Technology

More people want to volunteer today than ever before. As practitioners, we recognize that it’s important to not just make volunteer opportunities more accessible but to also make them more personalized.

While some of us have yet to adopt a web-based approach to recruiting and working with volunteers, the conversation has already advanced to using more effective mobile apps. These apps offer more relevant opportunities to individual volunteers and also help automate check-in, background checking, and dynamic reporting processes. Today’s app developers aim beyond visual interfaces to target voice detection and artificial intelligence capabilities – such as those supported by Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa and Samsung's Bixby – to predictively deliver personalized content and experiences to us. Such advances have real implications for volunteer engagement, too.

In the past, the volunteer community has often been burned by online volunteer opportunity registries and other volunteerism-related website providers who over-promise and under-deliver. But improved electronic tools now offer growing opportunities for us to engage more volunteers and retain them. In this e-Volunteerism feature, Sam Fankuchen, the founder of Golden, a top-ranked mobile app for volunteers, shares his expertise on electronic access that impacts volunteers. Fankuchen clearly challenges us to broaden our vision when he asks: Are we ready to position our volunteer opportunity listings so that every volunteer on every device in every community can find them? 

Free, live-streaming video platforms like Facebook Live, Twitter’s Periscope, and YouTube Live allow users of smartphones or tablets to live stream something they are viewing in person so that people off-site can view and share in it, too, in real-time – events, speeches, announcements, celebrations, and more.

The keyword here is live. Viewers watch the video at the same time it’s being filmed. While videos are recorded on Facebook and available after the live event (just like on YouTube), the draw for Facebook viewers is that they can view the event as it is happening, in real time. As with other Facebook posts, they can even join in by commenting.

Could Facebook Live and other live-streaming video platforms be used to celebrate volunteers? Welcome new volunteers? Educate and train volunteers? Recruit new volunteers? “Sure!” argues Jayne Cravens, an internationally-recognized volunteer management researcher, consultant, and trainer. In this e-Volunteerism feature, Cravens outlines some captivating ideas for how to embrace live-streaming video platforms to benefit volunteer engagement, noting that you can even “plan out” your video ahead of time. “It doesn’t have to be entirely spontaneous,” writes Cravens. “It just needs to feel that way.” 

Virtual and remote activities are becoming more prevalent in the landscape of volunteer opportunities. However, most of the information or resources for volunteer managers continue to focus mainly on volunteering done on-site, alongside paid staff.  

In this feature article, author Michele Wiesner describes the highly successful volunteer program at Hire Heroes USA, where 85% of volunteer hours are dedicated to remote opportunities. As volunteer program director of Hire Heroes USA, Wiesner is an authority in how to engage with volunteers who never come into face-to-face contact with staff. Here, she shares lessons learned in working with remote and virtual volunteers, describes the relationship between the two, and explains how volunteer managers can think about engaging volunteers in new ways. The potential of remote and virtual volunteers, Wiesner notes, “is limitless.” 

Having access to professional e-learning and course-creation software — such as Adobe Captivate^©, Camtasia^®, and Snagit^® — can be a great asset to anyone's training program. But have you ever considered using such software for multiple purposes? Did you know, for instance, that it could also enhance your recognition activities with volunteers?

In this Training Designs article, author Erin R. Spink walks you through her experience with her new training software and describes how she ultimately used it to add value to more than just her volunteer training projects.

Whatever Happened To . . . is a recurring feature at e-Volunteerism that allows us to revisit past articles to see what has been happening since we first published the stories. 

In this issue, we revisit “Perspectives on Membership Development,” a story from 10 years ago about the Soroptimist International of the Americas, a global volunteer women’s organization. In 2005, the story revealed, Soroptimist International had recently faced a downward spiral in membership numbers and the closing of local clubs. Unlike other similar organizations in the same situation, Soroptimist had risen to the challenge by deciding to motivate its members to revamp tradition, discover new ways of doing things more relevant to women, and grow its membership.

In this fascinating update, Soroptimist’s Executive Director Elizabeth Lucas and Senior Director of Membership Marketing Darlene Friedman explain what Soroptimist is doing today to meet the challenges facing all volunteer and member-based organizations. The organization has created “an online community empowering offline action” called LiveYourDream.org, “a self-motivated community of people who wish to support women and girls in their quest to lead better lives, while gaining inspiration in their own lives.” We can all learn from this so-far successful approach to engaging non-members in volunteer activities (more than 50,000 people have signed up to date), and other changes Soroptimist has made to revitalize its approach to volunteerism in the 21^st century.

Though online volunteer recruiting has been around for decades, it is still a rapidly evolving field. Today, online recruiting is boosted along not only by technological advances but also by the ingenuity and determination of dedicated nonprofit professionals who recognize the value it can have for organizations of all shapes and sizes.

In this feature article, e-Volunteerism looks at online volunteer recruiting by examining the evolution of VolunteerMatch, the largest online volunteer opportunity network. Through this platform, author Shari Tishman, the director of engagement at VolunteeerMatch, argues that we can learn something valuable and instructive about the past, present, and future of online volunteer recruiting. Tishman obviously has a unique perspective on this topic. So here it is, folks, straight from the proverbial horse’s mouth: everything you ever wanted to know about online volunteer recruiting.

Do you think that creating training videos requires special expertise, lots of time, and a big budget? Think again. Perhaps nothing has evolved so rapidly in useful technology than videography: every smartphone has the capability to produce quality video; camcorders today have come down in price as their functionality has increased; and online conversations using webcams can be recorded as videos.  

Patricia Wright, the director of volunteer services at Western Maryland Health System, recently began experimenting with homemade video as a tool for volunteer orientation and training. She is the first to acknowledge she’s a novice at the process, which is one of the reasons her article is so interesting. Wright explains why she began experimenting with video, the successes and not-so-successful outcomes of her first forays into videotaping, how even her first attempt upgraded her previous curriculum and ensuing discussion, and what she plans next. This Training Designs article includes links to relevant Web sites and YouTube videos to help you, too, develop your own training tools, along with a  list of available video content that’s useful to almost any kind of volunteer effort.

Volunteers increasingly come to organizations with expectations that their involvement will be supported by the smart use of new technologies – during recruitment, induction, and in their actual volunteering. As shown in previous Training Designs, the Internet and video have the potential to revolutionize how we welcome and train volunteers and support their ongoing learning and development. In this issue, Laura Hamilton shares how George House Trust in the UK uses webinars and other e-learning tools to support the orientation and briefing of volunteers for one-off events and also to enhance organizational induction for all volunteers. Hamilton offers a step-by-step guide to successfully incorporate online learning from the start of volunteer engagement.

Take a tour of some of the technology tools currently being used in learning design and delivery.  In this issue, Sue Jones introduces a range of new learning platforms and explores the potential for organisations to further develop and enhance the ways they train volunteers. Jones also reviews some of the familiar and less familiar terms and labels emerging from this area, including social learning, e-learning and m-learning, with examples from her own and others’ experiences. And she provides comment and insight on some of her favourite learning technology articles and blogs, all designed  to help readers discover more about this evolving field.