One Day Activities for IT Volunteers or Volunteering Using IT
(Hacks4Good, for instance)

You know the term barn-raising? Where a group of neighbors gather and, in one-day, build a barn - or at least most of it?

It still happens, not only with barns. Such events also happen with computers. While the result isn't a barn, it can be something just as helpful.

Some advantages of these events:

• Getting volunteers together in the same place, even if that place is a Zoom conference or online "room," can be an incredibly fun, energizing experience for everyone involved. You know this if you have ever seen a group of employees from the same company work together on a Habitat for Humanity build or a serve food together at a homeless shelter.
   
• Participants get to work together with others, not just on their own, or with a new group they've never worked with before, face-to-face, onsite or online, and afterwards, they may feel more energized about their remote volunteering for your organization, may work better together online after the event at the company they are all a part of, etc.
   
• It can be a learning opportunity for both participating volunteers and the nonprofit staff that help organize and support the event - they may learn new skills, or receive increased awareness about causes or a community's circumstances they were not familiar with before.
   
• It's a great opportunity for photos and for press coverage, particularly when it happens onsite with volunteers altogether in the same room or series of rooms. Nearby TV stations will be all-too-happy to come to the site and take some video and interview participants. You can encourage participants to take photos as well, to share with your organization - providing great material for your web site, blog, brochures and annual report. If the event is online you should take lots of screen captures and record video sessions for later use (here's an example of a team from a hackathon for an Austin-based nonprofit - the volunteers, however, were in another state).
   
• You may recruit some new volunteers that turn into longer-term volunteers, helping your organization with projects beyond your one-day event.
   
• You may involve people that would never volunteer with the nonprofit or beneficiary program otherwise - perhaps even demographics that are under-represented among the usual volunteer ranks (young people, people from the corporate sector, etc.).
   
• You may reach people that will donate funds to the beneficiary program, once they understand what that program does (for the environment, for children, for the arts, for vulnerable populations, etc.) and the impact of the program's work.

Some disadvantages or challenges:

• None of these are just-show-up no-need-to-sign-up-first events. You will have to do some screening of volunteers, secure a site or platform, ensure that there are enough tables and chairs and parking for an onsite event, etc. You may have to do at least a bit of training of participants as well (the more you prepare and train, the more likely that, for participants, it will feel like a show-up-and-get-busy experience).
   
• Great food is required for an onsite event. More on that later.
   
• Great Internet access for everyone is a must.
   
• Flash drives will be used at onsite events - and people may have viruses on those flash drives they don't even know about. So you need to remind everyone to have up-to-date virus protection software.
   
• Whether onsite or online, participants need to know where to quickly find and trade files, how to immediately start collaborating, etc. - Slack? Basecamp? Groups.io? GoogleDrive? Should they have their signups and logins to use the platforms BEFORE the event?
   
• Some work by volunteers may turn out to be unusable. Some volunteers are going to turn in work that your organization may not be able to use as is, and that will have to be redone by others. That means you do need some kind of gate-keeping - that can be volunteers reviewing each others work, for instance. It's said that 90% of corporate hackathons have a negative ROI - most of what is developed doesn't end up being used afterwards. Corporations can afford that kind of experimentation to get to the 10% - nonprofits cannot. 
   
• You must have some onsite or online training before the event and onsite or on-demand guidance and help during the event. For the edit-a-thon, volunteers need to be briefed about your organization and the subject matter at hand. For the web site fix-a-thon, you need to recruit volunteers that understand HTML. At any of these events, volunteers must be guided and supported, have someone on hand that can answer their questions and make sure volunteers are doing proper work, etc.
  

Example #1: Wikipedia Edit-A-Thon

The Chronicle of Philanthropy highlighted the Smithsonian's gathering of volunteers onsite at the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art, in Washington, D.C. for an "edit-a-thon" to improve art history info on Wikipedia. In February 2014, 600 volunteers in 31 venues -  in the USA, Canada, Australia, Italy, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, in nonprofits and art schools, in museums and universities - added 101 female artists to Wikipedia. 

When you search for something on Google, Bing or Yahoo, very often the first link to come up will be one on Wikipedia. That's just one of the reasons your mission-based organization needs a profile there.

What organizations should have a Wikipedia strategy as well?

