What is next for virtual volunteering?
20:50, 20 October 2010
.. Posted in Volunteerism and Volunteer Management.. Link
I am frequently asked What is next for virtual volunteering? What will be happening 10 years from now?
As the practice is more than 30 years old, it's an intriguing question. The practice is no longer new -- it's mature and well-established. So, where will it go from here?
Here is both where I think it will go, and where I hope it will go:
- There will be less and less talk of two groups of volunteers -- online and onsite. I've been discouraging the practice of talking about two different groups of volunteers since I started advocating regarding virtual volunteering back in the 1990s, but many organizations and consultants continue to separate the two when talking about volunteers. But the boundary will not last much longer.
- More and more volunteer management trainings and books will fully integrate virtual volunteering practices into their recommendations, doing away with the need for separate virtual volunteering trainings, separate chapters, etc.
- More academic researchers and research institutions will include virtual volunteering in their studies regarding volunteer practices. A report about the state of volunteering in the USA, for instance, will include detailed information about how volunteers are using the Internet as a part of their service, and how organizations are using the Internet to support and involve volunteers.
- Being able to engage in virtual volunteering -- involving and supporting online volunteers -- will become a standard expectation of volunteer resources managers in the USA. Those volunteer resources managers and organizations that keep avoiding virtual volunteering will slowly be pushed aside by people and organizations that have long known virtual volunteering is no fad.
- Volunteer ranks will become more and more diverse at organizations throughout the USA, as the Internet allows for the involvement of a variety of different groups. No one age group or economic level will dominate most volunteer ranks, for instance.
- There will be more and more virtual teams of volunteers -- teams of online volunteers -- working on assignments together, as organizations become more savvy about creating assignments for these volunteers.
- Virtual volunteering will become much more widespread outside of the USA, with many more examples from Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East.
- There will be much more information available online and in print about virtual volunteering in languages other than English.
- Just as different cultures approach volunteering and people management in different ways, they will put their own unique spins on virtual volunteering. What works in Bangladesh will be different than what works in Ghana, for instance.
- People will continue to come up with new jargon for old practices. For instance, the current talk of micro-volunteering is merely a re-branding of a practice that's been around since the 1980s. The cloud is just another word for cyberspace. The challenge will be to figure out when a new technology term is actually referring to something they have already been doing, versus when it's referring to something truly new.
- The fundamentals for volunteer management -- and, therefore, for virtual volunteering -- will stand. There will never not be a need for clear volunteer task descriptions, for instance. There will never not be a need to recognize the contributions of volunteers in some way. There will never not be a need to know what online volunteers are doing.
