Exploring Volunteering

The frontier between what is and isn’t volunteering covered by the term ‘informal volunteering’ belies a deeper question about the structure of social relationships. This is certainly not a new issue. But the development of the online web as a means of communication, now brings this problem into sharper focus. It may even be offering new insights into how social networks impact on how we give.

The other day I came across Kevin Harris’s blog on neighbourhoods. I read a post he made about the ‘micro-formalisation of neighbourhood relations‘:

Here’s a neighbour at the door, come in my dear, asking me to fill in name and telephone number as someone to contact in case of need. The form is for local Age Concern drop-in sessions, which sound brilliant – all the sensitive flexibility we expect from local AC activities, and she’s raring to go.

Presumably someone will now take my contact details and key them into a database, digitally fixing that relationship of ‘neighbour-who-can-be-contacted-in-case-of-need’ into a format that can be referred to, passed-on, printed out. I don’t have a problem with that. But I wonder if we can expect more of this sort of micro-formalising of essentially informal relations, as the need is recognised to establish a stable platform for informal local support?

This trend that Kevin Harris calls micro-formalisation, seems to me to have implications for how we understand the kind of volunteering we often label as ‘informal’. Informal volunteering is defined in the Citizenship Survey in the UK as: “Giving unpaid help as an individual to people who are not relatives”.

It’s problematic to distinguish between informal volunteering and neighbourliness, as pointed out by NFPSynergy amongst others. It’s also difficult to draw the line between informal and formal volunteering, as it can over-simplify what defines a ‘formal’ group, club or organisation- witness the UK Government’s problems in drawing the line (PDF) as to who should be registered with the new Independent Safeguarding Authority (see R.Singleton’s report, P.11).

The growth of the social web is really forcing us to rethink how we conceive of formalised social relations (that also receive the lion’s share of research and attention). ‘Micro-formalisation’ is a good way of describing what is happening at the moment as we seek to apply the power of the web to the level of neighbours. The inevitable result is that more and more of our social relationships with those around us, become mediated (formalised and structured) by the web. One of the latest examples is NeighborGoods that started in California late 2009.

Right, hold that thought.

A guy called Jaron Lanier was in the UK recently. He’s someone who’s closely associated with the notion of ‘virtual reality’ (he basically coined the term) and he’s been involved in thinking about open culture associated with the web since it’s earliest days. He’s been on a epic journey. Compare, for example, his way of talking about technology on Charlie Rose in 1993, and then at the RSA in Feb 2010.

In his book just out, ‘You Are Not a Gadget’, he argues that the current social web (web 2.0) undervalues academic and artistic achievement and that free content is a setback. Moreover, his contention is that at it’s heart, ideas like web 2.0 and singularity are wrong because they equate humans with machines. Lanier’s point is that we must keep humans at the centre of our thinking and not worship technology as we might a mythical being.

If the only way of supporting culture is through third party advertising, Lanier, a talented musician, is concerned that this accommodation of advertising degrades the worth of the culture and intellectual produce that we seek to share. He also worries that if giving is collectivised, as it is on Wikipedia for example, that this lowers the cultural and intellectual value of what each individual can share of themselves.

These ideas of micro-formalisation and the humanist critique of the social web, provide the background to two emergent world views of the web and how it may be influencing the way we give.

Two world views of a web for giving

One of these views is revolutionary, the other revelatory. They’re not mutually exclusive, but on different ends of one long continuum.

Vision One: The Revolution

This world view believes in the power of technology to fundamentally change social relations. Just as we are witnessing something radically new and unprecedented in the technology of the web, so the social web represents a fundamental change in the way we relate together socially. Our technology is a means to an end: the meaning of technology is in its practical application.

This idea is as ubiquitous as the web itself. For example, take how the BBC, with user input, could uncontroversially name its series on the web: ‘The Virtual Revolution: How 20 Years of The Web Has Reshaped Our Lives’.

It’s close to the Google way of seeing the web, i.e. that information, whether offline or otherwise off the web, is there to be organised and made available on the web. It is simply a technological challenge, as opening access to information always trumps closed access or no access.  In Google’s corporate philosophy it states:

There’s always more information out there…

Our researchers continue looking into ways to bring all the world’s information to people seeking answers

Indexing the world through the web is like structuring the world in the image of the web. It’s structure in the name of openness and efficiency. Part of this process is to chop big things into smaller things to make the reconfiguration process quicker and more efficient. For example, crowdsourcing, is a process that breaks tasks down into their component bits and then shares them so that the power of the ‘network effect‘ can be brought to bear on the challenge in hand.

This world view of the web argues that this effectively amounts to something so new that it is revolutionary, ushering in a new order of social relationships, including how we give to each other.