• Every historical agency or history-focused nonprofit, no matter how small, should have a Wikipedia strategy, to ensure historical information for the period, region or person that agency is focused on is complete and correct on Wikipedia, and has lots of other Wikipedia pages linking to it.

• Every museum, no matter how small, no matter the focus of its displays, should have a strategy, profiling the museum and linking to the Wikipedia page for all of the artists or historical figures tied to the art and artifacts the museum displays.

• A school district should ensure the history of all its current schools, as well as schools that used to be in the area, is documented on Wikipedia, and that these pages have lots of other Wikipedia pages linking to them as well. 

• A nonprofit that considers itself an institution in a city or region should have a profile on Wikipedia that lists all of its executive directors over the years, all of its locations, links to all of the organizations it collaborates with that also have profiles on Wikipedia, etc.- and, again, has lots of other Wikipedia pages linking to it.

• Every community of faith. What is the history of your congregation in your community? What important historical events in your community was your church, temple, mosque or other congregation a part of?

• Every organization that celebrates a culture or ethnic group in a local community. When did people from that group first arrive in the community and does the Wikipedia page for that city reflect that arrival and the group's contributions? Are important people from that group that have impacted the community profiled on Wikipedia and do other pages link to those profiles?

If paid employees of your program don't have time to map what needs to be done on Wikipedia, this is a terrific job for an online volunteer, recruited from among your current, long-term and very knowledgeable volunteers/members, from among art history students at the nearest university, etc. That person, as project leader, will not only identify all that needs to be done regarding a Wikipedia entry; he or she will also break all that needs to be done into well-defined tasks, so that different people can each undertake a different task.

One person will also need to write and gather all text to be uploaded; you aren't recruiting writers but, rather, people to adapt text and links in the Wikipedia style. One volunteer may be in charge of your organization's Wikipedia page, ensuring words link to other Wikipedia pages, as appropriate. Another volunteer may be in charge of ensuring other Wikipedia pages that should link back to you do just that (pages that name your organization, pages that detail the cause your organization addresses, or pages for famous or notable people that are somehow connected to your organization and are named on your Wikipedia page - all identified earlier by the project leader), and will probably need at least one or two other volunteers to help with this. 

You could organize such an event for all of the arts organizations in your area, or all the history-related organizations in your area, or all the religiously-focused organizations in your area, etc.

Also see How to run an edit-a-thon on the Wikipedia web site.

Example #2: Web Site Accessibility Fix-A-thon

Back in the late 1990s, it was possible to build a new web site in just one day for most nonprofits - their web needs, and the World Wide Web, weren't nearly as sophisticated as they are now. But those days are long gone for most nonprofits. Most nonprofits need a lot more than a day for even a team of web designers and developers, working a full eight hours, to create an entire web site for them.

But today, a nonprofit could still host a one or two-day Web Site Fix-A-Thon, where a volunteer, or group of volunteers, spend one day onsite at the organization and, under the guidance of staff, do some simple things to the agency's existing web site to vastly improve it. For instance, you could have a day or two where volunteers focus specifically on accessibility and usability for people using screen readers (people who are blind and have a tool that reads a web site's content to them), people who have low vision and use a tool that makes a web page bigger on their device, people who have mobility issues and don't use a mouse, someone with hearing impairments, etc. As a result, your web site becomes more accessible for EVERYONE - someone who is in a crowded place and cannot hear your videos, someone for whom English isn't their first language, etc. You demonstrate, via your web site, your commitment to digital inclusion.

At a Web Site Fix-a-Thon, a volunteer, or group of volunteers, could go through your nonprofit's current web site and:

• Get rid of all non-descriptive links, all click here and read more links, changing them to links that are understandable out of context: list of our board of directors or more about our children's programs, etc. 
   
  
• Add alt tags, as appropriate, guided by these recommendations from the State of Illinois.
   
  
• Add meaningful page titles on every web page.
   
  
• Make sure headings are accurate. All text that looks like a heading is marked up as a heading. The main heading should be coded in HTML as <H1>. Secondary headings should be coded in HTML as <H2>. The heading hierarchy is meaningful. Ideally, the page does not skip levels.
   
  
• Provide labels or titles for all form fields.
   
  
• Replicate any essential information that is currently available only on a PDF on web pages (especially information that is particularly important like information about an upcoming event, list of board of directors, key awareness information related to your program, like how to prepare for an earthquake, etc.).
   
