Copyright © 2012 by Primary Key Technologies, Inc. and brought to you by YourVolunteers.

Valerie Wagner was kind enough to write about her experiences volunteering with ProNet, an organization in Northern Nevada that provides professionals with skills and opportunities that enhance their ability to connect with employers. ProNet Reno is a member-run, non-profit 501(c)(3) organization that prepares unemployed professionals to re-enter the workforce. Members are trained in the areas of resume writing, job interviews and job hunting to give them what’s called the ProNet Edge. While we are fans of what they do, it should be noted that YourVolunteers is not affiliated with ProNet Reno.

Giving back to the community, we all think about doing this especially around the Holiday’s.  Giving back can evoke quite a few different emotions.  We feel good when we are in a position to help feed the hungry whether it is through our time at a homeless shelter or a non-profit organization where food and cash donations are collected.  Helping to keep someone warm on a cold winter night when we donate our gently used clothes and blankets can warm our own hearts.  Sometimes we are a part of something even bigger when a family or senior is adopted for holiday’s, reminding them that the true meaning of compassion and love has not been lost during these difficult times.  Northern Nevada is full of these wonderful companies and people who are there to help, and it is the compassion in our community that makes me proud to be a resident in Northern Nevada.

During these challenging and stressful economic times I have found other areas where there is an unknown and sometimes forgotten need within the community.  It was 11 months ago I found myself active in the full time job of searching for my next dream job.  Realizing 5 months later, I could not endure this task alone I entered the doors of ProNet.  It was there I found more than I had ever expected, other professionals like myself, happy to share all their expertise and knowledge, where the only paycheck was the unselfish act of helping their fellow man.  Sharing everything they have learned over the years in order to enrich the life of another human being in a non-monetary way.  Something we have come to know by the phrase of “pay it forward.”

Upon becoming a vested member of this volunteer run organization and being someone who has enjoyed giving back to our community, I found myself drawn to the community partners committee.  Suffice it to say my past volunteering never prepared me for the impact I was going to feel in this new capacity of volunteer work.  Not to mention what it would be like being on the receiving side of someone volunteering their time for me.

I begin each Monday morning, dressed in professional business attire and attend a general meeting with other professional businessmen and women.  This is the start of my work week, this is a place where I can network with other vested ProNet member’s and have the chance to meet and support the new group of professionals coming in who are beginning the process .

One of the most important aspects of our general meeting is the work done by someone in the community partner’s committee who seeks out and finds motivational speakers each week.  These are the people who help kick start the new week with a fresh outlook on job seeking.  A professional person taking time from his or her “day job”, to volunteer time to other professional members of our community who may be in need of valuable career information or a dose of motivation.   After 2 short hours I head off to my committee meeting, and here is where it all begins.

Each committee is made up of volunteer’s, who have vested their time to the program and are active in their committees for a few hours a week.   These volunteers search for careers not only for themselves, but for their fellow member’s and forward these opportunities on.  This means you have at least 20 people in your corner and are seeking out career opportunities for you.  They are the men and women of the Business Development Committee and in my opinion the backbone of ProNet.

Our IT committee maintains the computers and networks and will assist anyone in the program with laptop issues.  These men and women can be extremely valuable to someone in need of computer services as well as making sure the network and computers within ProNet are in working order every week.

The Education committee is dedicated to teaching classes on creating resumes, working through career boards for those who are not internet savvy, and yes I refer to myself as well, coming from the day when putting shoes to the pavement and knocking on doors was how the job search was done.  There are interviewing skill classes, mock interviews and numerous other classes available, all taught by someone who is volunteering their time.

Most of the same classes offered through ProNet are taken to other organizations or events where members of the community partners committee bring a wealth of knowledge and the philosophy of “pay it forward” to other job seekers.

The benefit I have received from being on the community partners committee and a part of this program which is unique to Nevada is the ability to reach out to others in one of the most gratifying ways.  While I feel it is critical to be active in our community and giving back, “paying it forward” to those who have been most affected by the high unemployment rate is a need not addressed when one thinks of volunteering.  There is a great need in our community, a need of giving someone back their confidence and their value.  I do not want to remain a vested member of ProNet, I would rather become an alumnus, but regardless of where my path leads there is one thing for certain.  My time vested here has been life changing.  I will move forward in life looking for ways to share my valuable experience and seek out not only ways of giving back to my community, but also ways to pay forward to those who find themselves in need.

