Jayne Blog on volunteerism/volunteering, nonprofits, ngos, aid & development, women's empowerment, communications & random thoughts

Getting volunteer managers to use tech

03:38, 3 December 2007

.. Posted in Volunteerism and Volunteer Management


.. Link

Despite the best efforts of many different people and organizations over the last 11 years, many volunteer managers -- maybe most -- have NOT embraced online technology to support their volunteers nor to grow professionally, and the few online discussions regarding volunteerism are remaining terribly basic:

• Volunteer managers who blog or produce podcasts are rare.

• Organizations that host dedicated online fora for their volunteers, allowing them to interact together, are also rare.

• Conferences and workshops focused on volunteer management might feature an introduction to online volunteering or an overview of databases to manage volunteers, but not much more tech-related.

• Online discussion boards for volunteer managers are largely unknown in the field and not used frequently.

• Online questions regarding volunteer management stick are largely the same basic subjects (how do I recruit volunteers? where do I find an example of such-and-such form?). Advanced online discussions about supporting and involving volunteers are rarely happening.

• e-Volunteerism, a site for the advanced discussion of volunteer management, often struggles to get really dynamic interaction in its online Keyboard Roundtables, and only a few of its subscribers make use of the reader response and author exchange features.

In its November Keyboard Roundtable, e-Volunteerism explored why this might be. The Roundtable looked at three areas:

1. The Basics: Why should volunteer managers interact online and how can they do it?
   
2. Online Interaction: What works and what could we do to move interaction beyond the basics of volunteer management?
   
3. The Future: Where is all of this leading?

To debate these points, e-Volunteerism pulled together some of its closest friends in the volunteerism world: Jayne Cravens (me), who the site designated as "the world’s leading authority on online volunteering"; Andy Fryar, fellow Keyboard Roundtable Convening Editor and founder of the OzVPM eGroup (and whom I designate as a really nice dude); and Kristin Floyd, e-Volunteerism.com and Energizeinc.com’s Webmaster (whom I designate as oh-so-insightful and forward-thinking). Rob Jackson chimes in as well as the Keyboard Roundtable Convening Editor and founder of UKVPMs, the eGroup in the United Kingdom (and yet another really nice dude). UPDATE: Susan Ellis of e-Volunteerism felt this discussion was so important that she wanted to provide it to non-subscribers, and she's allowed the participants, including me, to publish a PDF version of the roundtable on our web sites.