Exploring Volunteering

It was great to see this interview with Paul Wilson, deputy director of Edinburgh Volunteer Centre from Jonathan Melville in the Guardian Local.

In the interview Paul talks about changes in volunteering in Edinburgh and more broadly in Scotland. He talks about developments in online volunteering and gives the example of how the Volunteer Centre in Edinburgh recruited a volunteer to help with their internal database management.

It’s interesting that when he moves on to micro-volunteering, the discussion becomes hypothetical. In a way this kind of represents where the UK volunteering sector as a whole is at, in terms of its experience of using new technology in volunteering. We’re comfortable talking about the role and status of volunteering in UK communities.

Most of us now have had at least ad hoc experiences of using new technology directly in helping to develop and broaden volunteering. However, when it comes to using new tech in very specific user cases such as mobile based micro-volunteering, the general experience is still tentative.

Always interesting to hear about the opportunities and new developments from Help from Home, i-volunteer and other sources. It will be interesting to see what responses the appeal in the Government’s Green Paper on giving gets on the subject.

This post started as I got sucked into using Google Labs’ Ngram Viewer- a tool that offers visual representations of the usage of words in books published going back 500 years ago.

Let’s put the statistical complexities to one side for a moment, what makes this fascinating is that it offers us a kind of visualisation where words become proxies for all sorts of concepts and actions in our culture/s. For example, take this ngram below.

Information – Data – Knowledge

The blue line is ‘information’, red line is ‘data’, and the green line is ‘knowledge’ and their level of usage in books since the year 1700.

For sure, there are different ways of interpreting this graph. One might be that while our perception of the amount of information seems to be increasing over the centuries, knowledge is relatively constant. A pithy summary might be that: more information (and data) does not necessarily lead to more knowledge.

It occurred to me that it might be fun to check out what ngrams tell us about how our use of the word ‘volunteer’ has evolved.

So first up is the word ‘volunteer‘.

Volunteer

It shows the growth of the use of the word ‘volunteer’. First, it bares out the historic use of the word volunteer in a military context. The peaks coincide with major wars that affected the English-speaking world: Napoleonic wars in early 1800s, American Civil War (1861-65), First World War (1914-18) and to a lesser degree the Second World War.

This decline in usage seems to suggest that already by the Second World War, the word volunteer was losing its distinctive and overriding military meaning. In addition, what’s striking is how usage of the word has steadily increased since the Second World War.

It points to the fact that we at a historic high in usage of the word volunteer.

Up to now it was only possible to look at trends through Google data on searches. This shows that the use of the word ‘volunteer’ has been pretty static. If anything, it’s gone down a little bit.

What’s interesting with the Ngram Viewer is that it holds out the possibility to get more historical perspective on the use of the term ‘volunteer’.

We know from sources across the centuries that the word ‘volunteer’ was used almost exclusively in a military context (particularly at sea). A cursory Google Book search bares this out with some publications about volunteering in the 19th Century.

A look at the records from the Old Bailey that include transcriptions of verbal testimony during trials between 1674-1913 gives more of a flavour of this. In particular, it offers a vivid insight into how the word ‘volunteer’ was used in spoken English many, many years ago.

Here are some typical examples:

“John Breams, The Younger Brother, was Condemned for the same Murther of Henry Hutton. He denied not that the dead person was run through by him; He was a Volunteer in the Sea-service very lately; He said that he did heartily repent, that he was drunk when he committed the sin of Murther…”

- A True ACCOUNT of the BEHAVIOUR, CONFESSION, AND Last Dying SPEECHES Of the Criminals that were Executed at TYBURN, On Wednesday the 20th of December, 1693.

“His character was exceeding good; he suttled for the camp both at home and abroad; he never was punished neither at home nor abroad, to my knowledge; he is in the same regiment with me, but not in the same battalion; he went a volunteer into another, when the volunteers went abroad, and he was of very great service to us abroad; he has a family, and has endeavoured hard to bring them up.”

- William Chamberlayne, Theft > grand larceny, 5th April 1758.

“He had before told me, that he was a native of Hampshire, but of a French descent, as he believed; was under 24 years of age; that his father was a gentleman; but both his parents were dead. He was enter’d a volunteer on board the Fougueux man-of-war, when eight years of age, at 17s. 6d. a month, and walk’d the quarterdeck; he was afterwards midshipman aboard the Bristol, three years; then in the Antigua sloop, two years and upwards; then in the Nassau, six months; in which he returned from the West-Indies, and was paid off at Chatham.”

- THE ORDINARY of NEWGATE’S ACCOUNT of the Behaviour, Confession, and Dying Words OF FIVE MALEFACTORS, VIZ.- Ordinary’s Account, 20th April 1761.

If you change the terminology to ‘volunteering‘, it shifts it slightly to more recent usage. Though it is still predominantly military (with the peaks correlating with the major wars cited above), it does accentuate the sharp post-war increase.

Volunteering

Comparing terminology the word volunteering has been overtaken by the use of the phrase ‘community service‘ in the late 1970s. It’s interesting that the origin of the use of the phrase ‘community service’ [red line below] seems to be at the time of the First World War.

It seems to suggest that community service has been a powerful bridge between the military and civilian forms of engagement. So while volunteering as a concept is firmly rooted in a military context, community service increasingly common usage also has it’s first tender shoots in a military context.

What then happens with the Second World War is that there’s a lag between ‘volunteering’ usage and ‘community service’ usage- from which usage of ‘community service’ as a term grows and grows- eventually outstripping ‘volunteering’ today.

Volunteering – Community Service

With connected concepts there are also insights. For example, with the phrase ‘civil society‘ you get two peaks. One at the beginning of the 1800s when it was associated more with the emergence of a new non-militarised society. At this time, civil society was a term used in political argument, spurred on by Jean-Jacques Rousseau amongst others. But it’s striking how the post-modern version of the concept has rocketed since the early 1980s.