By Valerie A. Wagner
Accounting Professional
Community Partners Volunteer ProNet
http://valeriewagner.wordpress.com/

My passion in being a volunteer began in 1996 through hospice as a way of giving others the same support our family received in 1995. After 10 years as a hospice volunteer I made the choice of giving back to the community as a big sister through Big Brothers Big Sisters. It has been through my current situation I have discovered yet another area where volunteering can make a difference in the lives of others. It is volunteering my time, knowledge and offering support to professional businessmen and women in our community through an organization called ProNet.

Image: photostock / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

I am the first to admit that we simply did not have the time to put together a January newsletter. January broke all monthly records by far in terms of usage and new organizations registering for our service. Even though our numbers are growing, we are still committed to providing exceptional customer service and website performance to all of our users, whether they be on Deluxe or Free accounts.

With this in mind, we are using this February newsletter to announce a couple of exciting new features as well as dispel a few myths about our service. Most importantly, I want to reach out to those who felt that our service was too difficult to set up, too difficult to use, or missing important features. Please contact us at support@yourvolunteers.com so that we may work with you to improve our service.

Sincerely,
John Wagoner
President

New Feature: Constant Contact® Integration

Quite a few of you have contacted us asking for a feature allowing you to synchronize your volunteer list with your existing Constant Contact® account. It certainly was not easy, but we have just released a beta of the new feature included on both the Deluxe and Free accounts. The integration will allow you to utilize all of the features of Constant Contact® including their email tracking. Many thanks to all of you that requested the feature and we appreciate your patience as we put it together.

New Feature: Public Calendars

By popular request, we’ve added the ability for you to provide your potential volunteers with a public calendar. You have the choice of embedding the calendar on your own website or simply providing them with a URL to view a calendar without having to first register on our site. The calendar does have a filter to only show shifts that still need volunteers and a popup with shift information will appear when they click on the shift name. Public calendars are available on both the Ongoing Needs and Special Events accounts in both the Free and Deluxe versions.

Myth #1: Errors on our site are because we are trying to push you toward the Deluxe products

Errors on websites happen. We who create them laugh in the faces of rocket scientists and mock the simplicity of their work. We keep a folder on our network with screenshots of big companies with website errors as evidence that it’s not just us. To be clear, we do not and have never used errors that you may encounter to nudge you towards paying for the Deluxe account. If you report the errors to us, we will do our best to ensure that they never happen again.

Myth #2: The purpose of our screening process is to sell you on our deluxe accounts 

99% of the organizations that use our service stick with the Free versions and we are happy to provide them to you. As many of you who have been with us for a long time know, we are terrible at upselling and simply do not want to do it. The screening process is quick, and if you provide enough information when you request a Free account, you will not be contacted to verify the information.

Myth #3: The purpose of our screening process is really so that we may prevent certain legitimate groups from using the service

We do not discriminate against any legitimate group who operates within the confines of the law as long as they use volunteers. Period. All organizations, regardless of your politics, your geographical location, and your raison d’etre are welcome to use our service. The purpose of the screening process is primarily to ensure that you are a legitimate organization and not someone who would do harm to our service or who would use our free online volunteer management system to do illegal activities.

Myth #4: The YourVolunteers profit model is unsustainable and we will be out of business soon

We received a message from a user stating that a sales person from another online service told them that they shouldn’t bother setting up an account with us since we would be out of business soon. As the kids say, LOL. We have been providing an online volunteer management system since 2004. YourVolunteers is not our business – rather, it is one product of Primary Key Technologies, Inc. and we have been providing cost-effective web, software, database, and mobile app development services since 2002 to organizations around the world.