But what are the problems with this view? Well, it tends to be a technocentric way of approaching problems that are essentially social. In John Brockman’s book back in 1996, ‘Digerati: Encounters with the Cyber Elite‘, Lanier questions the merits of such an approach to information:

Do we think of computers as things that exist in their own right, or do we think of them as conduits between us? We should treat computers as fancy telephones, whose purpose is to connect people. Information is alienated experience. Information is not something that exists. Indeed, computers don’t really exist, exactly; they’re only subject to human interpretation. This is a strong primary humanism I am promoting. As long as we remember that we ourselves are the source of our value, our creativity, our sense of reality, then all of our work with computers will be worthwhile and beautiful.

An example of this putting the needs of technology before the source of the value of technology is the debate about the role of public and private spheres of life in a webbed world.  When technology dissolves obstacles to opening up access to information from institutions and individuals, social obstacles to openness, such as secrecy and privacy, come under pressure. Depending on your point of view, this may well be a price worth paying. But as AC Grayling argues, “We have surrendered our right to privacy to technology”:

Privacy is indeed a right. It is more: it is an essential. Private life, a margin of inviolability for our thoughts, feelings, intimacies, reflections, anxieties, our hopes and nascent plans, and our recoveries from the abrasions of life, are fundamentals of personal and psychological health.

In fact, it’s not so much privacy that’s at stake, it’s the right to live life in unstructured, informal, unmediated settings. More specifically for this post, the argument for privacy also effectively questions the assumption that structured giving, means more giving.

Vision Two: The Revelation

The alternative world view sees a brave new world through revelation, rather than revolution. The web is revealing structures of social relationships that previously existed, albeit at a deeper level. With the existence of the web, these structures or networks are more readily visible and more easily empirically knowable. Our technology is an end in itself: technological development is an expression of what it means to be human.

As Kevin Kelly writes in his upcoming book The Technium that we need to broaden the way we think about technology, past just gadgets and hardware, to anything useful that a mind makes: like the law, writing and many other things developed by human civilisations.

The greatest technology that humans have ever invented is humanity itself. We domesticated ourselves. We turned ourselves into part of the technium. We cannot live as a species, we cannot live with out technology.

Take our example from the beginning of this post about understanding how the development of social networks from social media is formalising previously informal neighbourly activities.

By tracking and recording activity increasingly publicly and openly, the web is making these activities more visible and providing empirical evidence. As Kevin Harris puts it: “digitally fixing relationships”. This is increasingly prevalent as barriers to entry to the web decrease, and use of the social web becomes more and more common. Through online social networks, we’re increasingly aware of our friends’ networks, and our friends’ friends’ networks and so on.

This revelation is like an awakening consciousness. As Daniel Dennett put it back in 1999:

The planet has finally grown its own nervous system: us.

Dennett was looking at the issue of climate change and how the development of science was changing the way we understood ourselves and our relationship to our surroundings and each other.

James Fowler and Nicholas Christakis in their new book ‘Connected‘ look at the way our social networks influence our lives, from health, emotional wellbeing through to how altruistic we are. They argue that “connection and contagion are so fundamentally rooted in our evolutionary psychology that they carry over even to very modern aspects of human life – including email, blogs, and social networking sites”.

Fowler and Christakis’s data that has been built up over many years seems to suggest that ‘real world’ social networks effect us in different ways:

• Induction – the domino effect what one person does influences what someone else does who is close to them
• Homophily – we get close to people who do similar things to us, preferentially forming ties with others based on habits
• Confounding – both people connected share an exposure to some other factor that causes both things to happen at the same time

Using different statistical techniques they’ve unpicked the impact of each. In the study below looking at happiness in face-to-face networks blue indicates the least happy and yellow indicates the happiest people (green are in between):

This diagram (below) shows an ingenious experiment using data from Facebook that measured happiness by looking at whether individuals were smiling in their profile picture. Both diagrams suggest that there is clustering between those who are happy (smilers) and those who are sad.

Fowler and Christakis’s work identified three different kinds of friendships which helped identify which relationships had most influence. Mutual friendship (both regard each other as a friend), ego friendship (you regard them as a friend, but they don’t see you as a friend), and alter friendships (they regard you as a friend, but you don’t see them as a friend).

They’ve demonstrated that mutual friendships affect you most, next ego friendships affect you a bit and then alter friendships don’t affect you at all. Incidentally, this fits the model used by Twitter of mutual followers, followers and following.

What is really surprising is how people at three degrees of separation can still affect your health, emotional wellbeing or taste in films. That’s to say, as a rule of thumb (there are exceptions), your happiness is related to your friend’s, friend’s, friends. Online social networks are simply revealing a social network effect that has always been present, even though it’s been harder to detect in the past. Nicholas Christakis explains it in the following way:

“We form social networks because the benefits of a connected life outweigh the costs. If I was always violent towards you, or gave you bad germs, or made you sad, or gave you misinformation, you would cut the ties with me and the network would disintegrate. So the flow of good and desirable things is required to sustain and nurture the network. And in turn, the network is required for the flow of good and desirable things like happiness, or altruism, or love, or ideas. In fact, I think there is a phenomenally deep connection between networks and goodness. The reason we create networks is to create and sustain all kinds of good and desirable properties.”

