Exploring Volunteering

The sudden belated media interest in the setting up of the Vetting and Barring Scheme (VBS) has been curious. Not least because it has demonstrated once again, the rather simplistic and sketchy outlining of good practice in safeguarding by the media. However, what’s been really interesting from a volunteer management perspective is how the current debate suddenly seems to hinge on the definition of volunteering. Many of the criticisms of the VBS have underlined the weakness in the legal definition of what exactly a volunteer is.

Volunteering as an issue seems to have arisen as a result of a press conference where Home Office officials presented the Vetting and Barring Scheme. One of them used the example of parents giving lifts to children to sports clubs, as a way of demonstrating what activity does and doesn’t fall within the remit of the scheme. Since then we haven’t heard the end of parent drivers.

The Times’ Rosemary Bennett reported after the press conference:

“Home Office officials said that informal arrangements between parents to offer lifts or host sleepovers would not be covered”.

Bennett’s piece continues:

“A Home Office spokesman said: “Anyone working or volunteering on behalf of a third-party organisation – for example, a sports club or a charity – who has frequent or intensive access to children or vulnerable adults will have to be registered with the scheme.”"

This distinction between ‘informal arrangements’ and ‘volunteering on behalf of a third-party organisation’ holds, in as far as it goes. But it is limited, and the media picked up on it quick as a flash. The BBC’s Mark Easton said:

“The register will not apply to “family or personal” arrangements, we are told, but there is bound to be some debate as to when the informal kickabout in the park becomes a regulated voluntary activity.”

When does a committed parent offering lifts start to do so in a formal capacity? Is there a clear line in the sand or is it all just a little bit fuzzy?

Legally defining volunteering is problematic. It’s nothing new. Volunteering comes under many different pieces of legislation which not always very consistent and clear. Volunteer managers have intensively and frequently campaigned for a more consistent approach on the part of government.

In this latest case, failing to grasp the nettle on this has meant that critics of the Vetting and Barring Scheme can argue that there is a critical lack of clarity over who will and who won’t be liable to pay a fine of £5,000 for not complying with the VBS. In this case, the legal definition of volunteering that’s relevant is the one in the 1997 Police Act (Criminal Records) Regulations 2002. Let’s take a closer look for a moment:

“Volunteer means a person engaged in an activity which involves spending time, unpaid (except for travel and other approved out-of-pocket expenses), doing something which aims to benefit some third party other than or in addition to a close relative”

The rather vague “benefit some third party” could mean friends or neighbours. So often volunteering takes place in volunteer led groups that might not be formally constituted or legally registered as in the case of charities. Red Foundation’s recent report on Volunteer led activity cites research that of 865,000 civil society groups in England, the vast majority are small with very little income. This kind of volunteering activity and it’s impact on society remains poorly understood generally, but particularly by government and the media.

Volunteering is where our personal and public lives collide. It’s where informal and formal activities merge. The legal definition is broad in the Police Act 1997, because the concept of what volunteering is has to be flexible. Volunteering is where our personal freedom and desire to create social impact combine. Philosophically, it’s not actually clear that volunteering can ever be distilled into legal texts.

It’s seems intuitively reasonable to suppose that helping others happens inspite of the law, rather than because of it. Helping people usually boils down to simple, natural acts motivated by a very human desire to support and connect with those around you. It’s what makes volunteering difficult to express in legal terms, but it also what makes volunteering interesting and relevant to all our lives.

Somehow in this latest opportunity to disparage an unpopular government, the mainstream media in this country have focused on one of the most crucial questions to volunteer managers today: what is volunteering? In so doing, they have raised the profile of volunteer management issues.

It’s a shame then, that few in the media seem to have any idea that basic volunteer management has anything to say about the latest questions they’ve posed about the VBS.

When Clay Shirky, social media guru, talked about power law distribution, he demonstrated how equal access to participate in an activity almost always resulted in an unequal range of partipation. Some participants were active, while others (usually the vast majority) were a lot less active.