Civil Society

Macro-level terminology is changing the language of how we explain the meaning of volunteering. In particular, with the growth of the web, the term ‘community’ has been used more and more. In the last few years, the word ‘community’ has started to appear more in published literature than the word ‘society’ [blue]- a word that emerged suddenly at the beginning of the 19th century in relation. Perhaps this is because of the links between the concepts of society and state, that the looser construct of the ‘community’ fits better in an online world where hard divisions between social groupings along state lines are disappearing.

Society – Community

Other concepts that are often associated with volunteering, such as ‘donations’ and ‘alms’ give a more complex sense of the change in language usage. Though less, ‘donations’ has tracked ‘alms’ since the 1700s.

Only recently, really since the beginning of the 1970s has the word ‘donations’ [blue line] been used more than the word ‘alms’. Amongst other things, it suggests how much of the terminology around volunteering has historically been heavily influenced by religious concepts.

Donations – Alms

Rights – Duties

Gap between rights [blue] and duties [red] is opening up, particularly in the post-war period. It seems the trend has been to define rights, rather than discern duties. It’s interesting in relation to the debate around volunteering as a right, or as a duty to others.

Volunteer – Amateur

The idea of the amateur [red line] was popular during the Second World War, then has steadily declined. 1970s feel significant which is when the idea of volunteerism overtook amateurism.

Volunteer Management (1950-2008)

Almost as a postscript- volunteer management isn’t really mentioned before 1965, becomes stronger in the 1990s and then has rocketed in the last couple of years [graph above has zero smoothing].

Spanish: voluntariado – voluntarios – voluntario

In Spanish there’s the same issue with the military connotations of the word ‘voluntario’ (volunteer) or ‘voluntarios’ [red line]. In this case of Spanish literature, the graph demonstrates the focus on the battles in the emerging independence of Latin America in the 19th century. The idea of the ‘voluntariado’ is unheard of until very recently- a concept that is used almost exclusively in the context of social action rather military action.

French: b̩n̩volat Рvolontaires Рvolontariat

In French, the word “volontaire” and “volontaires” (red line) remains strong in the language- closely associated with the military. The word ‘volontaire’ is also used to describe actions that are voluntary (as in the general sense of it being ‘of free will’). A way to cut out this usage and stick to just the noun ‘volontaire’ is to search under the plural.

In French, the term “benevolat” [blue line] (graph below) from the latin for ‘good will’, has been used only fairly recently to describe volunteering in the context of social action or social benefit. “Benevolat” is a term that enters the literature in about 1975- perhaps this is a little like the concept of ‘Ehrenamt’ in German. “Benevolat” and “Ehrenamt” are roughly translated as volunteering.

What’s really interesting though, is how terms like ‘benevolat’ have been retrospectively applied. A search on Google by timeline (which organises content by the time period it’s concerned with- rather than date of publication) shows writers have used the term ‘benevolat’ to describe all kinds of volunteering and other activity right back as far as 1860.

“Benevole” which has become a term to denote volunteers- those who participate in “benevolat” activity. It shows again the uptick in usage of this term from 1975.

German: Ehrenamtliche – Freiwilligenarbeit – Ehrenamt – Freiwillige

In German, the way the volunteering is described and changing is fascinating. Words like “Ehrenamtliche”, “Freiwilligenarbeit” and “Ehrenamt” have been increasingly used to describe volunteering- more than “Freiwillige” [yellow line above] which has a more military links, particularly between 1930s and 1940s.

Though uses like “freiwilliges soziales Jahr” mean Freiwillige is the more generic term of choice to describe volunteering. What’s particularly striking is how the more modern concept of ‘Ehrenamt’ [green line] has increased and is almost on a par with the more traditional term “Freiwillige” [yellow line].

Anyway, will leave it at that- have a go yourself and share what you find. Cheers.

PS: for endless fun check out the ngrams tumblr blog

ERYICA (European Youth Information and Counselling Agency) is currently working on a project to produce an InfoKit for youth information workers across Europe. The InfoKit will be designed to help information providers facilitate young people’s access to high quality information, balancing the risks and opportunities.

The InfoKit aims to highlight some of the key issues in helping young people get the information they need, growing up in an information society enabled by digital networks.

The InfoKit will include learning activities that youth information workers can run with the young people they support. In this way, it’s hoped that they can boost knowledge sharing about these issues of quality and safety in using the web as a information resource.

In Antalya, Turkey, ERYICA organised an international session (11th-14th November) with 26 young people from across Europe to help pilot a range of different activities that will be included in the InfoKit when it’s published at the end of April 2011.

What was striking was just how getting info from the web was something all the young people could relate to, regardless of their cultural differences. It was clear that the web is crossing geographical and cultural boundaries in more ways than one. It felt like geography is less of a dividing line, than age is when it comes to the understanding the web.

Pragmatism and Culture

It seemed like the young people’s we spoke to and worked with in the workshop’s sessions had an attitude to the web that was assimilating two distinct aspects of the web.

The first is an impressive capacity for pragmatism. It was clear that the web’s existence was a practical reality. It affects their approach to school, to life with friends and to those around them.

“If I have a question for a friend it’s simpler to message them”, said one, “calling them means I’d have to go through the social niceties of polite conversation. Messaging is quick and gets to the point”.

The second is a coming to terms with a new and emergent culture mediated by digital networks. From the discussions that took place in the sessions, one overriding theme was how the web is changing social norms in often confusing and topsy turvey ways. For example, making sense of friendship where you’re messaged on Facebook by a school companion to tell you that they saw you in the street.

“If they can’t say hello to my face, are they still friends?”, asked one of the delegates.

This is a new web culture and we’re all discerning the values as we go along- wherever we live in the world.

In one of the activities we road-tested, we asked the young people to script, record and produce a short video imagining they were explaining the internet to aliens visiting from outer space. They used flip cams and within a matter of hours had produced interesting results. The film below, just one of those made, more than demonstrating what the young people achieved during the time in the workshop session, gives a general flavour of the discussions and atmosphere of this time together. Enjoy.

You can find the others on Marc Boes’ post on the social network for youth information workers – SHERYICA.

Table on two approaches to providing youth information online

The web’s development has had an enormous and growing influence on the way information, advice and guidance (IAG) services are delivered. Recently, I’ve been doing some thinking about how IAG services for young people have developed on the web.

