Trends Over Time in Virtual Volunteering - NTEN - 0 views
www.nten.org/...r-time-in-virtual-volunteering
trends volunteering online Cravens NTEN womenslearningstudio
shared by Doris Reeves-Lipscomb on 14 Apr 17
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Today’s ability to oh-so-easily see and hear each other online is a double-edged sword: it can make electronic communication more personable, but it can also inject offline prejudices evoked by how someone looks or sounds.
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Now, a lot of online communication is done synchronously, or nearly so: volunteers are online together, at the same time, talking together, and staff supporting those volunteers is often seeing their volunteering activities in real time.
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People do not communicate primarily via e-mail anymore; they now talk together via online social networks and in the comments section of blogs, photo-sharing sites, and video-sharing sites. Some people send far more SMS messages than email messages.
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they can and do engage in service just about anywhere, not only with a laptop, but with a tablet or smart phone.
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The most welcomed change in the last few years is that using the Internet to communicate with, engage, and support volunteers has been adopted in one way or another by a majority of nonprofit organizations in the USA. What hasn’t changed is that there are still thousands of organizations resisting any use of the Internet to support and involve volunteers, with thousands of other organizations involving online volunteers while still not understand that the involvement; I volunteered mostly online for a regional office of the Girl Scouts of the USA in 2010 and 2011, yet I would bet that office would say “no” to the question, “Do you engage in virtual volunteering?”
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the elements for success in virtual volunteering are still largely the same as they have been for the last 20 years. What hasn’t changed? The importance of creating volunteering tasks that have real impact, of frequent communications with volunteers, of showing volunteers what impact their contributions have had, and of showing senior management at an organization what impact virtual volunteering is having. I’m relatively sure these recommendations will never change, even as technology does.