Tag Archives: volunteers

Milestone: more than 100 virtual volunteering research articles

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As of October 2020, a milestone has been reached regarding virtual volunteering: I’ve found more than 100 research articles, dating back to 1997 and most with a university association, related to virtual volunteering. These are all listed here at the Virtual Volunteering Wiki.

I started tracking published research regarding virtual volunteering – using the internet to engage and support volunteers – when I directed the Virtual Volunteering Project at the University of Texas at Austin. I began heading the project in December 1996 and within several months of looking, I not only had found about 100 programs, most at nonprofits, a few at schools, that were involving online volunteers, I also realized that the practice was at least a couple of decades old, first starting at the Project Gutenberg, a volunteer effort that began in 1971 to digitize, archive and distribute the full texts of public domain books, such as works by Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Mark Twain. But what I had trouble finding was academic research on the subject. I had found a fair amount by the time The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook was published, but even so, it seemed still to be rather on the lean side for a practice that was so well-established.

I had no funding to research and write The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook, and I’ve had no funding to continue maintaining the Virtual Volunteering Wiki, which tracks news and research regarding using the Internet to engage and support volunteers. But, indeed, I’ve maintained the wiki all these years, focusing on things that I deemed newsworthy and, especially, academic research. When I realized that there are now more than 100 research articles, dating back to 1997 and most with a university association, related to virtual volunteering, I felt it was worth celebrating. And this is just the English-language material: I bet there is a fair amount in Spanish, given Spain’s leadership in virtual volunteering for a couple of decades now.

Note that sometimes research articles do not call the unpaid contributors or unpaid virtual team members “volunteers.” For instance, any research paper on Wikipedia contributors could be considered research on virtual volunteering, as Wikipedia contributors – Wikipedians – are unpaid by Wikimedia for those contributions.

Also note that many of the papers make the mistake of talking about virtual volunteering as new, ignoring or overlooking its more than three-decade history. When I read that this is a “new” practice in an academic paper recently published, especially a thesis or dissertation, it makes it very hard for me to take the rest of the research seriously. I wish more university professors would catch that inaccurate point of view early on in a PhD student’s exploration of the subject.

It’s so wonderful to see that virtual volunteering now has a rich research history to go along with its rich history of practice, and I love reading perspectives about virtual volunteering by people who ARE NOT ME. Look, it’s been fun to be the world’s expert regarding virtual volunteering, but I’m so hungry to read perspectives by other people, particularly regarding what works best in supporting online volunteers, particularly different demographics of such volunteers – is it different to involve teen online volunteers in India versus tech-savy senior volunteers in Germany? Is there something that works well supporting online volunteers in South Africa that is different than what’s done in Spain? Is engaging and supporting rural online volunteers different from engaging and supporting urban or suburban online volunteers, even in the same country? I’d love to see such comparative studies!

What’s not needed? Research on the motivations of people who volunteer online. Good grief, people, ENOUGH!

I would also love beyond words if a university would step forward and be willing to take over management of the Virtual Volunteering Wiki. Having university students and faculty maintaining this would make it a much more rich and valuable resource. Any takers?

Let me be frank: I’m going to eventually retire. I’ll always be interested in virtual volunteering, and I’ll be an online volunteer myself for, I hope, decades to come (in between my extensive motorcycle riding). But just as there is no one Queen or King of All Things Volunteer Management, there shouldn’t be just one person, or always the same person, keeping track of news and research regarding virtual volunteering and distilling the key points of such. It’s overdue for new leaders, and a diversity of new leaders, to emerge in this field. I stand ready to support those new leaders (or, at least, figuratively – I can’t stand as long as I used to).

If you have benefited from this blog or other parts of my web site and would like to support the time that went into researching information, developing material, preparing articles, updating pages, etc. (I receive no funding for this work), here is how you can help. 

how not to treat volunteers: another saga

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graphic by Jayne Cravens representing volunteers

I get inspiration for a lot of my blogs from stories that my friends tell me about their own volunteering experiences, from comments on my blogs from volunteers, and from my own attempts at volunteering.