  
• Correct text colors and background colors so that the contrast between the two is stark (no dark fonts on dark backgrounds, no gray fonts on gray or colored backgrounds, etc.).
   
  
• Present a full description of any meaningful image on a page, so that someone using a screen reader (where the page is read in a human voice) will know what it is.
   
  
• Remove all functions that automatically start audio or video when someone opens a page.
   
  
• Correct any content that flashes faster than 3 times per second. Flashing faster than three times per second can trigger epileptic seizures.
   
  
• Identify a header cell for each column and row in simple data tables (again, use these recommendations from the State of Illinois as a guide.

This page from the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) offers simple steps with detailed guidance so that you can get an idea whether or not accessibility is addressed in even the most basic way on a web page - it's an excellent guide for volunteers at a web site accessibility fix-a-thon.

Example #3: Scan and Tag Day

You could use your organization's scanner - and ask volunteers to bring their own scanners - and spend the day scanning photos from your archives. Some volunteers scan, some volunteers tag them on your internal system (onsite or in the cloud) so they are appropriately archived and easy to find, some volunteers upload photos to a public photo-sharing like Flickr, other volunteers tag those photos on that photo-sharing site, as appropriate, other volunteers staff the sign-in table, and other volunteers serve food.

Example #4: Transcribe-a-Thon

There are lots of initiatives to transcribe historical documents - hand-written letters, newspaper advertising, posters and other "artifacts" in need of digitization - so that they become searchable online. These initiatives also often tag historical photos and write descriptions of such. Here is a SMALL sample of such (and note that these projects come and go regularly - many get finished just months after they start):

• Zooniverse provides links to more than 80 projects that provide opportunities for volunteers to transcribe historical documents or tag images or scanned documents, and their list of opportunities is frequently updated.

• Carnamah Historical Society virtual volunteering initiative (Australia) - Online volunteers help with transcription and indexing projects to make historical records more discoverable and searchable.

• Colored Conventions, hosted at the University of Delaware. From 1830 until the 1890s, already free and once enslaved Black Americans came together in state and national political meetings in the USA called "Colored Conventions." Before the Civil War, they strategized about how to achieve educational, labor and legal justice at a moment when Black rights were constricting nationally and locally. After the Civil War, their numbers swelled as they continued to mobilize to ensure that Black citizenship rights and safety, Black labor rights and land, Black education and institutions would be protected under the law. Online volunteers transcribe newspaper accounts of these meetings.

• DIY History is an online volunteering project from the University of Iowa’s Digital Library related to Iowa history.

• The Freedom on the Move (FOTM) public database project at Cornell University is a major digital database effort to make the search of North American fugitive slave advertisements in newspapers from regional, state, and other collections from the 1700s and 1800s easy to search and the data easy to evaluate. 

• Library of Congress By the People (crowd.loc.gov). Online volunteers transcribe, review and tag digitized images of manuscripts and typed materials from the Library’s collections.

Example #5: Crisis Camp / Crisis Commons

This is a gathering of IT professionals, software developers, and computer programmers to aid in the relief efforts after earthquakes, floods, or hurricanes. Projects by these volunteers include setting up social networks for people to locate missing friends and relatives and creating maps of affected areas. "CrisisCampers are not only technical folks like coders, programmers, geospatial and visualization ninjas but we are also filled to the brim with super creative and smart folks who can lead teams, manage projects, share information, search the internet, translate languages, know usability, can write a research paper and can help us edit wikis."

Example #6: Book and Translation Sprints

FLOSS Manuals (FM) is a collection of different language communities that produce original documentation about Free Software. The FLOSS Manuals effort was launched in 2007 to create quality free documentation about Free and Open Source Software. "Our strategy since the beginning has been to develop communities to produce high quality free manuals about Free Software in their own language. Today we have more than 120 books in more than 30 languages and more than 3,000 contributors over 5 independent language communities (French, English, Farsi, Dutch, Finnish)." FM organizations events called Book Sprints, based on code sprints, but with the focus on producing documentation instead of code. A sprint brings together a group of writers, editors, and perhaps an artist and production specialist, to go from outline to published book in five days. FM also has translation sprints.

If your nonprofit serves a multilingual public, a translation sprint for your web site and publications can be a terrific event.