GiftingWishes.com Update

As mentioned in our December newsletter, YourVolunteers partnered with NPcatalyst in Reno, NV to create an online charity fundraising service at GiftingWishes.com. Since our launch, we’ve had more than US$10 million in wishes posted and interest from large organizations to create branded solutions for their fundraising efforts. As many nonprofit organizations have learned, the current world economy makes it difficult for individuals to make large donations. Gifting Wishes helps a charity to crowdsource funds for specific needs. The service is free for charities to post wishes and they receive donations directly through PayPal or Google Checkout.

Image: sheelamohan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Copyright © 2011 by Primary Key Technologies, Inc. and brought to you by YourVolunteers.

2012 is nearly here and given the slow recovery of the world economy, your organization may be looking to improve upon its 2011 volunteer strategy to either expand or better utilize an existing volunteer program. We offer a few tips to consider when building a new volunteer strategy.

Volunteer Involvement

CVS Northhamptonshire makes a great point about the importance of involving volunteers in the development of a strategy (“Developing”). The last thing that you want is a mass exodus of your existing, dedicated volunteers because of changes to your program. Keeping your volunteers aware of upcoming changes is vital to keeping your volunteers happy. If you plan to expand your program, volunteers need to know that their efforts were not lacking. Additionally, if the duties of the volunteers will be expanded to cover more of what paid employees used to do, it’s important to know that the volunteers agree that the new duties are appropriate.

The Recruiting Plan

We’ve previously offered tips on how to recruit volunteers, but as a volunteer manager, you still have to decide whether you will be interviewing all applicants yourself, if you will be asking trusted volunteers to help, if you will be accepting all who want to help, and if necessary, what your budget will be for background checks. Consider spending a significant amount of time developing precise job titles that let your potential volunteers know exactly what your potential volunteers will be doing. Expecting that all volunteers will be willing to spend their time peforming all of the tasks that your organization has is a quick way to lose said volunteers. It should be noted that giving a volunteer position the wrong job title is the Seventh Deadly Sin of recruiting volunteers according to VolunteerPower.com (McKee).

Expanding the Virtual Volunteer Program

We have recently offered some tips on managing a virtual volunteer program and have received good and bad feedback. Good from virtual volunteers and bad from volunteer managers. When developing a volunteer strategy, it may be easy to think that expanding or creating a virtual volunteer program might be the answer to your organization’s limited space, to your recruiting challenges, and to finding the specific skills that may be mostly contained in individuals who are not generally available during your office hours (e.g. web developers). However, as we mentioned in the post and as we received in feedback, working with virtual volunteers may be challenging since you do not have them onsite for a set number of hours and they may be distracted by other work, by their families or by the excellent season of television. If you will be adding a virtual program to your volunteer strategy, be sure to remember that you may need to include generous timelines and you should definitely seek to recruit more volunteers than you think you need.

Changing the Way that You Manage Your Volunteers

It should be crystal clear that we are partial to one particular free online volunteer management system, but we are fully aware that there are other systems available. If you will be expanding your volunteer program and you do not currently use a system, you should consider including the use of a volunteer management system in your plan. In addition, if you are expanding your program because your organization has fewer paid employees, it’s likely that your duties will be expanded beyond the management of volunteers. More volunteers mean more management, more data to enter, more spreadsheets, more emails, more phone calls, more training and more more more more. Online systems allow your volunteers to come to a website and enter their own information and to help manage their own schedules. If their updated schedule information is available online, you will less likely to be contacted when a volunteer has a question.

In leiu of or in addition to using a volunteer management system, you may want to consider creating a hierarchy where a volunteer reports to another volunteer (with a proper title, of course). However, as many of you know, volunteers are not always willing to follow the rules of traditional hierarchies (McDuff et al, 2009) and may want to report directly to you anyway to get faster answers and to move into different volunteer roles.

Build in the Ways to Thank Them (or Not)

There have been numerous articles, posts and books dedicated just to the topic of thanking volunteers published in the past few years which reflects the recent emphasis on gratitude. Nonprofit organizations are now competing with the increasing volunteer needs of schools, libraries, parks departments and for-profit corporations. Volunteers need to know that their work is appreciated and word will spread that your organization is one that understands the value of their service.