Here’s a comment I got recently from a neighbor who is volunteering to send postcards to registered voters regarding the upcoming elections here in the USA. Through an advocacy group, volunteers like her handwrite messages on the postcards encouraging the recipient to vote. It’s very important that the postcards be handwritten and personalized – recipients are more likely to read the postcards because they are handwritten and because they are coming from a volunteer, specifically – not a paid campaign worker. Here’s her message to me about her frustration:

Jayne, here’s a suggestion for a blog post: please do not simply assume your volunteers will do more than they have committed to. I committed to write 30 postcards this week. For me, this was a stretch as far as my time goes. My contact at this organization brought me *60* postcards and a list of where to send them, plus a request for three postcards written in Spanish (but not providing me with a Spanish-language script). She said, “Can you just ask somebody else to write the rest if you don’t want to?” Now that I am actually looking at the instructions for writing this postcard, I see that they asked me to fit far more text into the postcard that is possible to fit. So they didn’t test their idea. Grrrr. This makes me amazingly cranky and demotivates me to write her damn postcards. Also, I am cranky these days anyway.

This person is one of the most dedicated campaign volunteers I have ever seen: I’ve seen her at demonstrations of all kinds, she has a sign in her front yard for a campaign she supports (and offered them to others in the neighborhood), she shares advocacy messages on her Facebook page, and I see her a day or two every week walking down to our nearby post office with a stack of postcards she has personally addressed. She feels a great sense of urgency regarding the upcoming election, just like so many volunteers do about the nonprofit they are supporting. That commitment and that sense of urgency are easy to take advantage of when an organization needs additional help. At first, a volunteer might not say no: they feel needed, they feel valued, and they feel like they are really helping out in a dire time of need. But if this keeps happening, volunteers QUIT. And they send messages to me about how frustrated they are, and I get to write a blog about it!

Don’t put volunteers in an awkward situation when you need more work done than they have agreed to do. Tell them your need for additional hours or for an additional task to be done and say, “if this is too much for you, please say so – we don’t want to overwhelm you, we value your service.” And mean that. If the volunteer says no, respect the no.

What’s your alternative? Surely you have an online community of all of your local volunteers, and you can just post to that community, let people know you have extra work to be done, and ask who could do it – right?

Weeks ago, this particular advocacy group should have made a list of assistive independent living centers, where residents live on their own in their own apartments with minimal assistance – where they still prepare their own food, still live largely independently, still drive, etc. Because of the global pandemic, many of these senior citizens are stuck in their homes without much to do, and they would have LOVED to have volunteered for an initiative like this (and if they are anything like my maternal grandmother, they have BEAUTIFUL cursive, legible handwriting – I always recognized my grandmother’s letters, which she wrote to me until she died at almost 102). Instead, they kept going back to the same well – and the well is running dry.

Other blogs about frustrated volunteers:

If you have benefited from this blog or other parts of my web site and would like to support the time that went into researching information, developing material, preparing articles, updating pages, etc. (I receive no funding for this work), here is how you can help. 

Study measures interest in volunteering in May 2020

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graphic by Jayne Cravens representing volunteers

Points of Light commissioned a research study to understand the state of American civic engagement – in all its facets – as of May 2020, and to explore the path forward for catalyzing deeper and broader civic participation. Researchers surveyed 1,441 adults in May for the report, which says it has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.8 percentage points.

The study found that the pandemic and other catastrophes prompted a surge in interest in volunteering in May: While only 36 percent of American adults say they volunteered within the last year, 60 percent said they are interested in doing so in May, and 73 percent said volunteering is more important than ever. According to the survey, Gen Z already demonstrates higher rates of civic engagement than older generations.

The study also found that 75 percent of Americans said in May that donating to nonprofits is more important than ever because of the Covid-19 crisis, while 54 percent reported giving to charity a year ago.

Note that by civic engagement, the survey did not just mean volunteering. Activities measured included:

  • Donated money to a nonprofit
  • Signed a petition
  • Purchase decisions based on company’s social responsibility
  • Participated in volunteer activities
  • Posted or started group/campaign for issue on social media
  • Contacted elected official about issue
  • Considered applying/taking job because of company’s social responsibility
  • Attended demonstration or rally for issue
  • Public service thru military, elected office, nonprofit board
  • Voted in every/almost every election in past few years

Volunteer Preferences and the percentages of people that selected such:

  • Focus on global issues impacting our world: 18%
  • Not interact directly with people benefiting: 24%
  • Volunteer directly or with friends/ neighbors, not through organization: 28%
  • Participate at home/online: 30%
  • Activities where I help someone one-on-one: 27%
  • One-time activities: 29%