Example #7: Hackathons / Apps4Good

One-Ish Day Events for Tech-Volunteers: What it takes

The key to success with these days is a lot of preparation before the day happens. Your goal is not only to get the work done; you also want volunteers to have the experience of walking through the door or logging in, staying busy the entire time, never ever standing around or sitting at home waiting for a task or wondering when something is going to happen, having a great time, and leaving or logging off with a smile on their face. For you, that is going to take a HUGE amount of preparation - let's not mince words about that. But that preparation will be worth it: you will connect with new volunteers, connect with volunteers in new ways, create new supporters, re-energize current supporters, create excitement about your organization, and, if you go about this the right way, press coverage!

What these one day events for tech volunteers take in order to be successful:

You will need not just technical volunteers such as programmers and designers; you will also need people who know how to facilitate groups and lead teams, people who know how to write well, and people to simply run around and make sure all volunteers are taken care of.

Identify exactly what it is volunteers will do on the day, as well as what paid employees that are supporting the event will do that day. All tasks for everyone need to be in writing, with estimates on how much time each task will take. Think of it as the script for the play - because in many ways, this is a performance you are pulling off!

Identify exactly how volunteers will register online in the days leading up to the event. When is the cut off date for sign ups to participate?

Make expectations clear, and in writing, on your online sign up site for the event: what skills do volunteers have to have? What do volunteers need to bring if it's an onsite event (their own lunch? identification? their own laptops?)? What time must they arrive or login, and how many hours must they provide during the event?

Here is a great template for a Code of Conduct for your hackathon that can be adapted for any one-ish day tech event. You absolutely need a well-written and well-communicated code of conduct for any of these events.


Can volunteers bring their kids to an onsite event? If you don't say they can't, some WILL bring their children!

Will you send a text message to volunteers the day before the event, and an hour before the event, reminding them of the start time?

Is the Wi-Fi connection at your onsite event excellent? How will everyone at an onsite event get on the Internet? Will there be any issues for people with different types of computers to use the Wi-Fi?

Script the day down to the minute. What happens when volunteers arrive or login? What does the check-in process look like? Who will be in charge of that check-in process? How will you prevent a long line of volunteers waiting to be checked in or waiting to login? After a volunteer checks in, then what happens? How will volunteers receive their orientation/instructions for the day? When will there be breaks? How will you bring the day to an end? The more volunteers feel like they always know what they are supposed to be doing, and the less they feel confused or feel like they are having to wait, the more likely they will be to have a great time and rave about this event later.

How will volunteers receive their tasks? For an onsite event, will you have a large bulletin board in the middle of the room where people sign up for what they want to do? Or will you have an online space where volunteers sign up before the day regarding what they want to do? Will you have a Slack channel or Basecamp or groups.io group just for the day?

Have ways to capture participants' key contact information and provide followup to them regarding the project or issue they contributed to. Require every person at the event to sign in - EVERY PERSON. For an onsite event, they should wear a name tag. For an online event, they should have identifying information on their profile and use a meaningful graphic or actual photo as their avatar.

Have every volunteer complete the briefest of volunteering applications and a photo release, and strongly encourage them to join an online discussion group, and/or to subscribe to your email newsletter. If someone refuses to sign a photo release for an onsite event, give them a particular kind of name tag that denotes this, so that if anyone takes a photo of that person, you know you can't use that photo on a web site, in a brochure, etc. If someone refuses to sign a photo release for an onsite event, you may have to tell them they cannot participate, because you cannot control volunteers taking screen captures during the event.

Make a list of whom to call for any problem that may arise. For an onsite event, that's: Internet not working, heat or cooling not working, broken toilets, etc.

Test everything days before the event, the day before the event, and two hours before the event. For an onsite event: Is the Internet working? How are the bathrooms? Desks everywhere they should be? Power outlets working?

Have a hashtag for your event and, if the event is onsite, have it posted around the room(s) and encourage participants to post updates to their social media accounts throughout the day using that social media hashtag. If it's an online event, just keep reminding online participants about that hashtag and encourage them to use it. When choosing a hashtag, it should be (1) something that is easy to remember (2) something NOT already in use by some other activity or event. After the event, you can easily compile all of the people that used the hashtag on public social media posts.


For an onsite event, serve great, free food. That is an essential. I have done a LOT of community volunteering events and community planning meetings, and food has played a MAJOR role in keeping everyone happy at an onsite event. It's 30% of your evaluation score, no question. It's easy to get food donations from multiple sources: a sandwich shop may donate one deli tray, a pizza place may donate two pizzas, a grocery store may also donate one deli tray, etc. That's going to require not only visiting each of these places before the event to secure a donation (and you will have to bring a letter on the organization's stationary asking for this donation), but also, a volunteer or two driving to each of these sites the day of the event and gathering up the food donations, then bringing them to the site. Harder to get: drink donations.

