for the discussion of virtual volunteering.

Also see: Safety in virtual volunteering

People not following-through on volunteering in disasters

Leave a reply

The state of Queensland, Australia suffered from horrific floods in December 2010 and January 2011. Thousands of Australians expressed interest in volunteering, inundating volunteer centers and online message boards.

Recently, Volunteering Queensland offered this Submission to Queensland Floods Commission of Inquiry, which said, in part:

QUEENSLAND’S peak volunteer organisation says the vast majority of people who registered to help clean up following the floods and cyclone Yasi backed off at the last minute.

Some people backed out because they realized this was a real commitment of time, and they couldn’t make that real commitment. Some dropped out because they could not donate a significant amount of time – an hour or two when you might have some time eventually is usually not enough for such a situation. Some backed out because they really were not prepared to volunteer (they hadn’t set up child care, time off from work, transportation, etc.).

Seasoned volunteer managers, of course, aren’t surprised. Even in a non-disaster situation, we have come to expect at least 50 percent of people who express interest in volunteering to drop out. That’s why many volunteer managers, including myself, insist on at least a bit of screening before a volunteer is placed into an assignment, so that drop outs happen in the screening process, not after the assignment is given and we’re counting on those volunteers.

Martin Cowling has done a great blog about this Queensland report, and I encourage you to head over to it, read it, read the comments (yes, I’ve commented there) and respond yourself.

Here is a resource I created following the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, Volunteering To Help After Major Disasters, which I’ve regularly updated at least monthly every since, per the over-whelming number of posts to places like YahooAnswers by people who want to volunteer following a disaster (earthquake, hurricane, tornado, tropical storm, flood, tsunami, oil spill, zombies, etc.). It’s become one of the most popular pages on my web site, despite being posted as almost an after-thought and being focused on people that the majority of my web site is not focused on (it’s not even linked from my home page!).

Tags: volunteering, volunteers, relief, disaster, response, spontaneous, episodic, microvolunteer, microvolunteering. communications, public relations, engagement, engage, community, nonprofit, NGO, not-for-profit, government, outreach, staff, employees, civil society, floods, tornadoes

 

Recruiting board members with LinkedIn?

1 Reply

On LinkedIn, in the Answers section for nonprofits, someone asked:

How can a non-profit recruit board members through LinkedIn?

Recruiting board members successfully comes from a lot of ongoing cultivation. Using LinkedIn or any other online networking tool to recruit board members has to be a part of a comprehensive, ongoing strategy that involves a lot of different activities, IMO.

It not only doesn’t work to just post somewhere and say, “Hey, we need some board members!”, it also makes it sound like you don’t treat board membership seriously.

The following suggested activities to recruit board members will show that you are a competent, credible, transparent organization, and will give candidates an idea of how seriously you take your organization’s work and how well you support your board members. It also shows you aren’t looking for just anyone. Board membership is an honor, a leadership volunteering opportunity, and should be treated as such in your recruitment!

Start with your web site:

  • Have a full description of what board members do, what weekly or monthly time requirements a board member is committing to (onsite meetings once a month? online meetings once a week?) and for how long (a year? two years?), if attendance to a certain number of meetings is mandatory (IMO, you should always have such a requirement if you want board members to take attenance seriously), if board members are expected to give or raise a certain amount of money each year (you don’t need to say how much on your web site; you can leave that to an interview later), etc.
  • Note on your web site how many board members you are looking for. Two? Three to six?
  • Have photos of your board in action, and a list of all current board members with short bios about each – not just what companies and constiuencies they represent, but also, a personal statement from each about why they volunteer for your organization, why they think such is important, etc.
  • Have complete details on how someone could nominate themselves as a board member, or how they could suggest someone for possible nomination. Make this process super easy.

This information on your organization’s web site is not an afterthought. They are super-important steps that they show how much your organizaton values board members. This information will wow a potential candidate. It will also screen out people who don’t understand the very real commitment of board membership.