A much bigger group selected these “opposite” options of each of the bulleted items above:

  • Focus on issues directly impacting my community +37 —> 55%
  • Interact directly with people who are benefiting +22 —> 46%
  • Volunteer through an organization +15 —> 43%
  • Participate in person +12 —> 42%
  • Activities where I help groups of people +14 —> 41%
  • Activities that I can do on a regular basis +10 —> 39%

I hope that the way this was presented wasn’t done to imply that volunteering from home, online (virtual volunteering) doesn’t allow for volunteering activities that many people preferred: interacting with someone one-on-one, interacting directly with people benefitting, and focusing on issues directly impacting a volunteer’s community. All of these things are possible in virtual volunteering and have been the preferred activities of online volunteers, at least according to all of the research I’ve done since the late 1990s – indeed, when I’ve said that a greater portion of online volunteers want a more substantial experience than a few minutes of microvolunteering, a lot of tech bros – people with corporate backgrounds and tech backgrounds, not volunteerism backgrounds – have really pushed back. Yet, once again, the latest research shows it’s true.

According to the survey, the top barriers to volunteering (among those interested in volunteering who have not done so) are the following – the same things those of us in the volunteer management field have heard year after year:

  • Unsure how to get involved or where to find opportunities 44%
  • Cannot find opportunities near me 44%
  • Not sure what I can do that would be helpful 43%
  • Busy, don’t have time to volunteer 42%
  • Haven’t found a group of volunteers with whom I fit 41%
  • Haven’t found opportunities matching my skills, abilities 41% ‘
  • Rather do other things when I have free time 34%
  • Uncomfortable volunteering with people I don’t know 33%
  • Don’t believe my efforts will make a difference 26%

From the volunteer perspective, a worthwhile experience is:

  • discoverable. Can be easily found online.
  • local. Addresses an issue important to my community.
  • credible. Delivered by an organization with local/issue expertise.
  • social. Allows me to invite my friends and family.
  • authentic. Explains why my actions will matter, upfront.
  • personal. Allows me to engage with beneficiaries.
  • impactful. Shows me the outcomes of my actions.
  • repeatable. Provides an avenue for me to reengage.

This part was my favorite part of the study, in fact – what makes a worthwhile experience. How many managers of volunteer programs are going to use this to improve their own volunteer engagement schemes? And, again, this supports everything I’ve said about micro volunteering – it’s nice, it’s worth exploring, but it’s NOT what most volunteers are looking for.

Here’s the full research study. It would be fascinating to compare this to now – in May, the country was experiencing a pandemic “surge”, where people were feeling optimistic and community-minded. Now, it’s almost October, and we’re most definitely in pandemic “fatigue” where people are feeling anxious, even negative, and rebellious.

Also see:

The Nonprofit & NGO Guide to Using Reddit

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A new resource from me: The Nonprofit & NGO Guide to Using Reddit

As of July 2019, Reddit ranked as the No. 5 most visited web site in the USA and No. 13 in the world. Reddit is a community of communities, and its communities are called subreddits. Statistics suggest that 74% of Reddit users are male. Users tend to be significantly younger than other online communities like Facebook with less than 1% of users being 65 or over.

If you want to reach a younger demographic regarding your volunteering opportunities, your awareness messages, your data that shows your value to the community and more, you need to build posts to Reddit into your marketing strategy, no matter what your nonprofit’s size or focus. This resource tells you how to do it. It covers how to find subreddits to join or read regularly based on your nonprofit or NGO mission, how to choose a user name, how to guide staff who may already have a Reddit user account, whether or not you should create your own subreddit and more.

And note: manging your Reddit presence and monitoring Reddit for discussions about your organization or program is a terrific role for an online volunteer!

If you have benefited from this blog or other parts of my web site and would like to support the time that went into researching information, developing material, preparing articles, updating pages, etc. (I receive no funding for this work), here is how you can help. 

One-ish Day Activities for Volunteering Using IT (Hacks4Good, for instance)

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UPDATED: One-ish Day Activities for IT Volunteers or Volunteering Using IT (Hacks4Good, for instance)

image of a panel discussion

For a couple of decades now, volunteers have been getting together for intense, one-day events, or events of just a few days, to build web pages, to write code (hackathons, apps4good, etc.), to edit Wikipedia pages, to transcribe historical documents and more. These have usually been, in the past, gatherings of onsite volunteers, where everyone is in one location, together, but even before the global pandemic, these activities were involving or mobilizing remote volunteers – online volunteers helping from wherever they were in the world.

