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February 2009
Dear users,
Our online volunteering community has continued to thrive in 2008: through the Online Volunteering service, more volunteers have supported more organizations than ever before in order to strengthen the impact of their development work.
For those of you who would like to engage in online volunteering but are not sure how to do it, this month’s newsletter will help you get started. We show volunteers how to apply for online volunteering opportunities, and we provide guidance for organizations to help them find skilled and committed online volunteers to support their development activities.
We continue our series introducing online volunteers who have made significant contributions to the development work of organizations using this service. In our current edition of the newsletter, we bring you the experience of Wayne A. Bacale, a development practitioner from the Philippines. He stumbled upon online volunteering almost by accident, but through the organizations’ feedback he soon realized its impact on development initiatives, as well as on his own professional capacities.
Best wishes,
The Online Volunteering service team
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THIS MONTH'S TOPICS
1. FROM THE SERVICE: Facts and figures: Online volunteering keeps growing
2. TIP: How to find online volunteers to support your organization’s activities
3. EXPERIENCE: Focus on online volunteers: Wayne A. Bacale
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1. FROM THE SERVICE: Facts and figures: Online volunteering keeps growing
Our figures for 2008 confirm the positive trend of the previous year, and that the number of opportunities offered on the Online Volunteering service website, as well as the number of online volunteers, is growing continuously.
Around 4,000 online volunteering assignments were completed last year, primarily supporting civil society organizations (80 percent), and initiatives in Sub-Saharan Africa (32 percent) and South-East Asia (20 percent). 40 percent focused on education and 20 percent on youth.
About 3,000 online volunteers, on average 31 years old, had the opportunity to contribute their time, skills and expertise to support the cause of peace and development. 60 percent of online volunteers were women and 45 percent from developing countries.
In addition to collaborating on more than one assignment, online volunteers and organizations expressed their satisfaction through the feedback form: 80 percent of online volunteers and 84 percent of organizations rated their online collaboration as very satisfactory or satisfactory.
We hope that our new website will help connect even more online volunteers with organizations, to join forces and address the challenges of sustainable human development. Take action for peace and development now!
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2. TIP: How to find online volunteers to support your organization’s activities
Thousands of online volunteers with diverse profiles register on the Online Volunteering service website (www.onlinevolunteering.org) to find opportunities through which they can support sustainable human development. Unlike UNV volunteers, who are screened by UNV before they begin their on-site assignments, online volunteers submit their applications directly to the organizations which posted the opportunities. Much of the success of an online volunteering opportunity therefore depends on how you present the opportunity, and on how you select your volunteers.
To find volunteers whose skills can benefit your organization, your online volunteering opportunities must clearly specify the tasks and objectives. When reading how and why they are expected to contribute, volunteers searching for opportunities must be able to determine whether or not they are suitably qualified, and must be appropriately motivated to help your organization achieve its goals. You will find more information on how to write opportunity descriptions in the Resources section.
Once your opportunity has been published and volunteers have started to submit their applications, you should apply a thorough screening process to select the volunteers who have the skills and the commitment required to complete the task. The first step is to review their applications and to reject all candidates whose applications are not satisfactory. You may also wish to short-list candidates and then probe further by asking questions relevant to the task. For more information on how to select volunteers, please visit the Resources section.
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3. EXPERIENCE: Focus on online volunteers: Wayne A. Bacale
Wayne A. Bacale, an online volunteer from the Philippines, has been supporting various organizations through the Online Volunteering service since 2006. With seven years of professional experience in development work in the Philippines and Kenya, Wayne discovered online volunteering as a casual activity to be pursued after work and on weekends, sharing his skills in report writing, editing, project monitoring and evaluation, and volunteer management. The feedback he received from the organizations, however, made him aware of the impact his contributions were having on the organizations’ work. This changed his perception of online volunteering, which he now sees as a way of sharing knowledge and skills to help organizations around the world, while at the same time providing him with the opportunity to learn new strategies relevant to his professional area of specialization, and allowing him to develop an online network.
Wayne has been involved in the editing and reviewing of the communication strategy of the United Nations Development Programme's International Poverty Centre (IPC), and has also been a Communication on Progress (COP) Report Reviewer of the UN Global Compact. His collaboration with these organizations has given him the opportunity to understand and appreciate various UN initiatives aimed at achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), and provided him with insight into new trends and developments regarding the IPC programme.
He also assisted the United Nations Volunteers (UNV) programme in developing the UNV Reflection Toolkit, a guide for UNV volunteers in assessing performance and achievements, used as a basis for personal and professional planning. While making significant contributions to the toolkit, Wayne also learned about culturally and socially acceptable strategies in volunteer reflection. Through close communication and feedback from his counterpart at UNV, Wayne gained new ideas for developing reflection strategies.
Wayne is currently working as Project Coordinator to develop the Youth Development Action Guide, to be released in early 2009, for the Ghanaian NGO Young People We Care (YPWC). This Guide is tailored to the needs and requirements of the youth and youth groups on how they can contribute to the MDGs at the grassroots and national level. His contribution gave him a rich experience in online project coordination and collaboration with online volunteers from different nationalities, and allowed him to be involved in discussing new ideas and sharing views from different perspectives.
“Online volunteering is an interesting and worthwhile learning experience. Aside from helping organizations all over the world, it gave me an opportunity to understand global issues and how we can contribute towards development in our own simple way. Through my experience as an online volunteer, I can say that distance, time and race are not a hindrance towards skills sharing and global development.”