For an onsite event, have cups near a sink so people can drink as much tap water as they want.

For an onsite event, have great bathrooms with plenty of toilet paper. If you don't, negative comments will show up not only in your event evaluations, but on online reviews as well.

Contact TV stations - fax and email them before the event, and the day of the event. Send to "attention: assignment editor." For an onsite event, one person needs to be with a TV crew every second of their visit, to ensure they don't interfere with the event while filming.

Do NOT let any volunteer walk out the door or logoff without filling out an evaluation! They will NOT fill out an evaluation later online unless you somehow make it a part of their commitment to the hackathon and this is best done immediately - trust me on this! Plus, by having onsite volunteers fill out an evaluation at the event, before they leave, the more likely it will be that you capture the excitement of the day - as well as accurate criticisms that can be addressed next time.

The By the People project publishes a guide for How to Host a Transcribe-A-Thon, and although it's specific to its Library of Congress initiative, a lot of the advice is good for any edit-a-thon or transcribe-a-thon.

Never think of the only goal of these events is to get work done. Your goals should always include cultivating new and ongoing supporters. You want to turn people who attend these events into longer-term advocates and supporters of your cause, people who tell family and friends about your organization, who have their perception changed about a particular issue your organization is involved with, and maybe even are so moved by your work that they make a financial donation. To that end:

• Invite participants to like you on Facebook, follow you on Twitter, subscribe to your blog, and to subscribe to your online and paper newsletters, if you have such. Do not automatically add people to any mailing lists that communicate information beyond what they need to participate in your one-day-ish tech event - always ask their permission to add them to such lists.
   
• Encourage volunteers to blog and tweet about their experience, and to post to Facebook or other social networks about their experience with your event. If they do such, then comment on their blog, Tweet or status update, thanking them for the post.
   
• When you thank volunteers, provide them with information about other ways to volunteer with your organization, invite them to other events hosted by your organization, and remind them to like you on Facebook, follow you on Twitter, subscribe to your blog, and to subscribe to your online and paper newsletters, if you have such.

In the days following the event, you need to go through social media and "like" and respond to participants who commented about the event - this will be especially easy if they used the designated hashtag.

Evaluation

At minimum, as soon after the event as possible, you should report on your web site or blog (and share links on social media), and even via a press release:

• The number of people that participated in your event.
• Any particular groups these volunteers represented (were these teens? black students learning coding? elders/seniors? actors-turned-editors/historians?).
• A few quotes from organizers and volunteers that show why this event was worthwhile.
  
• A few screen captures or photos from the event.
  
• A summary of what the volunteers accomplished.
• Links to any information people could already see online as a result of your event.
  
• Any awards given that day to participants.
  
• What will happen now that the event is over.
  

Then you should have more substantial data to share in the weeks following the event, like:

• Data from participant evaluations, including how the experience may or may not have affected their feelings about the community, knowledge about a particular issue, etc.
  
• Many more photos.
  
• Videos like this one (or something much more fun, with music and quick cuts!).
• Many more quotes from organizers and volunteers that show why this event was worthwhile.
• Any data or links that show more in-depth what the project accomplished.
• What has happened now that the event is over.

Three to six months later, you should have data that answers these questions, even if you keep this data internal to use to improve future events:

• Are any of these projects sustainable? Have the new Wikipedia pages been deleted, for instance, or are they still there - and have they been updated?
  
• For apps4good/app development projects, are the apps being used by the target audience? If they aren't being used by the target audience, why is that?
  
• Has the web site or Wikipedia pages or an app developed been improved in any way? 
  
• If an organization got a new web site - are they still using that web site? Are they having any issues? If the program isn't using the resulting web site, why is that?
• What do volunteers say about the event six months later, as far as how it may or may not be affecting their career options, feelings about the community, knowledge about a particular issue, etc.?

The more follow-up data you have, the more data you have to say how and why your program makes a difference, and why donors should help pay for it. It will also make it much easier for you to find nonprofits, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), charities, community groups, schools and government programs to partner with for future events.

Should volunteers be charged for participation?