Then talk to your current board and map exactly what will happen when a nomination comes in:

  • What research will be done on a candidate, and who will do that research? How and when will a candidate be interviewed, and who will do that interview?
  • What questions will be asked in that interview?
  • What will be the reasons to turn a nominee away, and how will this rejection be communicated?
  • If you turn away a board member, will you encourage that person to volunteer in other ways? (advisory board? volunteer project leader? special events volunteer?)

And once you have done all of these steps, you are ready to:

  • post this leadership volunteering opportunity (that’s what board membership is!) to BoardNetUSA, VolunteerMatch, etc., pointing back to your web site with complete details about what board membership really looks like
  • post something about the opportunity on your own, individual LinkedIn status update for your network (you may want to do this more than once)
  • ask each of your existing board members to do the same on their status updates on LinkedIn, to reach their network
    if it’s appropriate 
  • ask all of your volunteers to post about the opportunity to their LinkedIn status updates as well, if they feel comfortable doing such
  • do the same on Facebook, if it’s appropriate – but note that Facebook is a social networking site, and many people don’t like mixing their business or volunteering with their social activities.

If you have a Come learn about our organization event/open house, list it on the events function of LinkedIn as well, and make sure all staff, board members and other volunteers that will attend RSVP on LinkedIn, so that all of their connections see the attendance, and ask all board members and staff to mention the event in their status updates as well.

Also, look for LinkedIn groups that are regionally-focused on your geographic area; these can be focused on business, on a particular issue, on on someone else’s group, etc. Some of these LinkedIn groups may be appropriate for posting about your board opportunities (most won’t be, but it’s worth it to look). You can also troll those groups and look for people that you think would be great board members based on the quality and content of their posts, and the ask your board member, your staff, your other volunteers and your own professional network if anyone knows a person you’ve identified as a potential candidate and if anyone in your network would be willing to make the initial invitation to an open house or event so that person can get to know your organization.

After three-six months, evaluate your efforts. How many inquiries did you receive? How many formal nominations did you receive? How many new board members have joined or are in process? If people dropped out of the process after expressing interest or being nominated, why did they? If people were rejected, why were they rejected? In answering these questions, you will know what adjustments you need to make in your board recruitment – on LinkedIn and otherwise!

And one final thought: what a great volunteering opportunity it would be for someone to be in charge of this board recruitment process! You could recruit a volunteer just to do all of the above for six months. Designate one staff member to be the primary contact and support person for such a volunteer, and start recruiting just for this position first! There are so many university students studying nonprofit management, business management, HR management, or any number of other subjects, as well as people who are job-hunting, who would love to be able to put on their résumé: instituted and managed a successfully recruitment campaign for such-and-such organization, resulting in three new board members.

Volunteers are suing!

4 Replies

In May 1999, two America Online volunteers in the USA filed a class action lawsuit against AOL, claiming that AOL online volunteers performed work equivalent to employees and thus should be compensated according to the Fair Labor Standards Act.

Yes, a for-profit business involved online volunteers. It happened all the time. It still happens. These online volunteers moderated chat rooms and message boards, kept online areas up-to-date, helped new users, helped with technical issues, etc. In return, they got perks like free AOL access.

AOL was the Facebook of its day; if you didn’t have an AOL keyword, you weren’t really on the the Internet. Back then, TV commercials didn’t just say a company’s web site address, they ALSO said a company’s AOL user name. And at its peak, AOL had more than 14,000 online volunteers.

But something went wrong. Maybe it was when the volunteers started looking at AOL’s massive profits. Maybe it was when some long-term volunteers were dismissed and they felt cheated. Whatever it was, volunteers started getting angry. The plaintiffs detailed how AOL’s online volunteers — called Community Leaders — had to undergo a thorough, three-month training program and were required to file timecards for shifts, work at least four hours per week, and submit detailed reports outlining their work activity during each shift. In response, AOL began drastically reducing volunteer responsibilities. According to Wikipedia, by 2000, nearly all Community Leaders had lost content-editing rights and no longer provided customer service or technical support to AOL customers. Other AOL online volunteers joined the lawsuit. In February 2010, the United States for the Southern District of New York gave preliminary approval to a settlement between AOL and the Community Leaders totaling 15 million dollars. Final approval was granted in May 2010.