Christakis even suggests that social networks are like a super organism. They have a certain coherence, identity, they can reproduce and survive, they are fairly resistant to injury, they have their own memory and sense of purpose. It’s interesting to ponder the parallel’s with Dennett’s idea of humans as the planet’s nervous system and Kelly’s idea of humans inventing humanity.

Social networks influence giving

Fowler and Christakis’s most recent piece of research (PDF) has looked at how networks affect giving: ‘Cooperative behavior cascades in human social networks’. They analysed results of experiments based on the Public goods game. It’s a game where if everybody gives their tokens to the collective good of the group, they’re each rewarded and make a profit. However, if fellow gamers don’t give, and you do give to the group, you can end up making a loss.

Fowler and Christakis’s work demonstrates that each individual’s tendency to give is affected by what the people in their own personal social network do- even those separated by up to three degrees of separation.

[These] results show experimentally that such cascades (connection between people at degrees of separation) can occur in a controlled environment where people are making decisions about giving to others. Other researchers have shown that giving behavior can spread from person to person in natural settings, whether in workplace donations (PDF) to charity or the decision to donate organs.

This growing awareness of how we are influenced by social networks is an example of how technology is revelatory, rather than revolutionary. It is revealing how technology is making us more conscious of our social relations and how we are influenced by them. This increasing formalisation of our social relations by the web, such as giving activities like volunteering, is not so much a brave new world, as it is a new opportunity to raise our consciousness of who we are and how we give.

Further reading

“Nicholas Christakis turns the notion of the self-directed individual on its head, and shows us the extraordinary power of social networks”. – at RSA in London, Feb 25th 2010.

“Digital guru Jaron Lanier delivers a call to arms against digital collectivism and proposes more productive ways technology might interact with our culture”. – at the RSA, London – 1st Feb, 2010

TEDxAmsterdam: Kevin Kelly from TEDxAmsterdam on Vimeo.

“What does technology mean in our lives? That’s the question Kevin Kelly explored in his new talk. Kelly presented a new definition of technology: ˜anything useful invented by a mind’ – whether it be a hammer or the rule of law. So technology is more than gadgets; it’s part of a great story that started long ago, an extension of life and it is moving through us.”

Another way of looking at the discussion about whether volunteering is a means to an end or an end in itself, is to look at whether:

• volunteering has an intrinsic value, and so knowing whether a given activity is or isn’t volunteering is important;
• or, whether volunteering activities don’t have intrinsic value, and can only prove their worth in terms of their impact

Intrinsic value?

Is volunteering fundamentally good, i.e. its goodness is how we define whether it is volunteering or not? If it’s not fundamentally good, it’s not volunteering. Or can we only really talk about volunteering being good in terms of what it specifically aims to bring about or achieves?

Just as with giving, we can give in an effort to achieve a particular end, but we can also give for the sake of giving. There is an intrinsic value to giving.

Esoteric? Volunteering is a giving activity and as a result everyone fighting to promote and support volunteering wrestles with this question of how we value it.

Take my favourite counterpoint to volunteering: fundraising. Similar in the sense that it is also based on giving activities and different in the sense that its focus is on financial capital, not social capital.

Fundraising,  is overwhelmingly seen as a means to an end. Although, I guess one exception might be almsgiving, where making donations comes close to being a good in itself. Fundraising as a ‘means to an end’, has no need to prove its intrinsic worth. It’s worth such as it is, is seen in terms of what it achieves and intends to achieve for the mission or cause it’s employed to support.

Volunteering’s merit is also dependent on the merit of the mission it supports, but beyond this, we seek to justify the value of volunteering in and of itself. At a minimum, it’s possible to imagine volunteering’s merit, regardless of what we think of the mission or cause the volunteering is supporting.

Lesser spotted mountain meerkats

A fictional example might be volunteering to save the lesser spotted mountain meerkat from extinction. Whether or not we believe in the merit of the cause or the actual impact on the fate of the mountain meerkat, volunteering in the name of mountain meerkat protection has value simply because it is volunteering.

Volunteering has value independent of its purported aim. Volunteering regardless of its aim has value in how it boosts a volunteer’s self-esteem, develops personal skills and builds social capital, amongst many other myriad well-documented benefits.

This is obviously not to argue that the value of volunteering is not increased even more when it can be demonstrated that it has an impact beyond those directly involved in the volunteering activity itself. But it is to argue that volunteering has value independent of its impact on its stated cause, unlike fundraising. Raising £50 for the mountain meerkat, which in fact does zilch in the way of protecting mountain meerkats has no value at all. Volunteering for the mountain meerkat, e.g. campaigning, educating or informing the general public, which in fact turns out to have zilch impact in protecting mountain meerkats still has a value as it taps into deeper social values that make us who we are, such as empowerment, education and community.