“Anything that increases our ability to share, coordinate or act increases our freedom to pursue our goals in congress with one another. Never have so many people been so free to say and do so many things with so many other people. The freedom driving mass participation removes the technological obstacles to participation. Given that everyone now has the tools to contribute equally, you might expect a huge increase in equality of participation. You’d be wrong.” (p.122-123)

After this quote taken from his book ‘Here Comes Everybody‘, Shirky used examples from popular social media websites such as Flickr and Wikipedia. He observed that frequently, you see approximately 20% of the participants delivering 80% of the total value produced, whether that’s a Wikipedia entry and a set of photos of Flickr tagged with the same word.

Taken from Clay Shirky’s article, Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality

Figure #1: 433 weblogs arranged in rank order by number of inbound links.
The data is drawn from N.Z Bear’s 2002 work on the blogosphere ecosystem.
The current version of this project can now be found at http://www.myelin.co.nz/ecosystem

Chris Anderson referred to this in his oft-quoted book called ‘The Long Tail‘. He pointed out that the web without the physical constraints of the real world could extract much more value from the 20% of participants. Amongst many others, he used the example of Amazon that was able to make money selling a huge volume of titles that individually sold few copies, but in aggregate added up to a considerable income. Traditional bookshops limited by how many titles they could stock, by necessity had to focus on the most popular titles and neglect the less popular. Amazon with its network of virtual stock had none of these constraints.

Two groups of volunteers

I’m really interested in how we can apply this thinking to volunteering with an online dimension. When I checked my own stats on the level of participation of online volunteer peer advisors in a programme I used to manage, I found an interesting result. Online peer advisors answer questions submitted online via askTheSite – a question and answer service for 16-25 year olds.

Sure enough when I plotted how many answers each volunteer had written to users over the course of a year the long tail effect was clear to see. In fact, the long tail underlined the two distinct groups of peer advisors. There was a group that was incredibly active, and roughly 20% of the peer advisors almost accounted for 80% of the answers over the given year. There was another group though of many more volunteers who had been relatively less active.

The point that is interesting for volunteer managers to contemplate is how to support and engage with these two very different groups. One group that is more engaged in many ways requires a different kind of support. For example, frequently they’re looking for progress further in the role, more advanced training and ways to more intensively network with their peers. However, those who are less engaged often required a very different approach to support. For example, they wanted flexibility in how they could commit, along with a low barrier to being able to contribute meaningfully to the project.

Holy grail of volunteerism

On reflection, it hit me how the new opportunities presented by social media are stretching volunteer managers in two different directions. We’re being stretched by the increasing variation in the way volunteers can now participate, particularly online, in our projects. Stretched between the smaller group of more intense participants and the larger group of more flexible participants. In the past, a favourite question of volunteer managers was: how many volunteers can a volunteer manager manage? It’s almost the holy grail of volunteerism. Finding the balance between the needs of the project and the needs of volunteers has been a volunteer manager’s primary tightrope walk.

It’s all wrapped up in the broader challenge any volunteer manager has of finding the sweet spot between the stakeholders: service user, volunteer and host organisation. In simple terms, it’s about ensuring that there is enough volunteer capacity to deliver what the project requires, while at the same timemeeting the support needs of the volunteers involved.

Are we taking sufficient advantage of this long tail in volunteering? I think we’ve only just scratched the surface.

Volunteering and participation

If all volunteering activity could be plotted on a graph, I wouldn’t be surprised if it demonstrated the contribution of a kind of volunteering that is often labelled as being participation rather than full blown volunteering, e.g. taking part in a survey, consultation, commenting on a website, posting on a blog, etc. Despite the adhoc nature and short duration of many participation activities, in aggregate it’s likely that they make a surprisingly significant contribution to the work of charities and not for profit organisations.

Are volunteer managers creating enough of these kind of these online roles that can scale, so that the larger more flexible group can meet their potential?

Do volunteer managers understand how those participating and engaging in their work can be converted in more active volunteers?