Mosshead

Nonprofits: respect the time investment of volunteers

February 24th, 2006

About a month ago, I started volunteering at a startup (1-year old) organization that addresses the environmental impact of old computers while also working to bridge the “digital divide”. It’s a young organization with little structure but it’s experienced rapid growth because the community need is so great. Naturally, there are some issues related to unstructured growth like this and right now it has to do with communication.

In The Permeable Non Profit, Gilbert asks

How do people come together around a cause in this new era? (of boundaries broadened by communication technology)

My answer is … not in face to face meetings. In fact, organizations that fail to develop an online community that uses communication tools effectively are severely limiting their capacity as well as excluding professionals who have much to offer, but not the leisure time nor inclination to spend meeting time on tasks that can just as easily be done online. It means the primary volunteer base is made up of people who aren’t busy enough to need productivity tools and, in my experience, don’t always respect the time of busy people. It’s unbalanced.

Let’s face it … my work week is long sometimes; if I spend my one day off in meetings doing stuff that I could have been doing in small increments (e.g. 10 minute snippets) throughout the week, that’s not a contribution, it’s a sacrifice.

Yet I know that I have much to offer an organization. I participated in a lot of organizational development during the 10 years I worked in the nonprofit sector, I have a good success rate with grantwriting, and I know a bit about information technology (IT) both as a technologist and as a manager. I have a contribution to make.

Vetting proposals, arriving at compromise, collaboratively edited documents, all that bureaucratic stuff that does need to be done can be done online so that our time spent face to face is spent on mission critical activities. The tools are all there and most of them are free.

We all have different motivators for volunteering. Finding affinity groups is one of my motivators, but part of what makes a group an affinity group for me is finding people who value productivity. I’m a much happier volunteer when I feel my time is actually doing something for a cause. I, and my affinity group, need volunteer time to have quantifiable results.

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