One Day Activities for IT Volunteers or Volunteering Using IT
(Hacks4Good, for instance)


You know the term barn-raising? Where a group of neighbors gather and, in one-day, build a barn - or at least most of it?

It still happens, not only with barns. Such events also happen with computers. While the result isn't a barn, it can be something just as helpful.

For a couple of decades now, volunteers have been getting together for intense, one-day events, or events of just a few days, to build web pages, to write code (hackathons, apps4good, etc.), to edit Wikipedia pages, to transcribe historical documents and more. These are gatherings of usually of onsite volunteers, where everyone is in one location, together, but even before the global pandemic, these activities were involving or mobilizing remote volunteers - online volunteers helping from wherever they were.

These programs happened in one day, or a few days. It's a form of episodic volunteering, because volunteers don't have to make an ongoing commitment - they can come to the event, contribute their services, and then leave and never volunteer again. Because computers are involved, these events are sometimes called hackathons, even if coding isn't involved, though edit-a-thon or transcribe-a-thon are also being used more and more. I've even seen these events called microvolunteering, though others might say that's an inappropriate term, since volunteers have to contribute several hours of time, even a few days, not just a few minutes.

It can also be argued that editing Wikipedia pages or getting together to transcribe documents isn't really IT volunteering, since the volunteers are writing, editing and researching more than they are doing something tech-related. But I'm including it here, since using a computer is essential to participating.

Is a one-day event, or just-a-few-days-of activity, for a group of volunteers, working together, something your nonprofit, non-governmental organization (NGO), community-focused government program, school or other mission-based organization - or association of such - should consider undertaking?

Some advantages of these events:

Some disadvantages or challenges:

Here are five examples of what one-ish day volunteering for tech volunteers can look like, and then, what's needed to make these tech volunteering days successful:

Example #1: Wikipedia Edit-A-Thon

The Chronicle of Philanthropy highlighted the Smithsonian's gathering of volunteers onsite at the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art, in Washington, D.C. for an "edit-a-thon" to improve art history info on Wikipedia. In February 2014, 600 volunteers in 31 venues -  in the USA, Canada, Australia, Italy, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, in nonprofits and art schools, in museums and universities - added 101 female artists to Wikipedia

When you search for something on Google, Bing or Yahoo, very often the first link to come up will be one on Wikipedia. That's just one of the reasons your mission-based organization needs a profile there.

What organizations should have a Wikipedia strategy as well?

You not only need a profile or page on Wikipedia; you need that page to be linked to by other Wikipedia entries and you need to cite all of your information sources (newspaper articles, journal articles, web sites, etc.) to ensure the Wikipedia super users don't post banners on your site.

If paid employees of your program don't have time to map what needs to be done on Wikipedia, this is a terrific job for an online volunteer, recruited from among your current, long-term and very knowledgeable volunteers/members, from among art history students at the nearest university, etc. That person, as project leader, will not only identify all that needs to be done regarding a Wikipedia entry; he or she will also break all that needs to be done into well-defined tasks, so that different people can each undertake a different task.

One person will also need to write and gather all text to be uploaded; you aren't recruiting writers but, rather, people to adapt text and links in the Wikipedia style. One volunteer may be in charge of your organization's Wikipedia page, ensuring words link to other Wikipedia pages, as appropriate. Another volunteer may be in charge of ensuring other Wikipedia pages that should link back to you do just that (pages that name your organization, pages that detail the cause your organization addresses, or pages for famous or notable people that are somehow connected to your organization and are named on your Wikipedia page - all identified earlier by the project leader), and will probably need at least one or two other volunteers to help with this. 

You could organize such an event for all of the arts organizations in your area, or all the history-related organizations in your area, or all the religiously-focused organizations in your area, etc.

Also see How to run an edit-a-thon on the Wikipedia web site.

Example #2: Web Site Accessibility Fix-A-thon

Back in the late 1990s, it was possible to build a new web site in just one day for most nonprofits - their web needs, and the World Wide Web, weren't nearly as sophisticated as they are now. But those days are long gone for most nonprofits. Most nonprofits need a lot more than a day for even a team of web designers and developers, working a full eight hours, to create an entire web site for them.

