by Jayne Cravens
via coyotecommunications.com & coyoteboard.com (same web site)


Lessons from the United Nations' onlinevolunteering.org
2001 - 2005

(& observations about its operations & performance since then)


From February 2001 to February 2005, I had the honor of directing the United Nations Online Volunteering service. It was originally hosted at NetAid and was co-managed by Netaid staff in New York City and staff at the UN Volunteers program in Germany. After joining UNV in Germany, I worked to move the service entirely to the ownership and management of UNV, which happened at last in early 2004.

When I took over directing UNV's support of the Online Volunteering service, there were a LOT of people signing up to volunteer, but not many organizations were using the service. Therefore, online volunteering wasn't really happening. I knew, per my experience directing the Virtual Volunteering Project, that recruiting people that want to volunteer online is oh-so-easy, but that getting organizations to create assignments for online volunteers, and then for those organizations to provide appropriate guidance and support for those online volunteers, was a substantial and ongoing challenge.

Did it work? Yes. During my time at UNV, we saw a substantial increase in the number of online volunteering assignments posted to the service. We also saw a substantial increase in the number of organizations based in the developing world that were using the service to recruit online volunteers, and a substantial increase in the number of online volunteers based in the developing world.

Key Strategies That Changed the Service For the Better.

I did screen captures of some of the key pages of the UN's Online Volunteering service as of December 2004, archived at archive.org, presented here as PDF files (note that most of the links within these files will NOT work). This shows how we changed the focus of the initiative to supporting NGOs, UN agencies and others that were going to use the service, or were using the service, to engage online volunteers, rather than focusing on recruiting online volunteers:
No specific outreach to recruit more online volunteers to the service was undertaken as of about summer 2001 through my time directing the service - and, yet, we were overwhelmed with people wanting to be online volunteers and there were always far more people that wanted to volunteer online than there were assignments for them to do

"Who is Using the OV Service?" , about the United Nations Volunteers Online Volunteering Service. Published in April 2004. You can download it in PDF from my web site (it's one page). It's also archived from the original web site, at http://web.archive.org/web/20041205083644/http://www.onlinevolunteering.org/news/news_article.php?art_id=1298

Online Volunteering Service Testimonials From Host Organizations and Volunteers.

A selection of stories profiling both volunteers and the organizations they helped all over the world that are no longer available on the OV service. These are not all that were published on the site - all can be found via earlier versions of the OV site at archive.org. This was done as much to show organizations what effective engagement of online volunteers looked like as to honor these volunteers:

Online event in October 2001.

On Saturday, 27 October and Sunday, October 28, 2001, UN Volunteers joined CERN in Geneva and online to celebrate UN Day and the increasing role of online technologies in humanitarian work, including virtual volunteering. I was the remote host from Bonn, Germany. My event was on Saturday, and I interviewed Nicolas Fleuri, Sean Osner and others involved in UNITeS initiative in Jordan. On Sunday, the event featured a broadcast of live events in Geneva, including the head of UNV, Sharon Capling­-Alakija in Geneva interviewing World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners­-Lee in Boston. The host was Paola Catapano and featured a rollicking performance of the song "Surfing on the Web" by Les Horribles Cernettes.

During the event, Berners-Lee talked about the key role online volunteers played in the development of the web. During the two-day event, three online volunteers recruited via the UN's Online Volunteering service facilitated an online discussion about the Global Digital Divide, "Tech for Humanity", and ICT4D. Note that most of the links in these PDF files, which I downloaded from archive.org, will NOT work. The videos are, unfortunately, long-gone; according to CERN, they outsourced the video web hosting in 2001, and the company, the Orbigate.net streaming portal/Orbital & Cie, went under.


Staffing of the Online Volunteering Service.

I spent about 60 to 75% of my time directing the UN's Online Volunteering service. The rest of my time was spent creating content for and managing the web site of the United Nations Technology Service (UNITeS). Most of my time on the OV service was spent writing guidance for NGOs on engaging with and supporting online volunteers and promoting the service both internally and externally (for reasons I will never understand, when UNV got a new head of marketing, she told me flat out that it was not her job to promote the OV service). As I noted earlier, I did nothing to promote the service to potential online volunteers: all of my focus was on recruiting organizations to post opportunities to the site.

Various UN agencies promoted the site within their own web sites; this collaboration was essential in getting the word out about the site.

I also secured the URL onlinevolunteering.org, and having that URL I believe played an essential role in almost instantly getting a huge number of visitors to the site right after launch.