It should be noted that in this example we’re talking about simply raising the money, not how it is raised. Much fundraising is done through volunteering, so it’s important to distinguish between the value of volunteering to fundraise (and other activities that are typically associated with fundraising) which taps into the deeper social values mentioned above, and the value of raising money per se (a means to an end).

This brings us to the point about the form the volunteering takes. The value of volunteering in itself, does depend heavily on the nature of the activity. Different types of volunteering can certainly have varying levels of benefits to the volunteers and others connected with the volunteering, stopping short of the impact on the ultimate beneficiaries (in this case the mountain meerkats).

This is why the question of how you define volunteering is so hotly debated. The controversy is in the confusion between volunteering’s implicit value, independent of its explicit aim (e.g. to protect mountain meerkats). This confusion can lead to exploitation and manipulation of volunteers and beneficiaries. Why else would we care about whether something is volunteering or not? This is not a debate about semantics in other words.

An activity may help the mountain meerkats but may be detrimental to the volunteers themselves.  For instance, those volunteering may be obligated to carry out an activity, it may be detrimental to their self esteem, it may be dividing local communities, it may be negatively affecting the volunteers personal development, and so on. When volunteering causes harm to those involved in the volunteering, it’s may be because of poor management, or it may be because what is described as volunteering, isn’t volunteering at all.

In this way, the debate about the value of giving activities can often appear to be a debate about the definition of volunteering. My point is that this debate continues to be as controversial as it is, because we’re all trying to work out how forms of volunteering are related to the underpinning values. It’s much more than simply trying to come up with a technical definition that covers all the bases.

Hold that thought for a moment.

Definitions

The issue of how we define volunteering is one of the hottest topics in volunteer management. Many are exhausted by the perennial question that never seems to go away: what is a volunteer? What is volunteering?

What other professions are faced with the same issue as volunteer managers whose very basis for existing is called into question every ten minutes?

Do fundraisers continually question the root definition of fundraising? It’s methods may be, but not its raison d’etre.

Do medical professionals spend as much energy questioning the definition of being a doctor? No. So, what’s going on with volunteer management?

If you’re not already well-versed in the arguments, Susan Ellis’s compilation of definitions of volunteering on Energize is a good place to get an overview on this debate.

General moral values and technical, practical descriptions

I think part of the issue with the definition debate is because we haven’t settled the broader point about context. There’s no consensus on where to situate volunteering on this route between objective technical descriptions and subjective moral values. We’re not sure whether it’s a generic term or a specialist term.

At it’s most generic, volunteering is built on a complex web of cultural and moral values, in much the same way as the concept of giving is. For example, volunteering can be a way of life, an approach to work or a philosophy.

At it’s most specialist, it’s a pay grade, a technical term with very practical descriptions. For example, you don’t receive money beyond out-of-pocket expenses, you do something of social benefit, etc.

On the whole, professions that succeed in establishing a consensus around a technical and objective definition, can go beyond the more general and subjective moral values underpinning it.

We can all agree on a technical definition of a doctor that goes beyond the broader values it’s built on. It’s the same with fundraising. There’s a technical defintion, that enjoys a consensus beyond the moral and ethical controversies that fundraising can invoke.

However, this is not the case with volunteering. Here there is no technical definition that has superceded the values volunteering is based on. This is because volunteering is as much a technical means to achieve a particular end, as it is about the values that volunteering is built on that make it an end in itself.

Volunteering: value-laden term

Take politics for example. Political parties have fundraisers, but not volunteer managers. Terrorists can fundraise, but if they call their recruits volunteers, we balk at that description because we can not distinguish between the values of what makes a volunteer a volunteer and the technical description of a volunteer. As Andy Fryar puts it in e-Volunteerism back in 2003:

While I have never been a fan of placing volunteering into a ˜box’ and labelling it in any specific way, the thought of suicide bombers being branded as volunteers was a stretch, even for my way of thinking.

In Northern Ireland similar discussion and argument has taken place about how the word volunteer is used. One example of this controversy was when the Commission for Victims and Survivors released a statement in 2008 which spoke of an “IRA volunteer” killed “on active service”. The Newsletter quoted William Frazer of FAIR:

Are they saying that IRA members were volunteers and therefore suggesting that in acting voluntarily they are somehow honourable and even of a higher standard than soldiers or policemen and women who took home a wage to stand in the face of these terrorists?

This quote demonstrates why volunteer is controversial- it is loaded with values- and can’t be used as a technical term. A comment on the website puts the alternative way of interpreting the word volunteer:

The term “volunteer” indicates only that they were in voluntary service. This means they were neither conscripts, enlistees bound to service for a term certain nor paid professionals.