The definition of what constitutes IAG precisely is a controversial topic- and not something I want to dive into very deeply with this post. In terms of scope I’m applying this thinking to both careers and non-careers IAG services, as well as rights-based (legal, housing, benefits, etc.) and non-rights based services (health, relationships, emotional wellbeing, etc).

The following is heavily influenced by my experience working on TheSite.org with charity YouthNet providing online information to 16-25 year olds across a range of different issues. To clarify, this post is written in a personal capacity and doesn’t necessarily reflect the views of YouthNet.

The issue or the person?

Broadly, online IAG services have developed along two different routes.

Initially, the way information services were delivered online tended to begin with the issues the services sought to address and that the services’ users were perceived to face. Subsequently as the social web took hold, information services were developed that thrust the personal context of service users to the forefront of service delivery.

This legacy of web evolution means the online information services can often be separated into those that focus on a specific issue and those that focus on the personal context of the service user.

Here’s a simple illustration of the distinction outlined above. An online resource such as a catalogue of factsheets is typically written to address specific issues faced by service users (based on a generic understanding of their personal circumstances). An online discussion forum meanwhile is a resource that privileges the personal context of service users (it makes the specific personal circumstances of specific service users the starting point to delivering its IAG services).

Beginning of web info services

In the beginning, IAG services were delivered in a Web 1.0 world. IAG providers were excited by the storage potential and search capabilities of the web. Gradually all kinds of previously paper-based information was put online, followed by the creation of new content specifically made to fit the web.

Text-based resources typically categorized by issue, followed earlier delivery models developed by libraries and other offline information providers. It was the potential to create huge, seemingly unlimited information resources rich in textual content that excited us. In the world where keyword search was king, information developed around the issues the providers saw as key.

Old screengrab of TheSite.org from 1998

In the case of TheSite.org, from 1998, articles and factsheets were developed editorially that tackled the issues that affected young people. Categories included: “Advice”, “Drugs & Alcohol”, “Education” and so it went in alphabetical order. In addition, sources of support and further information like helplines and organisations were categorised by issue in an effort to render the information accessible to service users.

All kinds of IAG providers discovered they could store and publish this written information relatively cheaply. They could make access to this kind of text-based information (stored on static pages) available on demand, usually for free.

Web technology could begin to automate areas of information provision simply by uploading HTML and thereby hooking into the growing power of search engines. Offline databases could be made available online.

In YouthNet’s case, it meant that it could provide access to information around the clock to millions of young people who had previously been much, much harder to reach. The database of local services, originally called “The Information”, later became Local Advice Finder.

Old screengrab of first version of database of local advice agencies on TheSite.org in 1998

At the dawn of the web this was an information world sorted and ordered predominantly by issue. As a result though this was information delivered on a machine scale, not a human scale. It was an issue-centric approach, which led to systems that tended to be designed assuming service users already understood or could break up their problems into specific issues.

This was a service optimised for those who weren’t in crisis, and could access the information they needed by browsing issues that interested them. For those in crisis, they had to make do with links to resources where they could get the support (often delivered offline) they needed.

This Web 1.0 phase was a world dominated by information that was delivered primarily as objective and factual content, rather than as discursive or speculative material. Content that was more subjective was often seen more as entertaining than informative.

Happily serving information via hosted data sitting on servers came with a funding model of sorts: how people accessed information provided on static pages came with a bunch of new metrics. Page views, unique browsers, bounce rate, SQL queries and so on.

Unhappily, it presented particular challenges. For example, it often separated information provider from information seeker. While we knew when users found the information we offered online (such as with page views), we didn’t often know what they thought of it or the impact it had on them.

Fortunately, another web revolution was just round the corner.

Issues now bound in personal context

Web 2.0 ushered in a new era in online IAG. The web had officially become a social space. It was no longer simply about service users searching for issue-specific content. Information providers began to understand the value of connecting information seekers to their peers. The social web meant that instead of searching for content, you could now search for people affected by the same issues as you.

At a stroke, information provision became as much about information, as it did about support. Issues came to be understood in the specific personal context of those that presented them. This led to a growth in the demand for support services for those presenting with these issues, even before issues could be identified and information on possible options provided.

IAG online had gone beyond simply encouraging service users to read rather rational expositions of issues. IAG providers began to understand the value of facilitating the expression of feelings. These emotions emanated from issues rooted in the lives of the people who chose to connect with such IAG services in a radically new and interactive manner.

Encouraged by the anonymity and connectivity of the web, peers discussed their lives on discussion boards in strikingly personal and intimate ways. Issues were no longer assumed to exist. They could now be discerned through this new person-to-person dialogue mediated by the web.

Screengrab of TheSite.org discussion boards from 2000

It’s interesting that looking back, how soon in TheSite.org’s development the paths had been laid down between the issue-specific content from 1998, and the coming of personal context with the discussion boards in 2000.

Issues understood in a personal context

If online IAG services are ultimately all about building links between identified issues on the one hand, and how these issues may play out in the context of people’s personal lives on the other, then an interesting case-in-point is TheSite.org’s service askTheSite.

It’s a service set up to allow young people to pose questions on a range of topic areas to trained advisors in confidence. It’s a service that encourages users to set out the issues they face privately and confidentially, with as much personal context as they want to include. At the same time, it has led to the development of generic content based on the specific issues presented by specific users (editorialised Q&As are based on real questions received on askTheSite are published on a public archive on TheSite.org with the user’s consent).

In fact, with a bit of rough and ready analysis, it’s apparent that askTheSite is an information service that seems to sit somewhere between these two distinct strands of online IAG.

These two different approaches can be seen in the different ways young people ask questions on askTheSite. Often most users of the askTheSite service seem to articulate their question in terms that clearly and explicitly identify issues they are looking to resolve. Or instead, many users submit questions that talk about their life, rich in personal context, but in words that often leave the issues unsaid and implicit in what they say.

Issue-specific: My problem is this, can you help?

Personal context: My life feels like this, can you help?