However, in an article he wrote for Nonprofit World, Nick Levinson makes the case that you should forget the “thank you” and you should instead take full advantage of what they have to offer and encourage them to grow and learn like you would a paid employee (Levinson, 2004). This could mean setting aside funds for educational programs that would benefit both the volunteer and your organization. Further, Levinson states that volunteers are self-motivated and generally do not expect a plaque or certificate and would prefer the constant recognition of their contributions rather than just an annual dinner (Levinson, 2004).

Works Cited

“Developing a volunteer strategy.” Retrieved 12/14/2011 from the website of CVS Northamptonshire at http://www.cvsnorthamptonshire.org.uk/.

Levinson, N. (2004). What’s Wrong with “Thank You?” Plenty. Nonprofit World.

MacDuff, N., F. E. Netting and M. K. O’Connor. (2009). Multiple Ways of Coordinating Volunteers
With Differing Styles of Service. Journal of Community Practice.

McKee, T. The Seven Deadly Sins of Recruiting Volunteers. Retrieved 12/14/2011 from the website of VolunteerPower.com at http://www.volunteerpower.com/articles/7Sins.asp

Image: Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

NYEP does something amazing for our Northern Nevada community and is an organization that deserves the support of those of us who live in the region. From their new website:

NYEP opened it doors to serve the needs of this homeless teen population. NYEP provides its own unique residential programming to develop older teens to self sufficiency. Our housing program is designed to replicate “real life”. Teen residents sign a lease and commit to the Community Living Program (CLP) which is intended to move them to stability and self sufficiency. Our programming includes safe housing, food, clothing, life skills training and daily interaction with trusted positive adults. Upon entrance to the CLP, teens are typically homeless, lack their high school diploma, are unemployed and lack an income, are not involved with their community in a meaningful way and do not posses the skills necessary to influence these factors.

NPcatalyst has an excellent blog posting on their website: Nonprofit wish lists can be an opportunistic resource

To all of you who work each day to make your communities and the world a better place, YourVolunteers thanks you. We are constantly impressed by the work that so many of you do which is why we are continuing to build upon our system to help you to help others. After asking for suggestions that would make our system better, we’ve received a lot of great responses that are now on our work lists. Please keep those suggestions coming, and read down below where we descibe one of the upcoming changes involving volunteer availability.

Sincerely,
John Wagoner
President

New Service: GiftingWishes.com

YourVolunteers collaborated with NPcatalyst in Reno, NV to create a new service that allows nonprofits to create an online wish list for free and then receive donations for those items directly. The setup process is simple and donors send funds directly to your organization via Google Checkout. Donors receive the satisfaction of knowing exactly how their money will be used. Just this morning, the new service received a fantastic review from the Southern Arizona Nonprofits blog. You can read more about GiftingWishes.com on its website.

New Feature: Add a YourVolunteers Button to Your Website

Want something that gets more noticed than a text link? You can now add a YourVolunteers button to your website. After logging in as an administrator, go to the new Button Gallery to get the HTML code to paste onto your website.

New Blog Post: Be Kind to your Virtual Volunteers, for a Nerd May be Somebody’s Husband

On this International Volunteers Day, we should not forget about those volunteers that you may not see, but still contribute nonetheless. This blog post details the experiences, good and bad, of a virtual volunteer and how you can best structure the relationship that you have with them. The blog post is available here.

Coming Soon: Volunteer Availability Changes

One of the most powerful features of YourVolunteers, and one that differentiates our system from other ones that are online, is the fact that volunteers can enter their availability and administrators can see who is available for an assignment a particular task. However, many of you have told us that you would like to see this step eliminated. If we eliminate the step, we’d get suggestions asking us to add an extra step where volunteers enter their availability. What we’ll be doing is making the step optional. Those organizations that do not choose to use the availability feature will then have volunteers simply routed to the calendar or list of all shifts to build their schedules. We’ll have the new process up and running before our next newsletter.

Coming Soon: Ala Carte Pricing

We’ve received numerous suggestions that $59 per month is too much for some organizations to pay but they would really like to use some of the features of the Deluxe Packages. For example, some organizations do not mind the ads on each page, but would like to send schedules by email. We’ll be adding ala carte pricing to our service before the next newsletter. Thank you for the suggestion.

