Exploring Volunteering

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two groups of volunteers

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

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

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

Holy grail of volunteerism

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

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

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

Volunteering and participation

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

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

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

With the collaborative nature of a lot web tools that have developed over the last few years, such as commenting, discussion, messaging and social networking, etc., the line has started to blur between the ways in which people engage with all sorts of projects and services which aim to effect social change. For example, it’s increasingly difficult to define where the role of an active community member ends and an officially recruited and trained volunteer begins.

It’s a broad spectrum that now covers community members who regularly comment and engage with other community members right through to volunteers who run and help administer the online community itself. Given the plethora of avenues (commenting, messaging, etc) to collaborate and participate that hard structure of service deliverers and service users is breaking up.

With the falling away of a lot of the more traditional obstacles to involvement (time, location, privacy, resources, etc), so active participation is becoming a more seamless experience. This leads me to ask: does maintaining this distinction between volunteering and participation matter or should our perception of what volunteering is broaden?

Another change in the way people perceive volunteering and the not for profit sector in general is that causes and issues are coming to the fore, and the mechanism or root you take to engaging with the issue or cause you care about is not necessarily now the driver for why people get involved.

Good examples of this are the how groups come together around issues on social networking sites nowadays and it’s not enough for big organisations to simply appeal for support without clearly identifying the cause or issue they are working to change. Twestival was a case in point where people came together around an issue not an organisation.

Developments on the web are taking this into account, such as web movements-dialogues like 4Change, Socialbrite and many, many others that put the issues before the mechanism for creating social change. In what ways will this change how volunteering is perceived once it becomes increasingly decoupled from a specific context, i.e. volunteering in a formal role with a traditionally constituted organisation?

When Google says it’s getting into the volunteering search business, you sit up and take notice. This month it was announced that they were setting up All for Good- backed by none other than President Barack Obama as part of the volunteering initiative: “United We Serve“. All for Good is supported by volunteers from web organisations such as Google, Craigslist Foundation, UCLA, YouTube, FanFeedr and Aha! Ink.

In addition, and in connection with this announcement, VolunteerMatch.org, an online resource for searching and posting volunteering opportunities has announced that it is opening public access to it’s network. Part of this announcement was that they are making their volunteer data available under creative commons. As a result it’s meant that you can find VolunteerMatch.org opportunities to volunteer via the All for Good website.

VolunteerMatch.org are just one of the many volunteer opportunity providers taking part in the scheme.

Founding activity providers include 1-800-volunteer.org, 1 Sky, AARP, American Solutions for Winning the Future, American Red Cross, City of New York, The Corporation for National and Community Service, craigslist, Girl Scouts of the USA, Habitat for Humanity, HandsOn Network and Points of Light Institute, Idealist, MeetUp, Mentor, Network for Good, Organizing for America, ServeNet.org, Sierra Club, TechMission, The Extraordinaries, Truist, United Jewish Communities, United Way, Volunteer2, VolunteerMatch and Youth Service America.

It’ll be interesting to see how this influences the way volunteer managers recruit their volunteers in the UK. Already organisations registered on participating sites, such as VolunteerMatch.org, can see their opportunities listed (for free) on the All for Good website. The opportunities are location-based and are displayed on a map.

This development is the latest and highest profile in the technical infrastructure underpinning volunteering. But it’s just an evolutionary next step in a series of progressive changes in how anyone can get involved in volunteering via the web. The social networking revolution is at the heart of this change in online volunteer recruitment. Facebook aps such as Volunteer Connect (in Canada) and I Volunteer are examples that have worked to promote volunteering via social networks.

Twitter aps like Twitter Job Search are accidentally building volunteering opportunity searches out of the fastest growing web platform that is Twitter. A search for volunteer or volunteering opportunity on Twitter Job Search pulls out a number of volunteer roles posted by users on Twitter.

Different queries on plain vanilla Twitter Search can yield interesting results of different volunteering opportunities out there. For example:

Looking volunteer volunteering

volunteer role OR post

Twitter seems to be the focus for a lot of innovation and the potential for using it as a platform for recruiting volunteers seems enormous. Certainly well know web resources for Volunteer Management are moving to Twitter- such as Tony Goodrow (President Volunteer2), Energize Inc, etc., but this is just a fraction of the story. Twitter’s not just a new way of information sharing, it’s a new way of organising. Enter social organisations stage left…

Late last year and early this year, the new way of social organising via Twitter in the form of Twestival demonstrated just how old models of volunteer recruitment were being shaken up. This post by beegod gives some insight into this. And it’s interesting to read Twestival starter Amanda Rose’s reflections with Beth Kanter on Twestival and in particular what she said about volunteer management:

“Providing A Better Virtual Hub To Support Volunteers. Amanda says the website was a key element in reaching out to the cities and that she was not prepared for the amount of work that went into setting it up. Says Amanda, “Even through this was a volunteer-run event, there was a level of expectation from people once they signed up. I think most understood that we were doing the best we could with our resources and limited time – but it was frustrating not to be able to offer them something beyond a blog to connect and share.”