This resource has been revised to take into consideration more virtual volunteering / remote volunteering, rather than everyone being in the same room. The revision, with greater emphasis on remote volunteers, was prompted by probably half a dozen inquiries to me in the last four months saying something along these lines:

We have all these corporations / businesses calling us because nonprofits have suspended their onsite volunteering. These companies want to engage in group online volunteering, but don’t know what that would really look like.

In addition to updating One-ish Day Activities for IT Volunteers or Volunteering Using IT (Hacks4Good, for instance), these folks should also view these ideas for high-impact virtual volunteering projects.

But with all that said, businesses/corporations also need to keep in mind that nonprofits are under terrific financial strain right now. They need to consider this recent blog by Jerome Tennille, which says in part:

Many companies are seeking to pivot successfully from in-person employee engagement to forms that allow for social distancing whether virtually or remote. In their quest to achieve this some companies have sought to place that burden on their non-profit partners in the communities they serve. Unfortunately, by placing this responsibility on the non-profit organizations…

Remember: Volunteers are not free for the nonprofit or community group expected to involve them. If you ask an agency to create volunteering opportunities specifically for your employees, you are asking them to spend money and resources they may not be able to afford – so be ready to make an appropriate financial – CASH – donation to a nonprofit or school if you want a customized volunteering gig for your employees at that nonprofit or school. Here’s more advice on how to create successful and appropriate volunteering activities for employees.

cover of Virtual Volunteering book with hands raising up various Internet connected devices

For much more detailed advice on creating assignments for online volunteers, for working with online volunteers, for using the Internet to support and involve ALL volunteers, including volunteers that provide service onsite, and for ensuring success in virtual volunteering, check out The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook. Tools come and go – but certain community engagement principles never change. You will not find a more detailed guide anywhere for working with online volunteers and using the Internet to support and involve all volunteers – even after home quarantines are over and volunteers start coming back onsite to your workspace. It’s available both as a traditional paperback and as an online book. It’s co-written by myself and Susan Ellis.

If you have benefited from this blog or other parts of my web site and would like to support the time that went into researching information, developing material, preparing articles, updating pages, etc. (I receive no funding for this work), here is how you can help. 

How to create partnerships for virtual volunteering

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Volunteers have always been the drivers of virtual volunteering, much more than programs that host volunteers. And it’s still true now, in 2020.

Back in the 1990s, when Impact Online (now VolunteerMatch) launched one of the first volunteer-matching services online, there were FAR more people visiting the web site that wanted to volunteer than there were organizations posting assignments, and those assignments were supposed to be all ONSITE, but volunteers kept asking Impact Online staff for things they could do ONLINE. That’s why Impact Online launched the Virtual Volunteering Project in 1996: to promote the idea of involving online volunteers to host organizations and train them on how to do it. When I began directing the UN’s Online Volunteering service in February 2001, I stopped all outreach to potential volunteers and turned all attention to outreach to and support for potential host organizations, because this global service had the same issue: far more volunteers wanting to serve online than there were things for them to do.

Here we are decades later, with a global pandemic and thousands and thousands of volunteers wanting to engage online, but not able to find enough opportunities. I see it all over the Internet, particularly on the Reddit community – the subreddit – dedicated to discussions about and resources regarding volunteering, r/volunteer: young people, with no experience in mentoring, tutoring or counseling, are trying to launch their own virtual volunteering initiatives, recruiting plenty of volunteers but then not being able to find schools or programs to work with.

I’m doing my best to help schools, nonprofits, NGOs, charities and government agencies quickly launch roles and activities for online volunteers, with

But I cannot do this alone. Those of you who want to volunteer online have to help. You are going to have to help schools, nonprofits, NGOs, charities and others that you want to help online to create online roles and activities and to learn about the benefits of virtual volunteering. Otherwise, you are going to continue to be frustrated.

First, do NOT write an organization and say “We want to partner with you!” Words like “partner” and “partnership” are too big, too daunting, for most programs to think about. It sounds like lots of work with no funding. It’s not a message schools, nonprofits, etc. want to hear.

