My skepticism re: crowd-sourcing & volunteering
07:46, 18 March 2009
.. Posted in Volunteerism and Volunteer Management.. Link
Volunteers are never free.
While volunteers are unpaid, it takes a lot of time and resources to involve volunteers effectively, whether for a one-time, just-show-up volunteering gig, like a beach clean-up, or something more involved, like translating a program manual from English to Spanish, or moderating an online discussion group, or mentoring a young person. Supporting volunteers, through providing an appropriate orientation process and through effective communications (answering volunteers' questions promptly, providing all of the details needed to take on an assignment, etc.), is time-intensive, and many staff don't know how to provide such support. Even if the organization has a full-time volunteer coordinator, that person is not the only person who will support volunteers in their assignments; volunteering assignments should support a variety of staff and departments (teachers, program managers, direct-service providers, public relations staff, etc.), not just one person. And without appropriate support, volunteers fail: assignments don't get done, or don't get done in the way needed, work must be repeated by others, deadlines are missed, clients and staff are let down, and bad public relations abound -- all things nonprofit organizations, non-governmental organizations, schools, etc. cannot afford.
Staff at nonprofit organizations, non-governmental organizations, schools, etc., also have trouble creating assignments specifically for volunteers. Even if the organization has a full-time volunteer coordinator, that person should not be the only person who develops assignments for volunteers: no one wants to work with people "forced" upon them: "Hi, here are four volunteers ready to help you in your classroom. Good luck! Bye!" Instead, those who will work with volunteers should be involved in the design of what the volunteers will do, BEFORE the volunteers are ever recruited. And that's easier said than done. This struggle to create assignments for volunteers is why so many volunteerism conferences feature workshops specifically on this subject. It's why the most popular resource produced by a program to help organizations realize "the full potential of the literacy volunteers" was a list of more than 30 sample task descriptions for such volunteers. It's why one of the most popular page on my own web site is "Short-term assignments for tech expert volunteers", which provides a list of what volunteers could do at a nonprofit organization in just a few hours or a few weeks to help with the organization's computer and Internet systems.
And that brings me to a third point: a million years ago, back in 1994 or so, VolunteerMatch, then Impact Online, founded by Steve Glikbarg and Cindy Shove, thought that, with their new online service that allowed organizations to recruit volunteers to come onsite to an organization to help, thousands of organizations would also post volunteer assignments that could be completed from a volunteer's home, work, school or community center computer: virtual volunteering. But online volunteering opportunities did not even *trickle* in. That's why their "baby", the Virtual Volunteering Project, focused so heavily on creating materials targeted at organizations, rather than volunteers -- so that organizations would get the information and resources they needed to create the online volunteering opportunities, and to support volunteers in these assignments.
So, with all that said, can crowd-sourcing work with volunteering? Crowd-sourcing means creating short online activities that a large group of people or community can do from their own computers in a short-period of time, and that requires no long-term commitment by participants. It's sometimes worked with, say, a band that wants fans to create artwork for its new CD and web site. Or a political campaign that wants people to create short online videos promoting the candidate. It's the hot-new jargon right now in the media, and breathless feature stories abound about its successes -- but remember that they only talk about the crowd-sourcing campaigns that work, not the many, many campaigns that do not work, that do not attract large numbers of people or contributions, or don't generate contributions that are ever actually used.
Some crowd-sourcing activities pays money. For instance, the Mechanical Turk service, hosted by Amazon.com, allows companies to post assignments that hundreds of people can complete; workers receive a few pennies for each assignment he or she finishes. Assignments include choosing the best among several photographs of a storefront, writing product descriptions, podcast transcribing, image tagging, writing or rewriting sentences or paragraphs.
But, surprise!, there are criticisms of crowd-sourcing, and the criticisms will sound familiar if you've read this entire blog entry so far, or if you are familiar with the principles of quality volunteer management:
- there can be added costs to bring a project to an acceptable conclusion, costs that you wouldn't have had if you had traditional outsourced the job to a qualified professional
- workers aren't screened and aren't always qualified or appropriate to take on an assignment, which increases the chances of them turning in sub-standard or unusable work
- no written contracts, non-disclosure agreements, or employee agreements, which means workers often don't feel their work is a real commitment
- difficulties maintaining a working relationship with crowd-sourced workers throughout the duration of a project.
- susceptibility to faulty results caused by targeted, malicious work efforts.
If you want to jump on the jargon band-wagon and promote crowd-source volunteering, that's fine, but don't sell snake oil; be realistic instead, and focus on building the capacities of organizations to involve such volunteers, and helping organizations get the money and resources they will need to take on such volunteer involvement. Like short-term onsite assignments, what all online assignments have in common is that they require a *minimum* of screening, orientation and support to guarantee that the volunteering efforts ends up offering *real* value to participants. This minimum standard can be done in an hour, and it can be done at the convenience of a new volunteer. But it must be done.
Otherwise, you are setting up both organizations and the volunteers for failure. And nonprofit organizations, NGOs, schools and others just cannot afford such.
