online volunteering: the fundamentals never change
05:33, 6 April 2008
.. Posted in Volunteerism and Volunteer Management.. Link
I've been serving as volunteer manager for the Aid Workers Network (AWN), an online resource for people working in aid and development all over the world. Most of the AWN users are professional aid and development workers involved with a variety of relief and development efforts all over the world. They range from security officers to health care workers to teachers to program managers to headquarters staff and just about any other task you can think of relating to aid and development agencies. Some work for small NGOs, while others work for huge organizations, like the United Nations.
After graduating to a more sophisticated web site and a brief stint with a paid staff person, AWN has gone back to being an all-volunteer organization in support of the AWN community. The reason was not to save money, but because AWN needs the support and investment of aid workers themselves in order to be sustainable and worthwhile, the kind of support and investment that can come only from AWN's target audience seeing the web site as their responsibility and worthy of their time and support.
I got involved with AWN about six years ago just a forum participant, per my work at UNV/UNDP. I was asked to set up a formal volunteering program for AWN in December 2007, and will be recruiting and supporting AWN volunteers through December of this year. My fellow volunteers are all online and quite remote from me, so it's an excellent opportunity to once again test the suggested practices regarding online volunteering, as well as new practices like using advanced tools (video). One concept I started touting back in 1997 that's been very much reinforced yet again during this latest gig managing online volunteers: the biggest challenges regarding online volunteering are still regarding issues that have nothing to do with technology and everything to do with the fundamentals of maintaining any successful nonprofit organization (an active board, for instance), and the basics of volunteer management that every volunteer manager faces (generating new, interesting assignments, for instance).
