COVID-19 and Virtual Volunteering
These days, cooped up largely at home (like so many of us, due to COVID), I really miss hanging out with Will.
Will was my “little” — short for ‘little brother’ — back when I volunteered with the Big Brothers Big Sisters of New York City. At first, he was shy and not sure how much to open up to me. That changed in one of our first meetings when he arrived excited about having just met one of his favourite rappers in the street. I asked who it was. He was reluctant to say, knowing it would likely be meaningless to an older finance guy.
“Cam’Ron” he finally said.
My eyes widened with excitement. “Nice! Was he with Juelz Santana the rest of the Diplomats?!” I asked, referring to Cam’Ron’s Harlem music crew. Will’s face lit up. Then he eagerly recounted every last detail of the encounter, down to the handshake Cam’Ron gave him when they parted ways.
As it turned out, we both listened to the same music. This simple commonality sparked the beginning of a close and natural relationship where I had the opportunity to be a trusted and positive role model. Much like so many other volunteer activities I’ve done throughout my life, I found the experience exhilarating. I felt great about volunteering my time to mentor Will and in the process, I felt personally transformed.
There’s something irreplaceable about the feeling of being needed and helpful in the community to which we belong.
Recognizing the benefits of volunteering, many leading companies organize regular and fun volunteer programs for employees, both to demonstrate their commitment to the community as well as foster a strong purpose-driven workforce culture. And yet today, while they’re ready and willing to help, there’s simply no way to do it.
Our First Attempts
At Rumie, we knew that virtual volunteering could supercharge our digital learning solutions for underserved communities globally. What we did not know, however, was just how to build a win-win solution that truly works well for both givers and receivers of volunteerism in a digital context. We began experimenting in 2016, during the Syrian refugee crisis, by asking volunteer educators to help us quickly find free learning content that met the needs expressed by communities and NGOs operating in refugee camps. We knew we were on the right track when people from around the world began actively contributing to programs for Syrian refugees in all of Jordan, Turkey and Lebanon.
As we continued to grow, we stayed true to our bottoms-up model of listening to the communities that we serve, rather than us telling them what they need, as too often happens.
That led us to focus more and more on lifelong learning, employability and life skills. Moreover, we noticed that people learned through technology in significantly different ways to how they previously learned offline, spending more time on smartphones and with a much shorter attention span. As a result, we evolved our approach to one based on microlearning principles, where one can learn through short ‘snippets (‘Bytes’ as we call them) that lower the barriers to learning by making it fun, easy and quick.
The Arrival of COVID-19
Last year we put all of our experience to date into designing a new platform, Rumie Build, to allow volunteers to create Bytes in specific areas that meet the needs of the communities that use our free learning technology. Just as we were readying to launch, the COVID crisis descended upon us all — leaving youth, unemployed folks and others in greater need than ever before and would-be volunteers with no way to help. So while we weren’t fully ready to try it out fully online (we wanted to test the platform with in-person sessions first), we flipped the switch and went fully virtual.
We didn’t know how people would like it — had we landed on a win-win recipe? — but we knew that now more than ever this was needed, so we finished it and went live.
The result? It turns out that skills-based, online volunteerism really can work. It might even be revolutionary. Employees at companies with whom we work have said that it’s a breath of fresh air in an otherwise deflating day of sitting at home on calls all day long. And the quality of the learning content they’ve created is outstanding. It’s just what you’d expect, given that they’re creating content related to their core areas of expertise — i.e., the very skills for which the market pays them for their services every single day.
Lessons We’ve Learned
Here are a few lessons that we’ve learned over the years that may be helpful to others building a similar approach:
- Purpose-Driven Culture: There’s something important about knowing that your company and coworkers share your values. A good online volunteer experience must not just make giving back fun, but ideally do so in a way that encourages team-building, collaboration, and connectivity. It’s more fun to give back with kindred spirits, and this in turn boosts enthusiasm for the day job. While our platform allows volunteers to give back individually on their own time later, we always begin with live workshops that allow everyone to collaborate in real-time online.
- Shared value: A good solution has to drive value on both sides. It goes without saying that charities should always focus first and foremost on their beneficiaries; creating social impact for them is their sole bottom line. But we also know that volunteerism done well can supercharge that impact, but only if we think carefully about how to create better outcomes for corporate partners and their employees — ranging from measurable improvements in corporate engagement to positive outcomes in marketing and branding.
- Genuine Corporate Impact: Volunteering activities should fit into the core of a non-profit organization’s activities, and genuinely drive value for beneficiaries rather than being a ‘tack-on’ whose main purpose is to fulfill a need to create corporate volunteering opportunities. This can be harder for non-digital organizations, but with a bit of creative thinking, it’s always possible to find ways to engage passionate volunteers to create what they know has real and meaningful value.
- Skills-based Volunteering: In one of our first digital volunteering workshops, years ago when we had an earlier version of the platform, a volunteer from the IT department of a corporate partner clued me into one of the major reasons that skills-based volunteering is more rewarding to the giver: “Last year I picked up garbage at a park. While I was happy to contribute, I didn’t really feel like it was the best I had to offer to the world.”
- User Experience Matters: Just as the overall volunteer experience matters in real-life, what the tech space calls UI/UX (user interface/user experience) is critical for an online volunteering model. After years of experience and testing, we now allow volunteers the ability to create their own avatars, add fun facts, work in small teams to encourage employee team-building and connectivity, and collaborate on a fun and attractive web interface.
- Great Content Starts with a Recognizable Impact: A great question that we’re often asked is whether or not volunteers feel the same sense of reward given that they’re not directly interacting with beneficiaries. We believe the answer is yes, but it doesn’t happen automatically. In our workshops, we always clearly identify the communities who the Bytes will benefit at the beginning, throughout, and at the end of the workshop. First, it helps instill a clear sense of purpose into the minds of volunteers. Second, the clearer we are about the learners who will receive this content, the better the ability of volunteers to create great content for them. And third, we regularly follow up with emails, sharing detailed data on just where and how their work is impacting communities in need.
- Tracking Data and Outcomes: Besides the fact that a digital volunteering model means that location no longer matters, it also affords the ability to carefully track impact outcomes. This includes tracking reach and learning impact for beneficiaries. It also includes data on volunteer contributions and other data relevant to CSR professionals, such as mapping contributions against the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. (A new feature we’re testing even allows adding ‘gamification’ — with friendly competitions to incentivize greater social impact contributions across employees, groups, or different offices.)
Conclusion
COVID will eventually go away. But the new trend toward working from home is likely here to stay in some form, as many employees realize they don’t need to be in the office every single day to perform their jobs well and can find a better work-life balance by working from home more regularly.
What we’re doing is simply the first of many initiatives that we hope will emerge in future years, bringing creativity and new technology tools to bear on long-standing social challenges. We had a head start, as we’re a newer, digital-first organization that has been building volunteerism into our lifeblood from the beginning. We look forward to collaborating with others in our ecosystem, whether new social innovations or large, existing entities, helping to drive forward new models that use technology in ways never imagined before to create social impact for us all.
If you have additional lessons that others might find helpful, feel free to comment and start a discussion!
(And if you enjoyed this blog post, please consider sharing. If you want to learn more about corporate volunteer opportunities with Rumie, find us here.)