Part of this discussion includes the context in which volunteer is a technical term: the military context. The fact that there are separate technical definitions of the word volunteer makes the issue that bit more complicated. Perhaps values are still brought into the picture because they are useful for helping to separate these different kinds of volunteering. The problem is that values are subjective, making it hard to build a consensus around a more technical definition. At the same time, volunteering is emotive, is inspiring and arouses passions because it’s values are so close to the surface.

Susan Ellis offers a technical distinction between volunteering in and out of a military context (“Not everything that’s voluntary is volunteering, particularly in a free society”).

Going further, there’s evidence that because volunteering involves a value-judgement, people are hesitant to describe what they do as volunteering.  Interesting recent research (PDF) by Christine Reilly, Volunteer Development Scotland, Something that others do: applying personal experience to established definitions of volunteering“, suggests that people are reluctant to describe what they do as volunteering because they see it as ‘something others do’. They are often more likely to describe their own volunteering activity in more personal terms, less value laden terms, e.g. just helping out those around me. Here’s one quote cited by the research:

“I don’t have any experience of volunteering I don’t think. Maybe a group when I was twenty, but I wouldn’t have said it was volunteering, just something that I do”

Volunteering is seen as an incredibly weighty terms laden with different moral and cultural values (beyond the reach of many’s personal everyday experience). In other words, there is no clearly understood technical definition, that goes beyond the values we attach to volunteering and that make it what is.

I’ve noticed that when we seek to understand the benefits of volunteering, we often do so in two ways: either positioning volunteering as a means to an end, or as an end in itself.

I want to just look at these two approaches and try to understand how these approaches contrast and sometimes contradict each other. But also look at how these two approaches complement each other, so that we can make the strongest possible case for volunteering whoever we’re talking to: policy makers, funders, senior managers in our organisations, or even potential volunteers.

It was a post by DJ Cronin on i-volunteer.org.uk that got me thinking on this. His post gives a bit of context, i.e. raising awareness about the personal and social benefits of volunteering and the specific responsibility of those in volunteering development and management to get out of their “cocoon and educate”.

Volunteering as a means to an end

“Volunteer is a pay rate, not a job title” – @ChanceUK

John Ramsey’s recent post on the Association of Volunteer Managers website “The conflict between want and need” made the case that it makes more sense to view volunteering as a means to an end. He uses the specific example of managing volunteers for an organisation like Age Concern:

“Volunteering is part of our ethos. However, we are not ‘about’ volunteering, we are ‘about’ the health and well-being of older people. Volunteering does of course play a crucial role in the health and well-being of older volunteers but we do not exist to provide volunteering opportunities per se.”

So, from the standpoint of an organisation, charity or movement, volunteering’s value is in how involving volunteers enables it to meet its mission.

If you think about it, this is an incredibly rational way of coming at volunteering. Volunteers are essentially a kind of mechanism performing a particular function. As a result, it follows that volunteers should have a specific role (in the same way, an organisation employs paid staff to carry out a role that helps it deliver on its mission, not because it wants to particularly offer employment).

If this is how we explain the role of volunteers, the purpose of volunteering programmes is locked on achieving clear social impacts, the more measurable and demonstrable the better. Volunteering programmes are like carefully designed instruments, enabling the organisation or group to meet their aims and objectives.

This approach offers answers to those who question the value of volunteering, by looking at the overall effectiveness of organisations involving volunteers in meeting their global aims and objectives. For instance, it’s not about numbers of volunteers or even the personal benefits to the volunteers themselves, it’s more likely about numbers (such as key performance indicators in the jargon) like the service users who’ve been served and how successfully, etc.

This approach reminds us about the costs of effectively involving volunteers, and demands that the benefits to service users outweigh the costs to the organisation of involving volunteers. For many volunteers, the social impact of their volunteering is the key driver, beyond any benefits to them personally.

I think it’s helpful to compare this rational view of volunteering, with the conventional way of understanding fundraising. A charity raises funds to help it meet its mission, not because there is some kind of intrinsic value to fundraising above and beyond the money it raises.

The problem with this approach is that when volunteers are viewed as a means to an end, their special value is often underestimated. Volunteers true value to an organisation extends well beyond the services they help deliver. It can also place pressure to value those volunteers that deliver greater amounts, much before volunteers who may deliver much smaller amounts.

A second order problem is that very often funders are not satisfied with outcomes for volunteers in and of their volunteering, they are more interested in how volunteers will meet the needs of the service users and ultimate aims of the funding application.

Volunteering as an end in itself

Volunteers don’t get paid, not because they’re worthless, but because they’re priceless. – Sherry Anderson

In another sense, volunteering comes with some intrinsic benefits and value ‘right out of the box’- just as the above quote alludes to. Volunteering is in many ways an end in itself.

Volunteering inspires something more akin to a belief system in those who practise it. They believe in volunteering’s value a priori, not a posteriori. They don’t need to know the actual benefits and worth of volunteering before they do it. They don’t need all the social impact spelt out or measurable. Sure, social impact may be the intention, but it doesn’t need to be proven before a volunteer will get involved (here I’m really speaking as a volunteer myself).

