{"id":111,"date":"2011-01-19T15:38:00","date_gmt":"2011-01-19T15:38:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/coyoteblog.posterous.com\/going-too-far"},"modified":"2017-03-30T20:02:21","modified_gmt":"2017-03-31T03:02:21","slug":"going-too-far","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/2011\/01\/going-too-far\/","title":{"rendered":"Going too far"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A national nonprofit organization asked me to participate in a one-hour conference call this week to help them brainstorm something they want to do. I said sure, because I can make time available to do this, the topic is interesting to me, and I would like to contribute.<\/p>\n<p>That same nonprofit then asked me to participate in a series of calls between now and the summer, contributing more than 20-30 hours of my time to a planning process. I said no. They wanted 20-30 hours free consulting from me, and from about a dozen other people as well, and seemed stunned that I (and at least one other person involved) found this request exploitative.<\/p>\n<p>If I were running a store, would you walk in and say, &#8220;Hi, can you give me several hundred dollars of stuff for free?&#8221;? If I ran a restaurant, would you say, &#8220;Could I eat hear for six months every night for free? After all, we&#8217;re friends!&#8221;?<\/p>\n<p>When does a request for donated time go from being appropriate, even welcomed, to being exploitive? When the organization forgets what they are asking for &#8212; for <em>volunteering<\/em>. <strong><em>Pro bono<\/em> consulting is volunteering. <\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>Time is a precious commodity. In today&#8217;s economy, asking for a person&#8217;s time can be the same as asking for money.<\/strong> If you are going to ask me to part with that much of my time, you had better have a <em>highly<\/em>-motivating reason for me to do so, because you are asking me to give you something that I normally charge for &#8211; and I have bills to pay, a household to support, and many things to pay for, just like you do.<\/p>\n<p><strong>This organization forgot what goes into recruiting volunteers. Which is shocking, since it&#8217;s an organization that is supposed to be focused on volunteering.<\/strong> Recruiting volunteers is never, &#8220;Here&#8217;s a bunch of work we need done. Please come do it. Because we&#8217;re a nonprofit.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.coyotecommunications.com\/volunteer\/asavol.html\" target=\"_blank\">I volunteer a <em>lot<\/em>, with various organizations<\/a>. How did these organizations recruit me to give so much of my precious time to them? Their recruitment messages focused on:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<ul>\n<li>what their organization does, in terms of results for their target audience, and it inspired me or motivated me to get involved.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<ul>\n<li>why volunteers are essential to what that organization does, but never in terms like, &#8220;We could never have enough money to pay staff to do this, so we involve volunteers&#8221; or &#8220;volunteers contribute $xxxx in services,&#8221; which implies money saved in having to pay people; instead, the messages focus on why volunteers are more appropriate to do the tasks than paid staff, for reasons that have NOTHING to do with money.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<ul>\n<li>what the benefits will be for me in volunteering; Will I get to work with a target audience or regarding an issue I care deeply about? Will it be fun? Will I get opportunities that might help me in my professional work? Will I get some kind of incredible discount on something I would love to have?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I don&#8217;t wait for some free time to give these organizations; I MAKE time to help them. And these organizations also let me know that they appreciate my work:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>They send me personalized emails when I finish an assignment, commenting on the work to show me that they actually read it.<\/li>\n<li>They send me stuff: a pen, a t-shirt, a trophy.<\/li>\n<li>Sometimes, someone writes me just to say &#8220;hi.&#8221;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>In short, they treat me like a precious investor!<\/p>\n<p>I cannot possibly say yes to every organization that wants my donated time. In fact, I say &#8220;no&#8221; more often than I say &#8220;yes,&#8221; even to organizations that have a <em>great<\/em> volunteer recruitment message, because, as I&#8217;ve said, I have bills to pay. In fact, even if I win the lottery and can afford to give away all my time for free, I will still have to say &#8220;no&#8221; often, because there are only 24 hours a day, and I&#8217;ll still need time for eating, sleeping, spending time with my family, etc.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Time is precious. Sometimes, if you really want it, you are going to have to pay for it &#8211; even if you are a nonprofit.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A national nonprofit organization asked me to participate in a one-hour conference call this week to help them brainstorm something they want to do. I said sure, because I can make time available to do this, the topic is interesting to me, and I w&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[12],"tags":[1397,579,7,8,568,194,728,414,530],"class_list":["post-111","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nonprofitngoagency-management","tag-billing","tag-career","tag-consultant","tag-consulting","tag-ethics","tag-exploitation","tag-pro-bono","tag-respect","tag-volunteering"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3fFJB-1N","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=111"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2916,"href":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111\/revisions\/2916"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=111"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=111"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=111"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}