Too be clear, this shift in focus can be seen within services too as well as by comparing one service against another. For example, on TheSite.org articles can be issue-specific (such as factsheets), but they can also put the personal context first (through blogs, opinion pieces or diaries). Another example are group chat sessions, which are often focused on the people participating, unless an expert is invited and a topic or theme is selected for the chat session. In these cases, the information service puts the emphasis on the issue selected.

Funding and impact

One of the legacies of this development of information services on the web is the challenge of developing funding models. The majority of funders tie funding to specific issues, making it difficult to balance such funding with an overall holistic approach to offering information. In a technical sense, the web favours a holistic approach by creating value providing information services across a range of issues, and not in isolation.

On the other hand, many funders are also very interested in the personal context of their beneficiaries. Many make funding dependent on reaching specific niche groups of people. However, this can conflict with the demands of providing information as a universal offer (open to all). Again, the strength of the web is that it opens up access to information and can make universal offerings more straightforward than targeting services at specific niche groups.

On top of this, whether this starting point is the issue or the person can point towards the kinds of impact that different information services can have.

Issue-specific resources, often automated, can reach broad audiences Yet often this contact with the user is short in duration.

In contrast, support services focused on supporting the person tend to be narrower as they can’t be automated by the web to account for all the personal contexts that might conceivably by relevant with any given service user. However, the length of the intervention of these personal information services is often longer lasting because of the personal connections it facilitates.

We’re used to asking how the web has brought about new kinds of volunteering, yet rarely ponder how the spirit of volunteering brought about the web in the first place.

The web, and more specifically the social web, has to be one of volunteerism’s greatest achievements in its recent history.

Yet this achievement stands largely unrecognised.

There’s little acknowledgement within society as a whole of the volunteer-powered engine driving the development of the social web.

But perhaps more surprisingly, there’s even less affirmation of this accomplishment from the voluntary sector itself.

Instead, the creation and growth of the social web is more commonly characterised as the work of technology enthusiasts or amateurs, rather than of volunteerism.

As a result, those in volunteerism up to this point have mainly viewed the development of the web in terms of transferring traditional volunteering tasks and activities online with the aim of extending reach, efficiency and scale.

But this is just a fraction of the real significance of the social web for those involved in volunteering.

While the social web provides a new medium for the development of volunteering, it is also shifting and changing how people understand the notion of volunteering.

The social web is driven, not just by advances in new technology, but by ideas, principles and values about how we relate together and cooperate with one another.

It is these principles and values, that form the basis of an deep connection between volunteering and the social web.

There is, however, a twist in this story.

After years of nurturing the social web, volunteering is waking up to the veritable cuckoo in its nest.

The social web experiment amounts to a profound and ongoing reinterpretation of the ideas, principles and values of volunteering. It’s an ad hoc process that’s increasingly rippling out beyond the social web and challenging the volunteering consensus.

The challenge to the volunteering consensus presented by this growth in the social web comes at a time when the consensus about volunteerism is increasingly fragmented.

• There’s a widening gap between notions of formal and informal volunteering
• There’s a tendency to disassociate forms of volunteering that take place outside the traditional context of the charity
• There’s a profound disconnect between the giving of time (intangible goods) and the giving of material donations (tangible goods)

The bottom line is that we need to fundamentally rethink volunteering in the age of the social web.

At its core, volunteering provides us with a powerful way to bring communities together and create connections across society.

New technology can enable us to do this in new and exciting ways.

Now we need a new theoretical framework for volunteering that enables us to catch up with this new reality. One that takes on board the influence of the social web on volunteering’s ideas, values and principles, and begins to rebuild the volunteering consensus.

I gave a short talk this week at the Expert Volunteer Summit organised by the Career Development Group (CDG). It got me thinking about some of the analysis we need to do, prior to involving volunteers in the delivery of an already existing service- particularly if those services are online.

The experience that’s helped to shape my thinking on this, is setting up the peer advisor programme where we trained young people to help respond to relationships questions on YouthNet‘s online support service askTheSite. Over more than five years, we’ve trained almost 400 people to get involved and help us deliver the askTheSite service.

It’s important to be clear that by involving volunteers, the volunteers’ needs have to be considered in their own right. The delivery of the programme can not simply put the needs of the volunteers to one side, and focus on the needs of their beneficiaries.

The reason for making this separation between the needs of the volunteers and the beneficiaries of the service comes down to the importance of understanding motivation – both as a volunteer manager and as a service deliverer.

We must be clear about the motivation of the service deliverer (usually the organisation) to meet the needs of the beneficiaries. To do this, we must understand the needs of the beneficiaries.

But we must be equally clear about the complex intrinsic personal motivations of the volunteers to get involved and help provide the service. To do this, we must understand the needs of the volunteers.

Ends and Means

Often the involvement of volunteers in delivering services is viewed in fairly mechanistic terms: viewing volunteers simply as a means to an end. However, volunteering is also an end in itself (over and above the products and services it delivers). A programme that views volunteers simply as a means to an end, is very probably not realising the full potential that volunteers can bring to their service delivery programme.

Volunteers may be a means to amazing ends, but their true value goes beyond the help they deliver to the service’s users. The value of volunteering includes all the impacts the volunteering has on the volunteers themselves, the organisation they’re a part of and the wider community (see IVR’s impact assessment toolkit for example).

Given this multiplicity of impacts of volunteering means one of the key challenges of volunteer management in service delivery is balancing the needs of volunteers and the needs of beneficiaries.

Volunteering begins with a clear call to action

To engage volunteers, a clear call to action is vital. Whether this call involves a single task or a fully fledged role, there needs to be a clarity of purpose on the part of the volunteer involver. In other words, the reasons or motivations for involving volunteers in service delivery need to be clear and palpable.

If the volunteer managers are clear what this fundamental reason is: the easier it is to communicate to the volunteers what they need to do, and how it meets the needs of the beneficiaries.

The web has tended to offer that clarity by reducing volunteering to its constituent tasks. For example, participation on Wikipedia can be as a fully fledged Wikipedian curating content or as a one-off editor. The striking thing about Wikipedia’s clarity is that it can measure involvement in terms of the usefulness of the respective task to beneficiaries (such as correcting a typo or adding a sentence to an already existing article) way before you ever reach Wikipedian status.