Although having evidence of impact never hurts, not having it doesn’t necessarily deter volunteers from developing that kind of volunteering programme. The impact is believed, rather than known.

Viewing volunteering as an end in itself is certainly not tantamount to saying that the social impact of volunteering is irrelevant or inconsequential. It’s saying the reverse, it’s saying that a volunteering activity’s value is not dependent on its outcome.

Indeed, often the social impact of volunteering is impossible to understand out of the context of the relationships between those involved. In otherwise, often the single most important social impact a volunteer has are the supportive relationships they build with those they volunteer with (staff, service users and other volunteers). In this sense, volunteering can be an end in itself.

It’s worth considering the approach of Community Service Volunteers here:

Volunteering with CSV is a two way street. We aim to make sure our volunteers get as much out of the experience as the people and communities they help.

Arguably, CSV’s policy of rejecting no-one who applies to volunteer, stems from this belief in the intrinsic value of volunteering.

It’s ironic that while this approach of believing in the intrinsic value of volunteering may appear less rational, it’s in fact much more pragmatic. It also seems to be a more convincing explanation of what motivates volunteers, than simply because volunteer think of themselves as a means to end for the organisation.

Although we have ways of explaining how volunteering affects change, the indisputable proof can be illusive. Impact may take many years to manifest itself or transpire in all kinds of ways that are not immediately obvious, definitive or tangible. Volunteers are often far more motivated by a belief in the people they engage with, the merit of the particular cause or even a belief that the volunteering itself offers the volunteer themselves valuable experience.

As a result, the motivations for volunteering often hinge on a belief in the value of the volunteering itself. In many cases, in the absence of any clear evidence one way or the other, it comes down to the belief of the volunteer in the volunteering they’re taking part in.

The problem with this approach is that it becomes a more subjective experience which is then harder to communicate to a mass audience and general public. How do you educate people in the power of volunteering, if the best way to really understand it is to do it for yourself?

Often the strongest volunteering experiences, are highly personal. This approach also can also create challenges though in balancing the needs of volunteers with the needs of service users. It can, in a sense, create services where both service users and service providers (the volunteers) are beneficiaries. For example, this can sometimes make it harder for organisations to mobilize around their aims, whilst bringing their volunteers with them.

Joining the debate

It’s common in arguing publicly for the value of volunteering for us to present volunteering as both a means to end, as well as an end in itself. Justin Davis Smith argues this dual role in the recently published manifesto of Volunteering England. Volunteering is a means to offering services, but it’s also an end in itself offering benefits to the volunteers themselves:

Volunteering helps deliver essential public services, build social capital and develop trust between individuals and communities. It encourages integration and drives community cohesion. It’s informal and formal, cooperative and co-productive. It’s good for the individual too, improving health and well-being and providing opportunities to acquire skills and knowledge that can enhance career development or employment prospects.

I raise this debate because I think it heavily influences the way we explain volunteering to a broader public. It’s affects the way we seek to persuade the volunteering doubters and skeptics. For example, if we see volunteering as a means to an end – we tend to seek to persuade through evidence of impact. If we believe in volunteering as an end in itself, we focus on the intrinsic value of volunteering and how it fits in the concept of civil society.

Of course, in reality we take arguments from both sides when seeking to explain the value of volunteering. But I think it is interesting to consider these two approaches and routes to valuing volunteering.

Actually, it’s the fact that volunteering is as much an end in itself as it is a means to an end that makes it, and giving activities like it, special.

Further reading

Supported volunteering is a really interesting example of why it’s critical to have a balanced approach to volunteering- in the sense of seeing it as ‘a means to an end’ and ‘an end in itself’.

For example, to carry out supported volunteering requires us to think really carefully about the resources needed and the design of the programme/project to ensure the volunteering delivers a meaningful social impact in line with the organisation’s mission for its service users.

Added to this, supported volunteering also challenges us to defend volunteering as an end in itself against those who may say that supported volunteering projects are not efficient enough or are too complex to deliver their mission or achieve their aims.

For loads more interesting discussion on supported volunteering check out the presentation below:

Policy terms

Another interesting area where this discussion of means and ends of volunteering comes in is in the public policy discussion of volunteering. This is a massive subject- too big for this post – but here’s a quick example:

Government has been criticised for focussing too much on using volunteering numbers as a way of measuring the success of volunteering programmes. This approach tends to ignore the actual impact those volunteers have- in other words how successfully volunteers have been usefully integrated and are a means to an end, not merely signed up and processed. Many are frustrated with policy makers who seem to ignore the massive range of impacts and achievements of volunteering programmes, just because they defy simple quantitative analysis.