Copyright © 2011 by Primary Key Technologies, Inc. and brought to you by YourVolunteers.

December 5, 2011 is International Volunteer Day and I just have a quick thought (and my apologies to Woody Allen for adapting his joke from Annie Hall).

A volunteer manager walks into her psychiatrist’s office and says, “Doc, my volunteer’s crazy. He thinks he’s a chicken.” The doctor says, “Well, why don’t you turn him in?” The volunteer manager says, “I would, but I need the eggs.”

As many of you know, working with volunteers can be crazy. Without a paycheck, some do not place a high value on punctuality, and some are just watching the clock as they fulfill the volunteer requirements of their school or other program. Why do we work with volunteers? Because the world depends on those who are on the other end of the volunteer spectrum. Even after having worked with so many programs over the years, I am still amazed by the dedication of people who are not driven by financial reward or by glory or by the thought that the volunteer work is a stepping stone toward a destination. What I’ve learned most over these years is that there are millions of caring people in this world doing more things for their communities than you can imagine. Whether they are driven by their religious beliefs, their social needs, or their school’s requirements, volunteers are a reminder to all of us cynics that there are still plenty of good people doing good work on this planet. Let’s take this one day out of the year to stop complaining about a volunteer showing up late or surfing the net when they should be working and take a moment to imagine our world without them.

Image: digitalart / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Copyright © 2011 by Primary Key Technologies, Inc. and brought to you by YourVolunteers.

Just as the concept of telecommuting expands the ability of a workplace to recruit employees, opening up your organization to virtual volunteering allows you to recruit skilled service providers who want to make a differenec from anywhere in the world. While virtual volunteers can serve as your organization’s pubic relations people, accountants, grant writers, mentors or in any number of roles (Mukherjee, 2010), this post will focus primarily on my own experiences as a volunteer web, software and database developer.

Why We Volunteer Virtually

Bottom line: we want to help, but work and life get in the way. Virtual volunteering allows us to work on our own schedule, e.g. while we wait for a response from our paying clients, while we’re at home wondering why NBC has put Community on hiatus. We also do not have to commute to an office, a shelter or a community center through traffic to do the kinds of things that we know we could do at home.

Why We Don’t Volunteer Virtually

The modern world has our faces in our computers, smart phones, and tablets as we read the near-infinite emails, tweets, posts and updates regarding pending deadlines, customer complaints, and the links to YouTube videos of kittens. Volunteering onsite at a shelter with our phones off may be that quiet time that we all need and may provide those social connections that we in the IT industry don’t value enough (like sunlight). The last thing we need is a pushy volunteer coordinator looking to impress his/her superiors by showing how well he/she managed virtual volunteers through emails, tweets, posts and updates to get a project done. Unless you’re one of the lucky organizations that gets a virtual volunteer who is out of a job and looking to prove something, most of us are just trying to balance work, family and service.

Why You Want a Virtual Volunteer

As mentioned, with virtual volunteers, you are not limited to those in your community. Also, many of us, particularly in the IT field, have our own equipment that tend to be on the higher end of the spectrum not necessarily for the work that we do, but because that Starcraft 2 game requires some serious computer hardware. We also generally have a massive library of reference materials that we use in our own work that, when we work on site, we tend to wish that the Kindle came out 15 years ago and all of those books were on it. By recruiting virtual volunteers and by not restricting your volunteers to business hours, you’re able to work with professionals in the field who will do the same work for you that they do for some of the world’s best companies.

Why You Don’t Want a Virtual Volunteer

When you bring in a volunteer into the office, you have them for a volunteer shift. If they are there for a four hour shift, they likely will not be distracted by television, needing to do their laundry, or the new Call of Duty game. Seriously, have you seen the new Call of Duty game? They should rename it “Call of Distraction.” In addition, a 2006 article in the Chronicle of Philanthropy has a couple of volunteer managers agreeing that virtual volunteers tend to be higher maintenance (Gardyn, 2006). It may be true, but just a suggestion to everyone looking to hire IT virtual volunteers: don’t call them names like high maintenance or they’ll start to hear the Call of Duty.