…Extend the planning timeline to 2-3 months. Amanda admits that it was stressful to work under these very tight timelines. “However, not unlike Twitter which is restricted to 140 characters, I wanted to challenge everyone to see what we could do in the span of a few weeks. This generated a lot of buzz and enthuasiasm on Twitter and extended offline.” Amanda observes that volunteers were amazed with what they could do in this short a timeline and the amount of creativity that surfaced was truly inspiring…”

In other words, the new way of recruiting volunteers as demonstrated through Twestival didn’t come without challenges, but it clearly gave us all a glimpse into a new and very effective way of mobilising volunteers for a cause.

Certainly Twitter has shown that volunteering opportunities work two ways. Providers can use Twitter as a platform to offer opportunities, but equally, volunteers looking for opportunities can advertise the fact. It’s an idea that first found a home online in the UK years ago in the Goodwill Gallery. The idea of volunteering as an exchange along the lines of Timebanking has yet to find an adequate online platform that does it justice. Twitter just hints at what we could be developing.

Research, as yet unpublished, by the Red Foundation has looked in great detail into the issue of how social networks can open up the volunteering experience. Currently the major volunteer opportunity providers in the UK do-it.org.uk run by charity YouthNet and Worldwide Volunteering operate under a restricted access model for the volunteering data they manage.

There are different reasons for why, at present, actors in the UK operate under a model that restricts access to the volunteering data it manages, while the actors in the US are seeing the system open up increasingly. Reasons such as business model (how to generate the funds necessary to maintain the data system) and privacy issues (how to protect and manage potentially sensitive data of both volunteers and volunteer opportunity providers) are part of the story.

For sure, there’s a lot to be said for opening up. Creating API’s and offering a range of XML data feeds could enable developers to spread, disseminate and serve up information about volunteering in the UK in a totally new way. Beyond the technical issues of opening up data, there are also the practical issues of what system best meets the needs of users.

This is an open debate that should be had in the UK amongst all those interested in developing the platform for tomorrow’s volunteering via the web and what we want it to do. Great to see VLabsBlog beginning the discussion. It’s vital to debate what’s at stake here as volunteers, volunteer managers, funders, policy makers, developers, and others and raise the profile of this issue.

What do you think?

Recently I took part in a debate on E-Volunteerism about trends in the way Generation Y (those individuals born between 1981 and 1995) is volunteering and how volunteer-involving organisations can adapt to engage Generation Y. Part of the discussion looked at whether Gen Y volunteered more episodically and whether they were more self-focused in their approach to volunteering.

It is really easy to slip into a way of talking about Generation Y that attributes all kinds of characteristics to the way they volunteer, when what we’re actually talking about is the latest evolution in volunteering and not the latest generation of volunteers. This distinction is really important because it changes it from being a debate between those who actively involve Gen Y volunteers to a wider debate about how as a sector we change and adapt with the times.

Good examples that demonstrate this distinction are:

• As employment markets change, so do approaches to volunteering
• As digital technology changes working environments (or human activity generally), so it changes volunteering
• As charities and social movements change and grow, so do the opportunities to get involved

A debate about how best to involve young people from the standpoint of how the world around us (starting with your local community) is operating today, is more fruitful than simply head scratching about what young people are like today. To be clear, if you work to understand how the world around us is functioning today, you’ll better understand what young people are like in the present.

More episodic volunteering?

There is, perhaps, more episodic volunteering nowadays. But this is due to the more episodic career paths we have now on the one hand, and the digital technology which has fragmented the world around us on the other, allowing us to look beyond our local communities. I remember when I worked in Guatemala how struck I was by the commitment many young people had to their local volunteering roles such as health promoters, teachers or church groups. But part of this was due to the reality of volunteering in small rural communities – this link with the local community was not as strong in the larger, urban capital of Guatemala City.

Are volunteers nowadays more self-focused?

Are young people more self-focused than any other age group? I don’t think so. Most people approach volunteering with a balance of personal and social motivations. For example, if a younger person is more likely to want to learn a skill and an older person is more likely to want to meet new people, these are both personal motivations. It doesn’t follow that either is necessarily any less likely to want to volunteer for a social motivation like being able to help others.

The phrase self-focused is quite ambiguous. Are we hinting at selfishness or do we mean self-interestedness? Both selfishness and enlightened self-interestedness is about looking after your own needs. The difference is whether you’re being mindful of the needs of others at the same time. Volunteering obviously fits in with the latter; it’s enlightened self-interest. It doesn’t really make sense to talk about people volunteering their time selfishly. As a result, it makes more sense to think about whether we really know how Gen Y express this need to help others (which can show us new ways of volunteering happening today), before we’re tempted to say whether they’re any more self-focused, self-interested or selfish than anyone else.

Not them and us, it’s all about us

It seemed to be me that engaging in a them and us debate, missed the bigger picture. Them, the volunteers. Them, the young people. Them, the more self-focused. Them, the episodically committed. It’s about us. Us, in a new working environment. Us, in a new way of communicating and sharing information. Us, wanting social change.

Sounds glib, but it really is all about us- all of us