The Virtual Volunteering Guidebook

Fully Integrating Online Service into Volunteer Involvement

This book will help you:

Understand virtual volunteering and integrate online service into all volunteer involvement
Design virtual volunteering assignments and recruit, train, and support online volunteers in accomplishing them
Apply good volunteer management practices to assure success and manage risk in online interactions

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Description

What is virtual volunteering? It’s work done by volunteers online, via computers, smartphones or other hand-held devices, and often from afar. More and more organizations around the world are engaging people who want to contribute their skills via the Internet. The service may be done virtually, but the volunteers are real!

In The Virtual Volunteering Guidebook, international volunteerism consultants Jayne Cravens and Susan J. Ellis emphasize that online service should be integrated into an organization’s overall strategy for involving volunteers. They maintain that the basic principles of volunteer management should apply equally to volunteers working online or onsite. Whether you’re tech-savvy or still a newbie in cyberspace, this book will show you how to lead online volunteers successfully by:

Overcoming resistance to online volunteer service and the myths surrounding it
Designing virtual volunteering assignments, from micro-volunteering to long-term projects, from Web research to working directly with clients via the Internet
Adding a virtual component to any volunteer’s service
Interviewing and screening online volunteers
Managing risk and protecting confidentiality in online interactions
Creating online communities for volunteers
Offering orientation and training via Internet tools
Recruiting new volunteers successfully through the Web and social media
Assuring accessibility and diversity among online volunteers

Cravens and Ellis first explored the realm of virtual volunteering in 1996 through Impact Online’s Virtual Volunteering Project. As a culmination of the project in 2000, they wrote the first Virtual Volunteering Guidebook to help leaders of volunteer projects apply the skills of real-world volunteer management to emerging cyberspace. After 14 years, this fully revised edition of the Guidebook includes today’s technology, language, and modern society’s online activities.

Cravens and Ellis fervently believe that future volunteer management practitioners will automatically incorporate online service into community engagement, making this book the LAST virtual volunteering guidebook that anyone has to write!

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Choosing the Best Websites for Posting Volunteer Opportunities

By Jayne Cravens and Susan J. Ellis
From The Virtual Volunteering Guidebook, Energize, Inc., 2014, chapter 8, p. 157.

There are too many of these volunteer recruitment Web sites for you to try to use them all—there are not enough hours in the day! So, which of the many online databases of volunteering opportunities should you use to recruit online volunteers? Applying any of the following criteria will help:

Which has been most successful in recruiting onsite volunteers for you in the past?
Which allow for the specific recruitment of online volunteers (they allow you to tag the opportunity somehow as being online or virtual)?
Is the site focused on the particular type of volunteer or geographic region that you need to reach?
Have any been endorsed by a colleague who tells you, “I have recruited a lot of very reliable online volunteers via this Web site”?

...You should definitely try VolunteerMatch as a tool for recruiting online volunteers; it is one of the only sites that allows opportunities to be designated as virtual and is probably the most popular volunteer recruitment site, in terms of Web traffic and number of assignments posted. Otherwise, start by choosing just two Web sites available to you. Keep track of the number and quality of responses. Experiment with other sites if you are not getting enough candidates from your first two choices or you are not satisfied with responses.

You may come upon “aggregator” sites that pull postings from several different online registries to provide a wider range of volunteer opportunity choices than a single database might contain. Such sites do not always clearly identify themselves as using data gathered by others (especially ones posted by government agencies). There is nothing wrong with aggregators, but try to find out whether using one site automatically makes your vacancies accessible on other sites and track results. Also, before you
re-post new information into a new registry, check to make sure this is not unnecessary duplication.

Related Topics:

Recruitment

Virtual Volunteering

Permission is granted to download and reprint this material. Reprints must include all citations and the statement: "Found in the Energize online library at http://www.energizeinc.com/a-z"

Table of Contents

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Details

Publisher:

Energize, Inc.

Publication Year:

2014

Pages:

210

ISBN:

paperback: ISBN 978-0-940576-65-0, e-book (PDF): ISBN 978-0-940576-67-4

Editorial Reviews

Volunteers are critical to the success of many nonprofits, but all too often organizations don’t have a strategy in place for volunteer management. We believe that meaningful volunteer engagement can become a strategic advantage…We were heartened to see [this] guidebook with up-to-date insights and advice on integrating online activities into volunteer management, especially considering the rapid change and innovation of the last decade. If you seek a easy-to-use and forward-thinking guide to integrated volunteer involvement, look no further!

—Taylor Chamberlin, Blue Garnet

Ellis and Cravens reunite to revise a classic. The LAST Virtual Volunteering Guidebook shows how online service has evolved into an essential element of all volunteer involvement. It takes a look back at more than a decade of change and brings you up to date on the latest insights and advice on navigating the ever-changing world of technology to successfully engage volunteers, online and off. VolunteerMatch doesn’t just recommend this guide; we use it.

—Greg Baldwin, President, VolunteerMatch

What a great resource! This book can be accessed for specific content or as a complete learning experience. I chose to read it from start to finish, and am glad I did. Even after forty years of working in this field, the authors provided me with new ways to think about leadership challenges in the online world. We can all use more suggestions on how to use online resources to communicate with today’s volunteers, whether they are beside us or halfway around the world. This one definitely belongs on every volunteer management bookshelf.

— Kathleen Joy, Executive Director, Oregon Volunteers

If your project or organization relies on volunteers, go get this book! Its guidance is straightforward, practical, and applicable to the broadest range of volunteer challenges. The book goes beyond online interactions and provides winning strategies for working with all volunteers. I especially love the way questions of diversity and disability, often separated into “silos,” are fully integrated, creating vibrant volunteer involvement that will help your organization in ways you may not anticipate. This is a resource you will not want to be without!

— Sharron Rush, Executive Director, Knowbility

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Fully Integrating Online Service into Volunteer Involvement

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Choosing the Best Websites for Posting Volunteer Opportunities

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