Instead, your first outreach should be something like this:

Hello! We are a group of five students / employees from name of school / company, and…

  • we saw that you have 10 videos on YouTube about your program, but they are not closed-captioned / they are not captioned correctly. We would like to volunteer to fix that for you over the next two weeks…
  • we would like to help make your web site be more accessible for people with disabilities. We could spend 10 hours for one week next month adding alt text to all of the photos and graphics on your site and changing all of your “read more” and “click here” links to descriptive links that would make sense for those with a sight-impairments…
  • we would like to translate all of the text from your last newsletter to Spanish…
  • we would like to help create a monthly podcast for your program for the next four months. Each month, we would interview a staff member or a recipient of your program’s service and adapt that recording to a 15-minute podcast format, with intro and exit music, appropriate edits and full text transcription. We would help you post this to…
  • We think the work our local historical society is so important, and we would like to work with you to improve these listings on Wikipedia regarding our local history…

And adding:

We want whatever we do for your program as online volunteers, entirely unpaid, to be something your program wants and needs, something that will be meaningful and beneficial to your organization, not just something we can do. Could we meet by video conference sometime next week to explore these ideas?

In other words, you need to be specific about the project or activity you want to do with them as online volunteers, and to make it clear that your are offering as volunteers and do not expect any payment whatsoever. You need to make it sound like a great idea that isn’t going to cost the organization anything and isn’t going to create more work for them and isn’t going to require a long-term investment. Your outreach needs to prompt a program to say, “We need and want this!” Remember: most nonprofits, NGOs, schools and other community groups are overwhelmed with work, severely under-staffed and facing massive budget cuts. They don’t have time for any more work whatsoever. They will be open to ideas for projects that will immediately have benefits to their organization, especially in terms of attracting more financial support.

Your goal with that initial project is to provide such a great experience that the nonprofit, charity, school or NGO is open to further collaborations – and perhaps much more advanced activities, like from this list of high impact virtual volunteering projects. But first, you have to give them a simple, worthwhile experience that creates a solid, trusting relationship.

Do not write a program and suggest a big, ambitious project that they do not have a great deal of experience doing OFFLINE already. That means you don’t write a senior residence facility and say, “We want to start an online friendly visitor program with your residents!” Who will screen your volunteers to ensure they are appropriate for coming in contact with this vulnerable population? Who will train volunteers regarding appropriate and inappropriate topics of conversation, how to get started with a first conversation, etc.? What will your safety standards be? How will you set boundaries – what if a resident starts calling and texting a volunteer frequently throughout the week and this is beyond what the volunteer wants to be involved with? In other words, a lot of virtual volunteering projects require way more than just a platform for interactions.

Also see:

vvbooklittle

For much more detailed advice on creating assignments for online volunteers, for working with online volunteers, for using the Internet to support and involve ALL volunteers, including volunteers that provide service onsite, and for ensuring success in virtual volunteering, check out The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook. Tools come and go – but certain community engagement principles never change. You will not find a more detailed guide anywhere for working with online volunteers and using the Internet to support and involve all volunteers – even after home quarantines are over and volunteers start coming back onsite to your workspace. It’s available both as a traditional paperback and as an online book. It’s co-written by myself and Susan Ellis.

If you have benefited from this blog or other parts of my web site and would like to support the time that went into researching information, developing material, preparing articles, updating pages, etc. (I receive no funding for this work), here is how you can help. 

Please don’t stop virtual volunteering when the pandemic is over

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Before March of 2020, for the 10 years previous to that month, it was hard for me to find nonprofits who were NOT engaging volunteers online in some way. Thousands of nonprofits have been immersed in virtual volunteering for decades – as I keep saying over and over, virtual volunteering is NOT new, it’s NO LONGER innovative, and it’s an established, proven, effective form of volunteer engagement, whether just to support staff or to also be a part of service delivery.

Yet, as home quarantines and social distancing required by the coronavirus pandemic quickly took hold worldwide, many nonprofits, NGOs, charities and other mission-based programs that had drug their feet for years regarding using the Internet to support and engage with volunteers found themselves having to rapidly pivot into the world of virtual volunteering. One of those hold outs was in tech-savvy Austin, Texas, where a representative from the United Way of Austin said “We did not have virtual volunteering. Everything we did before coronavirus was all in-person,” in this article “4 Nonprofits Show How to Adapt Volunteer Programs in the Coronavirus Era.” in the Chronicle of Philanthropy.*

Now, and for months to come, these organizations that did not have virtual volunteering components are having to play catchup. I profile a few at the news section of the Virtual Volunteering Wiki and in updates to the Reddit community focused on volunteering. And this rapid pivot has some nonprofit leaders that have only now introduced virtual volunteering elements to their program wondering what they will keep and what they will leave behind when the pandemic recedes in terms of online service delivery – it is no surprise to me at all that so many virtual volunteering measures that have only recently been deployed are proving to be valuable tools worth keeping.