However, Government also gets caught up in approaching volunteering in a very mechanistic fashion as a tool for delivering a particular policy goal, e.g. reprimanding the youth in London who have to ‘volunteer’ to earn back their Oyster, immigrants taking up volunteering to earn their citizenship, or school pupils volunteering as part of their educational experience. This clumsy approach attempts to make volunteering the means to achieve an oversimplified end.

It seems to warp the possibility (the freedom) of volunteering being a good in its own terms- an end in itself- regardless of its success in achieving any one specific policy outcome. Is the real value of volunteering that it can enable young people to earn back free transport, immigrants earn British citizenship or pupils to meet the goals of the national curriculum? Surely volunteering’s value goes way beyond that narrow and unbalanced approach.

Different starting points

It is worth also pointing out that the two ways of looking at volunteering very often have two different starting points. ‘Means to an end’ thinking is usually quite ‘organisation centric’.

While ‘end in itself’ thinking is often quite ‘volunteer centric’ in its approach.

Prologue: I’m really interested in the lessons for voluntary organisations from the experience of the media industry facing the social media revolution square on. How can we build a positive agenda of organisational change that adapts best to this new networked reality?

I think that many in the voluntary sector (the formal part to some extent, but especially the informal part) have internalised much of how gift economies work in practice, because that’s where the sector’s roots lie. Jeff Jarvis’s What Would Google Do? and Chris Anderson’s Free are interesting because they mark a shift in the thinking in the private sector. The gift economy is going mainstream. A book like Andrew Keen’s ‘The Cult of the Amateur‘ demonstrate that the reaction against the growing significance of giving activities in the mainstream economy. Keen’s argument is not economic, it’s cultural. Volunteers and amateurs represent a threat to our culture.

Increasingly, as new market opportunities that social media opens up become better understood, they’re effectively coming to know what many in the voluntary sector have always understood. That is, that relationships based on giving have a value socially, spiritually, politically, culturally and economically.

Case study

The newspaper industry is one example of how social media has brought a professional sector closer to the gift economy and, as a consequence, is now encountering many issues that are all too familiar to those in volunteerism.

While newspapers were only printed, publication and distribution were costly. As a result, the means of production were in the hands of the few who could pay what it cost to run a mass circulation newspaper. With the advent of the internet, newspapers went online and many dipped their toe in the gift economy giving their content away on the web in the hope of somehow monetizing the increased reach. Others stuck resolutely with the exchange economy, following an online subscription model: money in exchange for access to content.

Now though, the gift economy is better understood by newspaper publishers. Social media means readers can comment directly on an article, rather than write a letter to the editor. They can share an article with friends, sending a link to their contacts via social networks. Readers can now even help contribute to the content of the online newspaper itself, sending in photos, editing collaborative articles or acting as an eyewitness from the scene itself as social media facilitates communicating in real time.

Social media operates so effectively because we like to give. We like to give our opinion. We want our ideas to gain currency and our thoughts to be validated. We like to give others the benefit of our network, passing information on. Above all, we like to give, to be useful and helpful to others. There are lots of reasons we give as we each have our own personal reasons for giving.

Co-Production and making money a metaphor for giving

The significance of social media for volunteerism is that it is providing the means to build on ideas that pre-date the technology itself. One such idea is that of co-production. It’s a term originally coined by Professor Elinor Ostrom, by later developed by Edgar Cahn. As with the idea of prosumers, it looks to produce results by bringing together service providers and service users.

Time Banks founded by Edgar Cahn are an interesting example of developing a system that promotes the exchange of giving. It’s a curious hybrid of the exchange and gift economies. Cahn used the metaphor of exchange, to explain the power of giving in familiar terms. In so doing, he was positioning volunteering at the core of society and off the fringes.

In a Time Bank community whatever you give is measured in time. ‘Time dollars’ are banked at a local Time Bank and can then be exchanged for something another member of the local Time Bank is prepared to give. Cahn developed Time Banks around the importance of the ‘core economy‘: home, family, neighbourhood and community. It’s important to recognise that a large part of the gift economy is often overlooked. When faced with supporting family and friends, it’s natural to give, rather than seek to exchange.

The interface between formal and informal volunteering

Interestingly this means that few would consider giving time to family as volunteering. In the UK, the government’s Citizenship Survey deliberately avoids tracking giving activity between relatives. NFPSynergy in March 2009 have argued persuasively (PDF) that the Home Office’s definitions on volunteering which are fairly loose, tend to over-estimate the levels of volunteering. It’s worth considering that a large part of the work done in the gift economy is therefore taken for granted such as: raising families, making communities safe and vibrant, caring for the disadvantaged, fighting injustice, making democracy work, etc.

Ultimately, one of biggest opportunities that social media offers volunteer managers is in thinking through new ways to involve volunteers more in how their volunteering experience is managed. Many volunteering programmes already have co-production baked into them: typically mentoring, befriending or programmes training volunteers from amongst their service users are all examples.

Can the giving activities that make up volunteering move online?