Web-based calls to action often, initially, play down the need for commitment, and play up the belief in the network effect. As a result of the power of networks, you can believe in the meaningfulness of your individual act of kindness online, even without much evidence of it’s impact. As an online volunteer, you’re often a step back from the beneficiaries of the service or product you’re helping to provide.

For example, peer advisors on askTheSite only have contact with the service’s beneficiaries at a distance, simply because of the anonymity the service very deliberately offers to its users. An advisor won’t have any contact with the user, other than through the question the user asks. And almost certainly, will never get any direct feedback from the user about what they thought of the question, due to this level of confidentiality afforded to users.

The smaller the task offered up as the call to action, such as with online crowdsourcing or microvolunteering, the more we begin to rely on this “means to an end” logic about the value of volunteering. The more menial or repetitive the task, the harder it becomes for a volunteer to see the opportunity as a form of personal development that satisfies their inner human needs.

The value of these smaller tasks carried out online by separate individuals distributed across a network, becomes tied to how it provides a socially beneficial service or product that responds to the needs of others. The needs of the volunteers that this kind of volunteering can meet over the longer term are severely reduced.

Volunteers don’t need to have direct access to the evidence of how their volunteering helps the identified beneficiaries (although this never hurts). But they do need a narrative upon which they can hang their own personal motivations for volunteering.

Realising the clear purpose

A clear purpose for volunteering (particularly online) is reinforced by:

1. Straightforward pathways into the volunteering opportunity, from the entry points such as recruitment (web can simplify these pathways) through to the training for each volunteer as they learn the ropes of service delivery (elearning is transforming training possibilities for online volunteers)
2. Structured flexibility – there has to be enough flexibility to the role so that each volunteer can make the opportunity their own, but enough structure so that the volunteers’ contributions are in sync with each other (web can make volunteering more flexible: when and where it takes place) – an example is flexible shifts and places of work
3. Abundant support – volunteers need support is they are to deliver a service sustainably whether that’s from their peers, skilled mentors, auxiliary services (such as administration) or getting feedback from service users (web can help provide support networks for volunteers)

However, a clear purpose for involving volunteers and understanding the organisation’s motivation for involving volunteers counts for nothing, if organisations ignore what motivates the volunteers to get involved in the first place.

Understanding motivation to volunteer

There’s a huge wealth of research into why volunteers volunteer. I’ve gone into some of this research in a previous post. Many topline findings point to the fact that volunteers are often primarily motivated by the idea of helping others. This makes intuitive sense. However, to assume that volunteers get involved in service delivery only because they want to help the beneficiaries, is simplistic in the extreme. Below this primary motivation to help, is a complex interplay between all kinds of personally specific factors.

Clary et al [1] have famously categorised these motivational factors for volunteering.

What’s important, though, is how central understanding volunteering motivation is to good volunteer management. It comes back to understanding the needs of your volunteers, not just your beneficiaries.

It’s telling that research into what motivates us to work at all, can be boiled down to extrinsic and intrinsic motivational factors. Extrinsic factors are the typical carrots and sticks (like paying incentives or threatening disciplinary action)- the sledgehammers that managers of paid employees have relied on in the past.

Writers such as Dan Pink and Bruno Frey, make the point that managers are much more effective in motivating their employees if they can tap into the intrinsic motivators, those things within us that can drive us to be productive and achieve great things in our work. Such intrinsic motivators might be ambitions, dreams or even our simple desire to learn and improve at what we do.

An insight volunteer managers have always understood

This insight is nothing new to volunteer managers. Those who engage with volunteers have never had the chance to resort to the same extrinsic motivators with volunteers, such as offer financial incentives or threaten volunteers with the sack. As a result, any volunteer manager worth their salt, builds their volunteering programme with an eye to what it is that motivates their volunteers to engage and deliver services.

By the way, it’s for this reason that internships promising work, placements enforced by schools and explicit gifts incentivising volunteering are all controversial. They all suggest extrinsic motivations can play a substantial part in volunteering.

With online volunteering, extrinsic motivations is even further out of the picture.

As a result, it’s even more crucial that a volunteer working remotely should been driven by their own set of inner motivations. For example, the distance and the so-called online disinhibition effect can numb the emotional cost of walking away from the commitment or make it harder to block out competing demands on a volunteer’s time that may be physically more immediate to them than remote beneficiaries, tasks or duties undertaken.

This online ‘psychological’ distance can make it harder to establish the clarity needed to ensure that there’s a clear alignment between what the volunteer wants out of their volunteering experience and the purpose of the volunteering. There is always room for confusion and misinterpretation to occur, unless the online communication between volunteer manager and volunteer is carefully and shrewdly managed.

Ultimate success

Ultimately, the success of volunteering programmes lives and dies by this understanding of the motivations and needs in play when volunteers are involved in delivering services.

This means the volunteer manager (and their organisation) understanding why they are involving volunteers, but more crucially it means the volunteer manager understanding why volunteers get involved in the volunteering programme.

This understanding must be rendered explicit and renewed regularly by the volunteer manager, as all too often it is left at the level of implicit understanding which can become confused, misunderstood or altered over the lifetime of the volunteering programme.

The web while presenting many challenges in this respect, also presents us with new ways to understand and reconcile our motivations as volunteer managers with those of our volunteers, for the benefit of those that together we aim serve.

Notes

1. Clary, E., Snyder, M., Ridge, R., Copeland, J., Stukas, A., Haugen, J., Miene, P. (1998), ˜Understanding and assessing the motivations of volunteers: a functional approach’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 7 (6), pages 1516- 0.

Today I presented some of the thinking we’ve been doing in the Engagement and Support team at YouthNet. We’ve been thinking about mapping all the online services YouthNet delivers and how we engage with and support young people in this delivery process.

Three observations struck home when we listed all the different activities we coordinate as a team.