James Taylor is the CEO of the John H. Boner Community Center in Indianapolis. The center runs several social-service programs, such as providing recreational facilities and opportunities for youths and affordable housing. In that same Chronicle of Philanthropy article, Taylor says his organization will consider keeping their online application forms for volunteers developed since the pandemic and is open to using videoconferencing more in the future. “Volunteers used to come to us and we’d figure out how to plug them in. This is the first time we’ve actually gone out and have recruited volunteers,” said Taylor. “There’s no reason why those things can’t continue.”

In that article, another nonprofit representative said that, instead of their traditional onsite volunteer recognition event, two volunteers have shared testimonials on the nonprofit’s social-media outlets telling of their experiences.

And all I can think is: great, it really is a shame you weren’t doing this all along, but please keep doing this. Virtual volunteering is going to allow you to include people you were previously excluding as volunteers. Virtual volunteering is going to bring diversity to your volunteer corps. Virtual volunteering is going to allow you to be not-as-limited by the restrictions of time and space. No one is saying to replace all of your volunteer roles and activities with online versions, but there is NO REASON you shouldn’t always have online roles right alongside those onsite roles. In fact, don’t be surprised if your onsite volunteers end up ALSO being your online volunteers.

vvbooklittle

For more advice on working with remote volunteers, or using the Internet to support and involve volunteers, check out The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook. Tools come and go – but certain community engagement principles never change. You will not find a more detailed guide anywhere for working with online volunteers and using the Internet to support and involve all volunteers – even after home quarantines are over and volunteers start coming back onsite to your workspace. It’s available both as a traditional paperback and as an online book. It’s co-written by myself and Susan Ellis.

* True story: back in the late 1990s, when I was directing the Virtual Volunteering Project at the University of Texas at Austin, I could not get anyone from the United Way in Austin to meet with me in my more than four years there. I got to meet a couple of staff members at an onsite seminar by Susan Ellis, who insisted they allow me to co-present with her. And at that meeting, one of the staff members asked for my advice: the United Way had chosen not to have a web site at first, so one of their volunteers had built one anyway. Now, they wanted possession of the web site and the URL, and the volunteer, who had worked on the site for years, was balking. I had hoped that more than 20 years later, things MIGHT have changed…

Get to know your volunteers now on a new level

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Most of the articles I’ve read on “tips for working with remote staff during COVID-19 lockdowns” have been way more basic than I need, say what should be obvious (at least to me – like the importance of starting meetings on-time and make sure you use your mute button when you aren’t talking) and really don’t offer much insight into this particular way of working. In short, when I read most of these articles, I say “Meh” and move on.

However, Charity Village in Canada shared 8 Tips for Nonprofit Leaders to Better Support Virtual Teams by Maryann Kerr and it’s outstanding. There are really great suggestions here that every nonprofit and government program needs to read and apply to their interactions with remote staff – I hope more than a few folks are brave enough to send the article to managers, including executive directors, who just aren’t getting what working from home during a pandemic is REALLY like and what their expectations of their staff REALLY should be.

In addition, many of these suggestions are applicable to virtual volunteering. Here are my favorite recommendations from the article that I think you need to be thinking about with your volunteers now as they do more service and interactions online:

Be patient and considerate of the specific challenges of your team. This is both a collective and unique experience for each of us. Some will be home alone and lonely.  Others may be desperate for a moment of peace. Still others may be caring for elderly family members or a combination of all three.

Speak up and don’t skip the hard stuff. This moment in history asks each of us to dig deep and develop our own innate ability to lead. You do not need to hold a position of leadership to act.  Speaking up, on your own behalf, and on behalf of others, is an act of leadership. If you have a concern or question, it is likely shared by others.

Get to know each other on a whole new level. Whether you use Patrick Lencioni’s Personal Histories Exercise or the Clifton Strengths Finder or any number of other team building activities available online and adaptable to a video conference – just do it. Lencioni’s is a favorite because I’ve never seen it fail to improve a team’s understanding of each other. Do team members have hidden talents they’d like to share?  A song, a poem, a musical instrument? A piece of artwork or craft they’d like to show?  You are suddenly in each other’s homes. Use this as an opportunity to see each other as whole human beings not just workers. 