Well, here we go again: AOL is now again being sued by online volunteers – by Huffington Post unpaid writers. The Huffington Post site was sold for $315 million and as many as 9,000 unpaid bloggers for the Huffington Post that have contributed the content that helped the web site’s price tag soar want to know where their share of the money is. They see themselves as responsible for that hefty price tag – and, really, why shouldn’t they?!

Should nonprofits that involve volunteers be worried about this turn of events? Yes, if they talk about volunteers in terms of money saved. If they talk about how much an hour of volunteer time is worth in terms of dollars. If they say things like, “We would never have enough funds to pay people to do what volunteers do.” If they say, “We have too much for our paid staff to do, so let’s find some volunteers.”

Consider this: was the value of the original AOL volunteers back in the 1990s really their unpaid time? Or was it that the tasks they were doing were best done by volunteers, by people who were there because of the passion they felt for a subject matter and not because of a paycheck? Not that paid employees can’t have passion and dedication – but do you have a different feeling when you are dealing with an organization’s representative that is a volunteer, as opposed to an employee? Does Girl Scouts of the USA, for instance, have most of its program delivered by volunteers because it saves money (not having to pay staff to do those things), or because of the long-term ties to communities that volunteers create, and because things like troop leadership are actually best done by volunteers? Just as some jobs are best done by paid employees, wouldn’t you say some nonprofit jobs are best done by unpaid staff? AOL’s original online volunteers were usually recruited from the more active users of a particular online forum; they were, therefore, genuinely passionate about the area for which they volunteered their time, and that enthusiasm often resulted in a greater sense of community on AOL. The online forum culture on the site changed drastically when volunteers started being let go – and not for the better. AOL never recovered from that change, and users fled to other online communities.

If AOL had talked about its online volunteers in different terms that had nothing to do with money — constantly and consistently — would AOL have still been successfully sued? I’m not so sure.

One of the many things that used to drive me crazy about the now defunct Association for Volunteer Administration (AVA) was how, after every annual conference, AVA representatives would brag about how much money was taken in. Myself and others would say, “Yes – on the backs of volunteers, the people who delivered all of your conference workshops but whom you did not pay.” I was often one of those unpaid presenters. We weren’t being involved because volunteers were best for the task at hand – we were involved because we both sold tickets and didn’t cost the organization anything.

Take a look at what you are saying about your organization’s volunteers. What’s written on your web site and in your annual report? How are you talking about their value? How are you talking about why your organization involves volunteers?

What you say vs. what you do re: volunteers

Leave a reply

You say volunteers are more than just free labor at your organization… but your annual report talks only about how much money volunteers saved (by showing how many hours they contributed and what this would have been in paid staff time otherwise).

You say you want committed volunteers that exude quality… but then you don’t respond to their emails or phone calls promptly, if at all.

You say you don’t have time to do this or that… but balk at the idea of allowing volunteers to take on any of those tasks.

You say you want steadfast, fully-invested volunteers… but you respond to every idea they have with, “At this time, we can’t address that/allow you to do that” or “We’re forming a committee to look into that – it’s employee only, however. Check back with me in six months.”

You say you want to engage more professionals as volunteers… but you don’t/won’t create volunteering opportunities in which those professionals might be interested.

You say you want your volunteers to represent the diversity of your community, or to reach under-represented groups… but you are unwilling to change your recruitment methods to reach different groups. “But this is how we’ve always done it!” or “I don’t have time to input every volunteering assignment into VolunteerMatch.”

You say you want volunteers to participate in decision-making… but you don’t invite volunteers to planning meetings, and don’t offer possible strategies up for discussion at volunteer meetings or on your online community.

You acknowledge that the best way to keep volunteers long-term is to create lots of short-term, “quick win” opportunities that keep them hooked… but you don’t create these short-term assignments regularly to attract new volunteers.

You want everyone at your organization to involve and value volunteers… but, as volunteer manager, you don’t push to work with staff regularly to help them create volunteer opportunities that support their work, or, as executive director, you don’t ask staff members to include their involvement of volunteers in their annual performance plan.