Online services and 24/7 expectations

First, it struck us that our online services are increasingly a 24/7 consideration. It was ever thus. Though in recent years the always on nature of the net has meant that our services have increasingly extended beyond the more traditional opening hours for advice and support services. This obviously comes with its pressures and responsibilities. However, it’s clear that part of working with the web is that the usual working hours just have to give a little if activities and service we offer are really to be as accessible as possible for the young people we hope to reach.

Spectrum from private to public

Second observation we made was that online services are based on many different forms of contact that sit on a range between the traditional boundaries between the public and the private. To use the terminology of danah boyd, our services have developed based on these emerging “mediated publics” (PDF) 1 [see notes]. It’s worth considering how privacy is now increasingly mediated as well. In other words, it’s not enough to simply opt-out of social networks to guard your privacy, as others may take the situation into their own hands.

If the web’s power is it’s ability to facilitate social contact, we recognise that the technology also comes with constraints that limit or mediate support and advice that young people can access. A number of our online spaces have given young people the opportunity to share experiences and opinions with others in different mediated publics or communities. However, equally many of our services, such as askTheSite, provide ways for young people to guard their privacy in these mediated online environments. From creating bespoke social networks when discussing sensitive issues, through to providing systems that don’t make registration and sign-in prerequisites to accessing confidential online services.

Participation through to volunteering

Third point that leapt out was that we’re increasingly covering a widening spectrum of engagement: from simple acts of participation such as filling in an online survey, through to structured volunteering opportunities that can lead to many years of commitment. With the growing social web, and rising expectations for flexibility, we’re developing more and more varied opportunities that sit at different points on this scale of participation. From the one off to the more committed opportunity, from the intense to the less demanding; the variety of possible opportunities for engagement is increasing.

Why facilitate these particular activities and services?

We believe that the web is particularly good at fomenting peer support. We’ve witnessed increasing interest in the potential for peer support in providing information and advice services from funders, partners and other stakeholders. The experience of the social web is that it’s good at creating connections between people who’re affected by a particular issue or with a common concern.

Group forming around issues

Social media and increasing searchability has meant that groups can form and coallesce around issue rather than gravitating to high profiles brands or campaigns that have traditionally led on issues and information services set up to tackle them. In particular, many of the most high profile brands or campaigns were not always set up to involve young people as well as they could. Today social media, whether it’s a Facebook group, a forum or even just one individuals blog, can serve as putting people affected by a common issue in contact with each other.

Valuing personal experience

Mediated connections through social media can provide young people with a degree of anonymity that can shield those from the worst excesses of stigmatisation and help overcome the stifling social pressure that leads young people remain silent about the big issues in their lives. Being able to mediate how you share your inner most thoughts and fears, as you can on the web, can give people the distance they need. It means those affected by an issue can reevaluate a harrowing experience as they overcome knowledge that can be used to support their peers.

Do-it Satisfaction Survey 2009

We know that one of the key motivations for why young people engage and participate with us at YouthNet is to do with how much the opportunities we offer, give young people the chance of learning and personal development. Anecdotally, our volunteers tell us that their reasons for volunteering are linked with how it helps them attain career ambitions. YouthNet’s Do-it Satisfaction Surveys and other volunteering research back this up, pointing to gaining or improving their skills as motivations for 16-25 year olds for giving time.

Engaging leads to transformation

The benefit for YouthNet as an organisation of engaging fully with the beneficiaries of its services, is the potential transformational impact it can have back on YouthNet itself. There’s a tendency for any organisation to preserve services which it’s familiar with. For sure, transformation can be scary for any organisation. It requires the organisation to ask itself serious questions that go to the heart of it’s own capacity to deliver. Stick with what you know is the safer option, but it’s not always clear that services that don’t adapt continue to meet the needs of the people they’re intending to. Needs can change, so organisations need to as well. If an organisation is genuinely engaging with it’s beneficiaries and supporters, it’s got a much better chance of responding to these needs.

Extending impact

We know that if we involve volunteers in the work of YouthNet, they can explain the benefits of these online services a million times better, whether it’s to their peers or to a minister in the government. Volunteers supporting YouthNet as Ambassadors for Lifetracks have demonstrated that the impact we hope to make is inexorably extended by the involvement of those we aim to reach.

Identifying emerging needs

The web has some enormous advantages in reaching many young people who might not know or feel comfortable approaching information or advice services in other ways. Increasingly youth information services are developing online outreach as part of the strategy to ensure those most in need know how to get the support they need. We know that often many young people see the web as a place to get factual information, however increasingly, many are turning to the web to ask for personal and bespoke support or indeed offering the personal support to others.

But where new technology is concerned, commercial operators are in the business of predicting and shaping our needs of the future. When Steve Jobs launched the iPad many questioned the demand for such a tablet-like device, yet now as sales grow it’s increasingly perceived as signalling a need in the future. As access and usage of the web increases to over 73% across Europe for 16-24 year olds, reliance on online services is increasing.

How many young people feel they rely on their mobile phone today? To keep in step with this changing landscape of technological-based needs we have as digital citizens, we need to engage and listen to what our audience and supporters are saying about their needs. We need to actively consult and we need to be able to interpret and understand the information we get back, if we’re to take advantage of the distinctive reach that online services can have.

Further information

Links to the activities and online services cited above:

• Expert chat
• Discussion boards – TheSite.org
• Group chat
• Ranters
• Polls
• Lifetracks community
• Public archive Q&A
• askTheSite
• Help in a crisis
• Volunteer management
• Promoting surveys
• Need an answer – Lifetracks
• User panels (online focus groups with restricted access)
• Local advice finder
• Do-it bloggers
• Photographers
• Lifetracks volunteer programme
• Lifetracks ambassadors (project group members)
• Accreditation
• Lifetracks project group – Ning (application required)
• Liasing with partners (e.g. partners on askTheSite)
• Group training sessions at YouthNet (e.g. peer advisor training)
• Leaders (application required)

Notes

1- boyd, danah. Why Youth Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life.” Youth, Identity, and Digital Media. Edited by David Buckingham. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008. 119-142. doi: 10.1162/dmal.9780262524834.119

Speeding dating youth information worker style: at the colloquy we paired up with other organisations to share learning -:- Source: Council of Europe

The other week I had the opportunity to get to know more about the network for youth information workers in Europe called ERYICA. The European Youth Information and Counselling Agency (ERYICA) is an international not-for-profit association based in Luxembourg. It was established on 17 April 1986 in Madrid.