Explore your values as individuals, teams and as an organization. Start with a free Personal Values Assessment  and then facilitate a discussion about what is important to you as individuals and how this is reflected in how you will work together.  Examine how these compare to your stated values as an organization.  How can you ensure you live these values, particularly now?

Again, I want to emphasize those four suggestions are from Maryann Kerr, not me – she gets all the credit!

But I will add that, in a past blog, I myself wrote this in a blog:

Successfully working with people remotely is a very human endeavor that people who are amiable, understanding and thoughtful tend to excel in.

And, indeed, that’s proven to be true yet again as millions of people experience remote work amid chaotic or lonely homes.

Also see these blogs and web pages from me:

Building a team culture among remote workers: yoga, cocktails & games

Team building activities for remote workers

Re-creating offline excitement & a human touch online

Virtual volunteering: it’s oh-so-personal

The dynamics of online culture & community

Leading in a virtual world

And this video about how personal working with online volunteers has been for me.

vvbooklittle

And, of course, for more advice on working with remote volunteers, or using the Internet to support and involve volunteers, check out The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook. Tools come and go – but certain community engagement principles never change. you will not find a more detailed guide anywhere for working with online volunteers and using the Internet to support and involve all volunteers – even after home quarantines are over and volunteers start coming back onsite to your workspace. It’s available both as a traditional paperback and as an online book. It’s co-written by myself and Susan Ellis.

If you have benefited from this blog or other parts of my web site and would like to support the time that went into researching information, developing material, preparing articles, updating pages, etc. (I receive no funding for this work), here is how you can help. 

Three resources for your COVID-19-related volunteering

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Lots of nonprofits, charities, government programs and others are rapidly re-aligning their volunteer engagement because of COVID-19 and home quarantines:

  • Converting some programming and volunteer engagement online.
  • Launching new virtual “home visit” or online mentoring programs.
  • Mobilizing volunteers to support people in-need because of home quarantine, because of the stress of their professional work in response to the pandemic, etc.

Here are three resources for these new or re-imagined efforts:

(1) This short video about the importance of safety measures in any virtual volunteering programs, including virtual “home visits”, virtual visits to those in senior homes, etc. Spoiler alert: it’s my video.

(2) After a natural disaster – earthquake, flood, tornado, hurricane, etc. – affected areas can be flooded with spontaneous volunteers. They present a lot of challenges – and even dangers. COVID-19 is presenting a similar flood of spontaneous volunteers. How to deal with that flood of goodwill? These resources on dealing with spontaneous volunteers in natural disasters can offer some guidance.

(3) These recommendations regarding volunteers in post-disaster situations (hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, etc.) from Chapter 5: Discussion, Conclusions, and Recommendations, in Disaster Survivors’ Experiences with Disaster Volunteers by Christa Frances Lopez / Christa López Sandelier (it’s her doctoral dissertation for Walden University).

Except:

The data from the findings confirm that disaster survivors had positive and negative interactions with the disaster volunteers. The disaster survivors weighted the positive experiences over the negative experiences. Participant 8 stated that she did not want to talk about the negative experiences, while another was very specific about concerns about the disaster volunteers’ skill levels and fitness for working in the climate in Texas. There were several recommendations for training of disaster volunteers with a clear expression from the research participants that stopping to listen and have clear communication with the disaster survivors was a high priority, as stated by Participant 1, “Listen to the people.” While Participant 3 stated, “just know that the people that you’re working for or they’re in a bad place and you’re there to make it better and always remember, to smile.” Participant 6 mentioned,

It depends on the tenure or the experience of the group coming in. Whereas you have other folks who just have a heart and they show up and mistakes do come out of those, they walk into situations- working on projects that weren’t priorities like trees down in yards when other houses had trees fallen on roofs into bedrooms. And so that kind of misstep of a volunteer coming to do good being directed by the homeowner as opposed to being directed by a group. I saw a lot of that happen because people show up, they don’t know where to go. They end up getting questioned in by a group of neighbors that are out front. Well, there needs to be a leader of each group who has some knowledge of construction or safety.