There was also an unpaid intern who would be in charge of reading and responding to every email from people using, or trying to use the service, using responses I had written. This role changed every six months, but it was easy to get the intern up-to-speed regarding what most emails would be asking and how to respond. Could an AI-powered chat bot do this job now? Much of it, yes, but we humans regularly learned so much by reading the questions people trying to use the service had and their quesitons and suggestions were essential for continually refining the service.

Our department had a web developer who split his time between managing the OV service and UNITeS. He spent a great deal of time developing the site when it came over from NetAid, and we had the intern, various online volunteers and staff from our unit test the site regularly before launch.

I offer this information to show just how little staffing it took to host and manage this wildly successful global program - however, being a part of a global network like the United Nations eliminated a lot of marketing needs that another platform would need.
 

After 2005

In 2016, UNV removed support materials for users of the OV service, or at least made them unavailable for unregistered users. It was a stunning development, one that no doubt adversely affected the quality of online volunteering opportunities, the support for online volunteers and the experience of both volunteers an host organizations. Word from colleagues inside UNV said leadership was ready to let the online volunteering service fade away. 

Then, in October 2019, UNV stopped accepting any new hosting organizations, limiting the service only to organizations that already registered. Then, UNV posted this message on its OV web site: "Effective 1 January 2020, the Online Volunteering service is free of charge to all eligible partners. Eligible partners are: UN entities, Governmental or other public institutions, and Civil Society Organizations." But if you clicked on the link for more information, you discovered that UNV has a VERY narrow version of civil society organizations (CSOs): it had to be a CSO already registered with the OV service, or the organization has to provide evidence of accreditation with the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), or the organization has to be working with a UN Country Team as an implementing partner or through an agreement and submit a form signed by the UN Entity they are partnering with.

It was a really sad time for online volunteering. Support for it within UNV had crumbled. It's days were numbered.

Then, in October 2021, UNV did something I never expected: it launched a Unified Volunteering Platform and Unified Conditions of Service. This new volunteer recruitment platform brought together UNV’s onsite UNV assignment recruitment and its recruitment of online volunteers into one place. Via this new unified platform, organizations can request services of both onsite and online volunteers, and candidates can apply for both onsite UN Volunteer assignments and online assignments. It is the single-entry point for all UNV partners – from candidates for onsite and online volunteering to donors, funding partners and UNV personnel and partner organizations.

In my time at UNV, I had fought the then-head of volunteer services to incorporate online volunteering into her work, and she refused outright. And as I noted earlier, the marketing manager refused to do any promotion of the online volunteering service as well. And here we were, 20 years later, and UNV was at last embracing online volunteering at every level! As I blogged at the time:

I love that UNV now, at last, sees its online volunteering engagement as part of its overall volunteer engagement. I would love to know how it happened! But this change, this unified platform, comes at a big cost: UNV no longer allows any nonprofit or NGO that’s working on behalf of the developing world to recruit online volunteers via its platform. The only organizations allowed to use the platform to recruit online volunteers are “eligible partners”: UN entities (UNICEF, UNDP, UNESCO, etc.), those with accreditation with the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), or an organization working with a UN Country Team as an implementing partner. That means small NGOs who don’t have a formal partnership with UNV or aren’t working with a UNV in the field are now locked out of the platform for recruiting online volunteers... (but) ultimately, it’s the right decision, because it means UNV now makes it clear that ALL of the volunteering it facilitates, including online volunteering, must be in support of the goals of communities in developing countries, and must have real impact – it must put the needs of the communities first.

I will never know what change in leadership and other staffing led UNV away from dismantling the Online Volunteering service and, instead, fully embracing and promoting online volunteering again. But I'll always be grateful and happy about it.

To be clear, online volunteers recruited through UNV's unified platform are still NOT UN Volunteers. Online volunteers receive no contract and receive no stipend. They are, truly, volunteers: unpaid. This was a confusion that has always been an issue with UNV's hosting of online volunteers.

Also see:


The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook

available for purchase as a paperback & an ebook

The experience of directing the UN's Online Volunteering Service greatly influenced the material in this book, which is co-authored by me, Jayne Cravens, and the world-renowned expert on volunteerism and one of the first promoters of online volunteering, Susan Ellis. If you want detailed information on how to work with online volunteers, and how to fully integrate virtual volunteering in to all of your community engagement, or if you are researching virtual volunteering / online volunteering, this book is a must read.
 

 
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