I went to the European Youth Centre in Budapest owned by the Council of Europe to the colloquy that discussed the issue of “Bridging the Gap” that exists in how the web’s used across Europe to offer youth information.

What struck me about the discussion was the amount youth information workers have in common, despite the differences across Europe. Issues such as enabling young people to participate in the production of youth information, professionalisation of youth information workers, and fostering peer support amongst young people. You see many of these similarities through the experiences shared on Sheryica – the social network ERYICA has developed for youth information workers from across Europe.

Here’s the presentation I did for the colloquy below or download the paper I wrote for it about youth information and digital citizenship:

In an interview with the Sunday Telegraph, Archbishop of Westminster Vincent Nichols, talked about the Big Society and the role of volunteering. His words are significant as they come at a time when the meaning of the Big Society for the voluntary sector in policy terms is still just emerging.

So it’s interesting that the Archbishop should find echoes of Catholic teaching “emerging in the language of the new Coalition Government”. The interview describes him as, “enthusiastic at the opportunities offered by Mr Cameron’s call for a Big Society…”.

There is no better model for this [the Big Society, he [Archbishop Nichols] says, than in Lourdes.

While it is doubtful that David Cameron had the French market town in mind when he launched the policy, across the cobbled road from the garden where we talk, smiling teenagers push elderly pilgrims in their wheelchairs. Around the corner in the hospital, groups of volunteers care for the sick and the frail…

One of the things that we see in Lourdes is the great value of tapping into people’s goodwill. If we can generate that sense of volunteering and the sense of fulfilment that comes from it in our society, then we would be better for it. The Big Society is a step in that direction.

Now, however, he expresses an excitement at the potential for the Coalition and reveals he had become disillusioned with the Labour administration.

The last government was too overarching. In attempting to create a state that provided everything, it ended up losing touch with the people it was trying to serve.

Up to now Cameron has been careful to present the concept of the Big Society in secular terms, but it’s clear that there’s a certain amount of jostling for position in the anticipation of policy space opened up in the loose and adaptable notion of the Big Society. If the space vacated by the state isn’t immediately occupied by the corporate sector, it seems the UK’s organised religions are standing by to gain in political influence in the hoped expansion of the voluntary sector aka civil society aka the Third Sector.

What might this mean for the way we understand volunteering in the future if the church and organised religion were to play a greater part in the public discourse about volunteering’s role in society?

Nathan Coombs, co-editor of the Journal of Critical Globalisation Studies, writing in the Guardian last November wrote a piece that pointed out the links between Big Society thinking and recent theological debates, “The red Tories’ true colours- Philip Blond’s ‘red Toryism’ is inspired by a brand of theology that sits strangely with Cameron’s modernising image”. Coombs writes:

Blond’s advocacy of “red Toryism” – a kind of communitarian, post-Thatcherite, traditional ruralist disdain for capitalism and liberalism – is really the only game in town, at least on the centre-right. It is then unlikely, as some argue, that red Tory ideas represented a mere flash in the pan in early 2009 before Cameron’s reversion to more conventional Thatcherite policies. Instead, their ideas should be seen as providing critical “mood music” for Conservative electioneering.

It is therefore surprising that the philosophical roots of the red Tory doctrine have been subject to only passing examination. One only has to dig very superficially to find the religious doppelganger of the Red Tories – a school of theology called “radical orthodoxy”. With its hub in a theological research centre directed by Professor John Milbank, radical orthodoxy is notable for theorising the roots of what they see as the dystopia of global capitalism and cultural liberalism.

Back in April, John Gray wrote this in his review in The Independent of Blond’s book, Red Tory that sums up how this critique of liberalism could play out in our multi-cultural reality:

A theologian in the Anglo-Catholic tradition of Radical Orthodoxy, Blond is the only significant thinker in the Cameron entourage, so his view of the condition of Britain has more than theoretical interest. Britain is in the state it is, he argues, as a result of an unholy alliance of the permissive counter-culture with market individualism. By giving personal choice supremacy over all other values, these seemingly opposed movements of the 1960s and the 1980s produced Britain as it is today: a society with no conception of the common good that is held together by the anonymous forces of the market and the coercive power of the state…

This rich and interesting diversity is one reason why Blond’s project of reinstating a more unitary culture is so deeply problematic. Today there is no possibility of reaching society-wide agreement on ultimate questions. Happily such agreement is not necessary, nor even desirable. No government can roll back modernity, and none should try. We may be in a mess. But the pluralist society that Britain has become is more hospitable to the good life than the imagined order of an earlier age, which in the end is just one more stifling utopia.

In many of Blond’s articles on this subject (see here and here for example) about the deficiencies of liberalism and secularism, several are written in collaboration with Adrian Pabst. Pabst wrote a piece in the Guardian the other week titled “The ‘big society’ needs religion“ that argued that it’s through religion that we’ll achieve the Big Society. In a nutshell, Pabst’s point, is that religion has a preeminent role in the voluntary sector:

By viewing human associations and intermediary institutions as more fundamental than either state or market, religious traditions are indispensable to a vibrant civil society.

It’s worth looking at Pabst’s argument to get a better sense of its implications:

Much of secular politics still views the voluntary sector either as extension of the state or a sub-section of the market. This subordinates social bonds either to uniform state law or to proprietary market relations or both. Indeed, state and market collude by subjecting the whole of society to formal standards that abstract from real, embodied relations of family, friendship, community, habit, ritual and celebration – as Archbishop Rowan recently argued.

Moreover, the purpose and scope of voluntary, civic activity is severely constrained: it merely compensates for state and market failures, rather than supporting the autonomy of the communities, groups and associations that compose civil society.

Even when this autonomy is acknowledged (as with Cameron), voluntary action, philanthropic giving or social enterprise are often seen as a “third sector” separate from secular politics and for-profit business. If austerity is not just about retrenching government and expanding private delivery of public services, then both state and market must be radically reformed to support rather than undermine civic institutions.