This emphasized the need for effective volunteer coordination with focus on organization and leadership for the established volunteer groups and the emerging volunteers so that work can be prioritized….

The cultural fit using Campinha-Bacote’s (2002) model of culture competence may be best applied in the future at the volunteer reception centers where coordinators of the volunteers could provide training before the volunteers go into the field to work. This training could involve an intake assessment that asks questions about the volunteer and their reasons and intent for coming to volunteer for that particular disaster. This would help volunteers look inward and fit within the first construct of cultural awareness. The questionnaire could then build upon the next construct of cultural knowledge by asking what the volunteer knows about the community. That could then lead into the topics the volunteer center can focus on for the volunteers’ training before they work in the field. During this training there can be a brief on the culture of the community, such as, what the community was like before the disaster, what is like now, including stages of grief the disaster survivors may be experiencing and other information pertinent to the local community…

As mentioned in the recommendations, using Campinha-Bacote’s (2002) model of culture competence may be best applied in the future at the volunteer reception centers where coordinators of the volunteers could provide training before the volunteers go into the field to work. This training could involve an intake assessment, as well, to assess the volunteer motivation to gauge their culture awareness by looking inward at their own self-awareness as to what motivates them to volunteer. The training could then provide information about the local community norms and provide cultural knowledge to the volunteers so that they can know who they are serving, and thus improve service and cultural integration of the volunteers within the community…

(end excerpt)

Saying “no” to recruiting volunteers for certain tasks

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Volunteer recruitment has always been easy for me. Often, when I post an assignment to a third-party platform like VolunteerMatch on behalf of whatever nonprofit I’m working for, I end up having to take it down two days later, because I get plenty of candidates to choose from.

I try to craft volunteer roles in a way that will benefit the volunteer (enhance or show-off skills, give them an opportunity to be involved directly in a cause, maybe even have fun). I also am explicit about why the task is important to the organization and those we serve. And I’m detailed in the role description of exactly what the expectations are in terms of time commitment and deadlines.

I also almost always get to make a commitment to involving volunteers in my work at a nonprofit – if I’m working for a nonprofit that already involves volunteers. I don’t involve volunteers in my work because “I have all this work to do and I can’t afford an assistant.” I do it because I think volunteers might be the best people for a task – like when I need more neutral eyes, when I need people who might be more critical in surveying participants or in reviewing the data they are compiling than a paid person. I do it because I think non-staff should get to see how a nonprofit works in a transparent, first-hand way – and I think those people turn into amazing advocates back out in the communities around the organization.

Sometimes, other staff see these volunteers involved in my work and are inspired to involve more volunteers in their work too. But they often just see “free labor” and want to treat VolunteerMatch like Task Rabbit: we’ve got work to do, let’s find someone to do it – for free!

I once had a staff person ask if I would recruit a new volunteer for her to serve food and then clean up after a breakfast meeting. I said no. At this particular organization, I believed strongly that every volunteering opportunity should include an emphasis on the volunteer learning what the nonprofit did, who it served and why the nonprofit was needed. Serving food and washing dishes didn’t do that. I also felt like involving volunteers in this way would contribute to the idea that so many staff members have at that organization: volunteers are free and do stuff we don’t want to do. I also didn’t like the idea of board members thinking of the “other” volunteers as merely waitresses and dishwashers.

It’s not a black or white issue: if someone contacted me and said, “I urgently need volunteering hours for court-ordered community service,” I might offer them that waitressing and dishwashing volunteer gig, knowing how hard it is for them to get the hours they need, but I would also offer all the other volunteering opportunities we have available as well and, if the volunteer was qualified, consider them for other, more significant roles too.

If this was a big fundraising event for the nonprofit, I might feel differently about having volunteers staffing the coat check, making sure there is plenty of coffee and helping clean up – but I would recruit the event-support volunteers from the ranks of our current volunteers, and those volunteers would be identified to all attendees: “We want to let you know that the staff you see here helping you all have a great experience here tonight are some of our volunteers. These are the volunteers who work with our clients, work on our web site, edit videos for us, research grants for us, etc. They are students, web designers, lawyers, job seekers, etc. They are here tonight, as volunteers, to further show their support for our organization and we encourage you to talk to them about what they do as volunteers for our organization.”

Why am I so concerned with the appropriateness of volunteer roles? The titles alone on these blogs and web pages that I have written should explain why – but if they don’t, then you’ll need to read them:

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