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