It’s worth quickly getting some historical context. When ‘surfing the net’ was a minority pursuit, many saw the online world as separate from the offline world. In 1999, the Netherlands became the first country where the majority of its citizens were online. Now, a decade on, it’s increasingly common for people to experience a merging of the activities they do online and offline.

This merging of experience has meant that the way we use the web has matured. We no longer use it for the novelty value or for the sake of it, we use it because it adds something to our lives. It augments, rather than shadows, real world giving activities. In the late 1990s when newspapers first went online, they were often an attempt to transfer the printed newspaper experience to the computer screen. It was a failure. They were a pale shadow of the printed newspaper in most cases.

To be used, newspapers on the web had to give us something we didn’t get from newspapers in print. Making newspapers social media friendly has been a big element in how newspapers online have evolved to give readers an experience that augmented their real world experience. The jury’s out on where we’ll be getting our news from in the next 50 years.

Moving to the web is a paradigm shift towards embracing the social web and ways of the gift economy. As Don Tapscott, author of Wikinomics notes:

«Why didn’t NBC invent YouTube? Why didn’t AT&T launch Twitter? Yellow Pages should have built Facebook and Microsoft should have come up with Google. And Craigslist would have been a perfect venture for the New York Times.»

In each case, the new kid on the block took advantage of social media and moved to a giving model. But why has volunteerism found it so hard to harness social media when as a giving activity it’s already halfway there?

Hard as is for newspapers to move online, it’s a relatively simple proposition. News is after all based on the exchange of information and the web is a communication and information platform. Volunteering is, though, a very different proposition and in a way it’s no surprise moving online has been difficult. When you look at volunteering websites, many have simply transferred the volunteer brokerage service online, narrowing in on recruitment and volunteering opportunity search (e.g. Do-it, Volunteer Match, etc), the part of the volunteering experience that requires an exchange of information.

Information is importantly a nonrival good which may be consumed by one consumer without preventing simultaneous consumption by others. This makes information giving simpler and easier than other kinds of giving for rival goods.

It’s much harder to move over aspects of volunteering, such as learning from service users, sensing the difference your volunteering has made, supporting the most vulnerable and disadvantaged, etc. Faced with these kind of challenges, the web is not always the optimum platform and it starts to become more evident why those in volunteerism are unsure about how to harness social media.

How moving journalism online has brought it closer to other giving activities

The experience of many in the newspaper industry as they’ve moved online has demonstrated that when they use social media, giving is more effective than exchanging. A willingness to share and be open (as when giving to each other) is a more effective strategy than limiting supply and being closed (as when formally exchanging with each other). Jeff Jarvis believes that these giving relationships online amount to what he terms as a ‘link economy‘.

“Links can be exploited and monetized; get links and you can grab audience and show ads and make money. Content is becoming a cost burden, what you have to have to get the links, but in and of itself, content can’t draw value without an audience, without links.”

How do online newspapers get these links? They are given them by their audience, amongst them participants, enthusiasts and volunteer bloggers, by opening up their content and inviting people in. They can’t oblige consumers of their product to link. Instead they can make it easier and more worthwhile to link. It’s the gift economy in action.

Journalism is a profession that is going through the social media revolution. As the internet has provided a low cost content publishing and distribution system, writers willing to share their passion are stepping in to fill gaps that professional journalists are not filling, e.g. niche subjects, hyperlocal coverage, etc. As the internet is enabling networked communication in real time through sites like Twitter and Facebook, so witnesses to breaking news with a mobile handy are replacing the journalist reporting from the scene of the action.

Citizen journalism is where “members of the public play an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing and disseminating news and information”. We Media sums it up as:

“Armed with easy-to-use web publishing tools, always-on connections and increasingly powerful mobile devices, the online audience has the means to become an active participant in the creation and dissemination of news and information”

It’s a complicated picture. Citizen journalism grows out of the idea of civic journalism where readers are not treated as spectators, but as participants. It’s a participatory approach to journalism, where professional journalists are increasingly collaborating with amateur journalists to produce their work. It’s worth looking at different journalists working in this area such as Nick Booth, Help me investigate with Paul Bradshaw and those on Talk About Local.

This is taking journalism into the gift economy where it’s no longer a simple exchange between producers and consumers, writers and their readership. This new form of journalism is confronting issues familiar to many in volunteerism who’ve worked for many years in the gift economy.

• How, as a professional journalist benefiting from information gifted by citizen journalists, should you recognise or reward their contribution?
• How can professionals and amateurs work alongside each other?
• How can journalists, that straddle the exchange and gift economies, fund their activity without changing the nature of the relationship they have with those who give to them?

Further reading

Jon Snow Interviews Professor Edgar Cahn. In this short clip Edgar explains the simple concept of Time Banking – Volunteering for the 21st Century which is sweeping across the UK.

Co-production – A Manifesto for Growing the Core Economy – New Economics Foundation (2008)