Make It So

If you post a Craigslist ad for a virtual volunteer and get a response from a highly qualified IT professional looking to help, don’t take down the ad. One virtual volunteer for an IT project is good, two is great, and three is even better. Most of us are used to working together and writing only parts of a project. The best idea would be to choose one to be the lead, step back a little and watch the magic happen. Let the team develop a timeline and the deliverables. One of the toughest parts of IT projects, both volunteer and paid, is conveying to a client that building a website or software product is not like building a Word document unless you imagine that each word in the document has a whole lot of other words hidden behind it.

It is important to keep the project moving forward with continual prodding, but at the same time, you can choose to either work with virtual volunteers with years of experience in the field who might be a little busy with their paying work or with that college student who once tweeted that their professor is soooo boring and therefore assumes they can do any kind of web development. In other words, a little bit of patience and a generous timeline on a project will likely result in a better product. If you have a tight timeline and things are falling behind, and your inclination is to get angry and write an email to your virtual volunteers WITH ONLY CAPITAL LETTERS, take a look at your organization’s checkbook to remind yourself how much you are paying for a service that is normally really expensive. If you don’t believe me, get a few quotes from around town. Be warned that when you receive the quotes, you’ll likely want to send a virtual hug to all of your virtual IT volunteers.

Works Cited

Gardyn, R. (2006) Volunteering Goes Virtual. Chronicle of Philanthropy.

Mukherjee, D. (2010) An Exploratory Study of Older Adults’ Engagement with Virtual Volunteerism. Journal of Technology in Human Services.

Image: David Castillo Dominici / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

In an effort to create the best online volunteer management system available, we keep track of all user suggestions whether they be large or small. While we are not able to implement all of them, we do our very best to implement as many as we can. We are very happy to announce the two new features described below involving email updates that were perhaps our most frequent requests. Please keep those suggestions coming and we thank you for choosing our ever-evolving YourVolunteers system.

Sincerely,
John Wagoner
President

New Feature: Administrators Can Now Opt-in to Receive Daily Summary Emails

These emails will let you as the administrator know about the activity on your organization’s account that day. While we still recommend that administrators log in each day to view the activity for their organization, we hope that these emails will prove to be helpful. The new feature is available on both the Free and Deluxe accounts.

New Feature: Volunteers Can Now Opt-in to Receive The Week Ahead Emails

Volunteers using both the Ongoing Needs and Special Events versions can now choose to receive The Week Ahead emails that will allow them to see their upcoming shifts. Please note that while we have placed a notice on the dashboard page of the volunteer interface, volunteers do not receive this newsletter so they will need to be made aware of the new feature if they do not routinely login to the site. Because of differing laws in the countries where we have organizations using our service, we are unable to allow administrators to choose this option for the volunteer; therefore volunteers must come to the site and opt-in themselves. Like the Administrator emails, The Week Ahead Emails are also available in both the Free and Deluxe versions of the YourVolunteers system.

New Feature: Assignments Can Now Be Cloned along with Shifts (Ongoing Needs Version)

We are grateful to our user who provided us with this suggestion. When you clone shifts across multiple days, you now have the option to also clone the assignments as well.

Fixed: Compatibility with Internet Explorer 8

As many of us who develop for the web know, Internet Explorer 8 works differently than other browsers. We were made aware of an issue on some of the pages of the administrative interface where information was not properly loading and we moved quickly to completely redesign both the administrative and volunteer interfaces to remedy the incompatibility. When we test for Internet Explorer, we use version 9 and use a built-in feature that allows it to pretend to be previous versions, but unfortunately the issue did not appear until we tested the site using the actual previous version. We apologize for the problems if you came across them and we are grateful to our user who pointed out the issue.

New Resource: Advanced Development Executives

Advanced Development Executives is well experienced in donor relations, fundraising, marketing, training, and hosts exceptional workshops relevant to nonprofit organizations. On November 15, the company will be hosting, “Solicitation Strategies: Making the Ask in a Challenging Economy” in Henderson, Nevada and also provides customized training to individuals or groups. More information about Advanced Development Executives is available on their website. Besides these direct services that they provide to nonprofit organizations, they also publish Nevada Nonprofit News.