Preferred communications methods -- can you accommodate everyone?
14:10, 24 September 2009
.. Posted in Volunteerism and Volunteer Management.. Link
A group I'm assisting with online communications is frustrated with one of its volunteers, because she doesn't have an email address. Every volunteer has an email account except her. There is a computer in her home, with Internet access, used by her family, so access isn't a problem. Per her professional work, we know she's perfectly capable of using email. Her family and others have tried several times to get her to register for a gmail or Yahoomail address, but she refuses -- politely but firmly. And that means that all messages that are sent out to volunteers via email or their online group have to be snail mailed to this volunteer.
Before you roll your eyes, talk about what an inconvenience she is to the group and how much more work she's creating because she refuses to drag herself into the 21st century, consider this: is she any more burdensome than that one volunteer telling you he wants you to send micro-blogs (tweets) to his cell phone instead of email? Or the volunteers that want you to switch from YahooGroups to FaceBook for volunteer communications, because that's what they prefer, even though a majority of your volunteers, and you, like the current online platform?
The necessity of online communications has been a reality for me since the mid-1990s, professionally as well as personally; for other nonprofits and those that support such, that necessity came even earlier, believe it or not. It's hard to argue that having an email address isn't an absolute requirement for volunteering in the USA in 2009, and has been for many years. But that said: because this volunteer is someone who has proven herself essential again and again to the success of the group, and because the group would suffer if they lost her, I suggested they keep accommodating her. She gets left out of the online conversations, but she still gets event flyers and major announcements by snail mail, and invitations to meetings by phone call. In short, her worth as a volunteer seems to far outweigh the inconvenience and cost of sending her snail mail.
But THAT said, had she not been so very essential, I would have suggested that they tell her she had to get an email address or not longer be a part of the group.
The vast majority of nonprofits cannot use every communication avenue out there to get messages out to current and potential volunteers, donors and clients, and cannot accommodate the preferred communications avenues of every volunteer, donor or client. How do you pick which tools to use? Know the people you want to reach. What works best with them? What are they telling you? What are your surveys and observations of them telling you? Also think about the staying power of certain online tools: FaceBook is popular now, but as I noted in my earlier blog, America Online used to be the online social networking site, and a few years ago, it seemed everyone had to have a MySpace account. By contrast, email and web sites have shown significant staying power, so investing in their use now won't be an investment wasted in a year or two.
Can you exclude a volunteer because he or she refuses to use an online tool you deem essential to working with volunteers? Yes, if you determine that it would be too huge of a time and/or cost burden to you and the organization to print out every email message to volunteers and send it via snail mail to just one person or a handful of people, or to reduce every message down to 140 characters and tweet it, or to duplicate every posting to your Googlegroup to post also on a Facebook group, etc. Or, if it's absolutely essential to a volunteer's service with your organization that he or she be available via their cell phone because of the nature of your organization's mission, you can make cell phone access a requirement. If your online group is on FaceBook, and the communications to volunteers on it is essential to their service, you can require volunteers to use Facebook. But note the word essential that I keep using; you have to be able to prove that an online tool is essential in order to make your case for it being a requirement to volunteer service.
Yes, that means sometimes leaving people out. But you probably do this regularly: can your organization accommodate volunteers who are only available third shift? Or does your organization require volunteers to undergo a certain number of hours of training before they can become involved? Volunteer requirements of any kind always leave some people out, and that's okay -- provided that those requirements are valid in relation to the volunteers' tasks and the organization's resources. (for the record, online volunteering not only leaves out people who don't have access to the Internet -- so far, it also excludes people who can't read).
And with THAT said, it's probably a good time to remind you to think about where you fall in the Stages of Maturity in Nonprofit Organizations' Use of Online Technologies. Are you a Basic user of online tech? Intermediate? Advanced? Trail-Blazing? Have a look at where you are now, and think about where you would like to be.