Religions are central to an alternative vision that seeks to transform political and economic practices in line with gift-exchange and strong notions of the sacred. Linked to this is the inalienable dignity of persons and the intrinsic worth of our shared natural habitat. For life is ultimately a gift bestowed upon us and not a matter of legal entitlement or individual possession. For Christians that means a divine source creating the universe out of love and goodness – hence the sanctity of life and land.

Despite the presentation by David Cameron of the ‘big society’ in strictly secular terms, it’s clear that at the theoretical level it’s an argument that finds a lot of resonance in theology. So does this mean those with a theological bent, the voluntary sector goliaths of organised religion, have a head start here over the ‘Davids’ (small, local grassroots groups) in the process to shape and influence the development of Big Society policy?

Dr Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, recently spoke about the Church’s response to the Big Society which he gave two and a half cheers.

He actually referred to Adrian Pabst’s article in the Guardian and highlighted his agreement. In particular, he picked out Pabst’s terms of mutual sympathy and social recognition- and notion of gift exchange.

“The common good of a society depends on deep empathy, the real ability to see something from another’s point of view, and recognition, that is the awareness the other person has the same issues as you do. What’s good for you and what’s good for them are sooner or later going to have to be woven together.”

These alignments between the theoretical roots behind the ‘big society’ and modern theological thinking may well influence the terms in which volunteering is thought about in this country in the future, if the notion of ‘big society’ takes root in policy thinking in the coming years.

The challenge, therefore, is for the sector to respond effectively and articulate a clear and rounded secular notion on the role of volunteering in society with it’s roots in the experience of all those involved in volunteering in all its forms and guises (both in and out of religious contexts).

UPDATE: 7th August 2010

Daily Telegraph reporting: “Church of England charity set to receive £5million from Government“.

“The Church Urban Fund, the Church of England’s poverty relief arm, is expected to be given the substantial sum by the Department for Communities and Local Government later this year. It would constitute by far the largest single grant from Whitehall to a church group in recent years.

The move would prove particularly contentious as the money is likely to be diverted from Preventing Violent Extremism, Labour’s £140million programme aimed at stopping young Muslims turning to radical Islam.

The Government said the grant could not be confirmed, but agreed it did want to use the experience and presence of church groups in every area of the country to help realise David Cameron’s idea of volunteers in the Big Society taking over some of the state’s functions.”

This afternoon on the day the Government launched the National Citizen Service, Francis Maude, Minister for the Cabinet Office, was interviewed on Radio 4′s PM programme by broadcaster Eddie Mair.

May be Francis Maude was expecting the same lacklustre questions that Gavin Esler had put to him earlier in the week when Newsnight did its much criticised feature on the Big Society. He obviously hadn’t banked on Eddie Mair. Anyone who’s followed his broadcasting career knows the guy’s not averse to throwing the odd googly question into his interviews. And so it was that we heard the following exchange (hear original here [via an AudioBoo from Alison Charlton]):

Eddie Mair (Radio 4) [42m:52s]: And what volunteering do you do?

Francis Maude (Minister for the Cabinet Office): I do… golly, what do I do? Umm, a whole load of things. I’m involved in my local church. Um, gosh, that’s a really unfair question cold. But actually the point is…

Eddie Mair: I think that given we’re talking about volunteering and how important it is, I thought you might be able to tell me. And not least because in your manifesto it says quote: “Our ambition is for every adult in the country to be a member of an active neighbourhood group.”

Francis Maude: Err, well I’m involved in things in my local community… Well, MPs spend their time involved with voluntary groups, umm…

Eddie Mair: Well that’s part of your job, you get paid for that. What else do you do?

Francis Maude: Well, we do it seven days a week kind of thing, so… Well, I do various things. It’s a great question to err… drop on me err… and if I had time to think about it… my point actually is that people, most people in their lives are doing things that you could define as volunteering with a capital ‘V’ but which are actually just doing things that support their neighbourhoods, support their neighbours, and be a part of… an active citizen, in an active community.

Eddie Mair: Understood, thank you very much for joining us, the Cabinet Office Minister Francis Maude.

I’m posting it here not just because it was a rare example of an interview that cut through the normally poised narrative and lofty rhetoric that politicians are so used to dishing out. I’m more interested in it because it helps to flush out the real essence of volunteering- even if it did so kind of by accident.

Volunteering is not just about doing things, about actions. If it was it would be very straightforward. Volunteering is about values, it’s how we express who we are as people. It’s more than just the sum of it’s parts. Volunteering’s not just a verb, it’s a noun. On an individual level, it can become part of our identity. On a social level, it can become part of our culture.

This interview caught Francis Maude on the hop because I think it showed that, he at least, has so far only thought about volunteering as a thing you do (or you don’t ). Not as something you are.

If this Government wants to make volunteering front and centre of it’s policy agenda through the Big Society, it’s got to understand that volunteering is empty rhetoric, unless it’s backed up by a genuine and personal belief in the values that make volunteering worth so much. At the same time, it can only work as a policy if the people (us) encouraged to volunteer, believe in the value of the volunteering they do. Not simply go through the motions because it’s part of a universal programme that has to be done.

That said, I thought the most revealing part of the whole interview came right at the end. Francis Maude was noticeably trying to get back into his stride when he said:

…most people in their lives are doing things that you could define as volunteering with a capital ‘V’ but which are actually just doing things that support their neighbourhoods…

This sounded like he was saying that volunteering is really nothing more than neighbourliness. It’s what we all do, in the course of our normal everyday lives. Maybe Maude said this in his attempt to suggest that he actually ‘volunteered’ in as far as he was a good neighbour, an active citizen as an MP seven days a week.

But I think he accidentally put his finger on the confusion that exists in how we value volunteering. Something that the idea of the Big Society has not fully reckoned with up till now.

Unlike any kind of impersonal commodity or transacted service which declines in exchange value the more there is of it; it is the very abundance of volunteering which is its value. It’s because volunteering is something personal we can all do that’s the basis for its value. The trick, though, is that we can only realise that value when it influences who we are, not just what we do.