Technology

It’s official.  YouTube isn’t just for silliness anymore.  The richness and variety of the videos that people now post online are quite amazing, and so it should come as no surprise that volunteering is among the subjects represented.  In this Voices from the Past, we’ll link you to some of the more fascinating online historical video clips and photograph archives and show how you can use the Internet to get a perspective on our mutual past.  You may find materials you can use for volunteer (and staff) training or as something different to show at a recognition event.

The Internet now offers a fascinating array of tools and techniques for managing volunteers – VolunteerMatch, Facebook, blogs, Vlogs, Wikis, Twitter and many others.  In this Along the Web, we take a look at these and other cutting-edge tools.  After a quick research review on how volunteer groups use the Internet, we’ll look at all of these new online techniques. We’ll provide references that explain how to use them, along with some examples of volunteer programs that are already making the brave attempt.

In the spring of 2001, e-Volunteerism published a feature story about online training efforts called “Workshops the Wired Way.” Now, in our periodic feature series called “Whatever Happened To . . .”, e-Volunteerism revisits modern technology training and how it is used for volunteers. What was a pioneering effort eight years ago is now a fully-accepted training practice, complete with self-study Web modules, Web sites, e-newsletters and online research reports and resources. Once again, we talk about this important development with online training innovators Vicki Trottier, Project Manager, Community Literacy of Ontario, and Joanne Kaattari, Co-Executive Director, Community Literacy of Ontario.

When Elizabeth Ellis was Volunteer Development Manager for the Girl Scouts of Minnesota and Wisconsin River Valleys, she managed, promoted and expanded their “Talent Match” database. This database listed the specific skills, preferred service locations, age group preferences and availability of individuals specifically recruited for this database. Both staff and adult volunteer Girl Scout leaders utilized this resource through a password-protected search to match their unique needs to volunteer interests and availability.

In this feature story, Ellis reviews the multiple benefits of creating a similar "talent" database for organizations, and explores the potential of “banking on volunteer talents” and time. She also reviews the multiple benefits of developing a similar "skills bank," and shares a model for how to make it work. Says Ellis, “Being on the front lines of volunteer recruitment, I had the opportunity to experience the growing interest of potential volunteers using this model, as well as experience first-hand the impact of this end user-friendly matching technique."

As e-Volunteerism enters its eighth year, it is clear that one of the original aims of this online journal project hasn’t been met: Namely, to get people in our field to interact more online.  Most of our online readers don’t make use of the interactive publishing features that make e-Volunteerism so valuable a resource to volunteer managers. In this Keyboard Roundtable, we explore why this might be. And along the way, we look at the whole issue of online interaction by people in the volunteerism field. 

GoVolunteer is the recruitment website of Volunteering Australia and is run in partnership with SEEK, an Internet employment website. From the 9th to the 31st of May 2005, a survey was placed on the website with the intention to collect data from people visiting the site. Analysing this data would enable a comparison of online tools for recruitment with more traditional methods, and help Volunteering Australia target its activities.

The survey gathered 1,413 responses out of a total number of 49,291 site visits. As sample sizes go, this ought to tell us a great deal about people using online volunteer matching sites.   What we do not know is whether the respondents are representative of users. For example, as we shall see below, the responses came overwhelmingly from women. Is that because more women use the site, or that women were more likely to answer the survey?

Happily the report also includes its own ‘applications of findings’ section to draw out the lessons of the research. This Research to Practice looks at the report and the findings.

In this quarter's issue, Harrison discusses her "logic model of decision making," designed to guide managers of volunteer resources through the steps and choices associated with managing virtual volunteering. This interview is a follow-up to Harrison’s interview in the last quarter of e-Volunteerism, where she discussed the misconceptions about virtual volunteering. 

After more than a decade of promoting virtual volunteering or online service as an important new development (which it is) for the volunteer field, it's time to step back and look at what is really happening as organizations put the theory into practice.  Yvonne D. Harrison, Assistant Professor of Nonprofit Leadership at Seattle University, has done some innovative research on virtual volunteering, particularly in Canada.  She also wrote her PhD dissertation on the subject and is devoted to helping practitioners understand the theoretical foundation of their work. In this interview with e-Volunteerism, Yvonne tackles misconceptions about virtual volunteering by sharing her research on such issues as how much is going on, who actually engages in it and how they engage, the appropriateness of virtual assignments and management implications, among other points.

This edition of Along the Web focuses on a miscellaneous set of new and interesting publications on volunteering.  Included are trends in volunteering, employee volunteering, disaster volunteers, immigrant volunteers, and a miscellany of other interesting things.

This issue of “Along the Web” contains a variety of the newer publications now available on the Internet.  The pace of research and technical assistance material on volunteering is increasing and one can now find almost any subject covered in some detail.  What follows is just a sampling of new things that have been developed in the past six months, many of them from the amazing work being done through the Canada Volunteerism Initiative (just cut from the Canadian government’s funding, of course – see this issue’s Keyboard Roundtable). 

Instead of a description of the material, we’ve included a quotation from each work – the basic content and theme can easily be identified by the work’s title.