You say you want to be as valued at your organization the fundraising manager… but you don’t regularly, precisely show to all employees and the board how volunteers are as essential to the organization as financial donors.

You say you are a modern organization… but you still think of volunteers in terms of real volunteers and online volunteers.

One organization inspired this blog in particular, but to be honest, I’ve seen all of the above at dozens and dozens of organizations. You could substitute the word member for volunteer and it would read the same.

Now you be honest. Have I described your organization? Is what you say about volunteers at your organization matched by what you DO?

train now for disasters later

Leave a reply

For almost 100 minutes, dozens of people took turns performing CPR and administering other first aid on a man crumpled on a freezing sidewalk in Goodhue, Minnesota, USA – population about 900, a town without a traffic light. It took almost 100 minutes for the May Clinic’s emergency helicopter to get to the fallen man. The first responders were volunteer fire fighters, police, and rescue squads, made up of both volunteers and paid staff, from neighboring towns. Their teamwork kept blood flowing to the man’s brain, making each rescuer a surrogate for his failing heart. And it worked: the man survived, resulting in what may be one of the longest, most successful out-of-hospital resuscitations ever.

The key to responding to a crisis successfully, whether its one person collapsing in front of you or an entire city collapsing around you, is training now for what might happen later. Getting training now in CPR and first aid, as well as disaster response (all available in the USA from your local chapter of the American Red Cross), can help later. What happened in Goodhue, Minnesota or in any disaster zone shows that: the people who are able to help immediately, the people who are able to make a real difference, are the people who made the time to register to volunteer, to get the necessary training, etc.

Whenever a disaster strikes, hundreds — even thousands — of people start contacting various organizations in an effort to try to volunteer onsite at the disaster site. The images and stories motivate these people to help immediately, in-person. But what most of these people don’t realize is that spontaneous volunteers with no training and no affiliation can actually cause more problems than they alleviate in a crisis or disaster situation. The priority in these situations is helping the people affected by the crisis or disaster, NOT giving spontaneous, unaffiliated volunteers an outlet for their desire to help.

During and after disasters, what’s desperately needed is equipment, supplies and expertise in disaster situations — that’s the priority. Disasters are incredibly complicated situations that require people with a very high degree of qualifications and long-term commitment, not just good will, a sense of urgency and short-term availability. Unless you have a formal affiliation with a recognized disaster relief organization, and training with that organization, you are probably going to be turned away if you want to help onsite.

If you have been moved by a disaster to help in some way immediately, please consider donating financially. Money is desperately needed in these situations to purchase food, up-to-date medicine, shelter, transportation for trained staff, and supplies. Disaster relief organizations cannot rely only on donations of these materials, and don’t have the resources in a crisis situation to go through them and make sure they are appropriate, clean, not expired, etc.; having finances means they can buy what they need, often in-country, and move much more quickly — and time is of the essence in these situations.

In addition to giving funds yourself, you can help by making sure friends and associates know how to give (you might be surprised how many people don’t know where or how to). A simple link on your own site or blog, a link at the end of your emails, an update on your status on FaceBook or MySpace or whatever, telling people how to donate financially, can be a huge help.

If you REALLY want to make a difference for developing countries suffering from a disaster, please make a financial donation to MercyCorps or the American Red Cross. For developed countries, like New Zealand or Japan, check the news and the internet for what agencies in those countries are saying they want – and don’t want. Please, no clothing drives or food drives, unless the American Red Cross says that’s what’s needed — it’s CASH that will pay for the things people need right now. Update your online profiles/status pages to encourage your friends to do the same.

If you want to truly help with a crisis situation or disaster, beyond financial donations, start thinking NOW about ways to get the training and affiliations you need to do such effectively for future emergency situations. There are many ways you can put yourself into a position for such in the future. Here’s why you need such training, and ways to get it.

And for agencies: People in Aid has a fantastic primer for organizations who want to develop their own emergency resources for sudden on-set disaster response. It’s something to do now. Good info for a funding proposal!