But today, a nonprofit could still host a one or two-day Web Site Fix-A-Thon, where a volunteer, or group of volunteers, spend one day onsite at the organization and, under the guidance of staff, do some simple things to the agency's existing web site to vastly improve it. For instance, you could have a day or two where volunteers focus specifically on accessibility and usability for people using screen readers (people who are blind and have a tool that reads a web site's content to them), people who have low vision and use a tool that makes a web page bigger on their device, people who have mobility issues and don't use a mouse, someone with hearing impairments, etc. As a result, your web site becomes more accessible for EVERYONE - someone who is in a crowded place and cannot hear your videos, someone for whom English isn't their first language, etc. You demonstrate, via your web site, your commitment to digital inclusion.

At a Web Site Fix-a-Thon, a volunteer, or group of volunteers, could go through your nonprofit's current web site and:

This page from the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) offers simple steps with detailed guidance so that you can get an idea whether or not accessibility is addressed in even the most basic way on a web page - it's an excellent guide for volunteers at a web site accessibility fix-a-thon.

For web sites that use CSS, consider this tweet from accessibility expert Denis Boudreau:

I'm not a web designer so I really don't entirely know what Denis is talking about, but if he says it's "that simple" then, for someone who knows what CSS is, it really will be "that simple."

You could have volunteers who would bring their earphones and spend the day:

Example #3: Scan and Tag Day

You could use your organization's scanner - and ask volunteers to bring their own scanners - and spend the day scanning photos from your archives. Some volunteers scan, some volunteers tag them on your internal system (onsite or in the cloud) so they are appropriately archived and easy to find, some volunteers upload photos to a public photo-sharing like Flickr, other volunteers tag those photos on that photo-sharing site, as appropriate, other volunteers staff the sign-in table, and other volunteers serve food.

Example #4: Transcribe-a-Thon

There are lots of initiatives to transcribe historical documents - hand-written letters, newspaper advertising, posters and other "artifacts" in need of digitization - so that they become searchable online. These initiatives also often tag historical photos and write descriptions of such. Here is a SMALL sample of such (and note that these projects come and go regularly - many get finished just months after they start):

Example #5: Crisis Camp / Crisis Commons

This is a gathering of IT professionals, software developers, and computer programmers to aid in the relief efforts after earthquakes, floods, or hurricanes. Projects by these volunteers include setting up social networks for people to locate missing friends and relatives and creating maps of affected areas. "CrisisCampers are not only technical folks like coders, programmers, geospatial and visualization ninjas but we are also filled to the brim with super creative and smart folks who can lead teams, manage projects, share information, search the internet, translate languages, know usability, can write a research paper and can help us edit wikis."

Example #6: Book and Translation Sprints

FLOSS Manuals (FM) is a collection of different language communities that produce original documentation about Free Software. The FLOSS Manuals effort was launched in 2007 to create quality free documentation about Free and Open Source Software. "Our strategy since the beginning has been to develop communities to produce high quality free manuals about Free Software in their own language. Today we have more than 120 books in more than 30 languages and more than 3,000 contributors over 5 independent language communities (French, English, Farsi, Dutch, Finnish)." FM organizations events called Book Sprints, based on code sprints, but with the focus on producing documentation instead of code. A sprint brings together a group of writers, editors, and perhaps an artist and production specialist, to go from outline to published book in five days. FM also has translation sprints.

If your nonprofit serves a multilingual public, a translation sprint for your web site and publications can be a terrific event.

Example #7: Hackathons / Apps4Good

I am not a big fan of hackathons "for good", because most are created by corporations who think they know what nonprofits or their clients want, without actually talking to the nonprofits or the cients. They seem focused on peppy headlines: "Hackathon to Help Kids!" rather than creating something that lasts beyond that proclamation on a PR newswire. Corporate hackathon events last over 24 to 72 hours: 50 to 100 people organize into small teams to develop and present tech solutions to a distinct business problem. Participants design and code from the assumption that the problem they are solving for is known, real and validated. A nonprofit needing an app that clients can use to know what food banks are open when in relation to their geographic location, and how to get there by mass transit, is a good project. A hackathon to "build an app to solve hunger" is not a good project, because it cannot happen. And yet another app to find volunteering opportunities is so not needed - there are PLENTY of tech tools already for this. Apps I see developed, and re-developed, over and over at hacks4good events: apps to report sexual harassment on the street in a particular area, apps to remind people to take certain medication, apps to reach rural first-time mothers with maternal health information or people with HIV/AIDS with health information related to their challenges, and apps to address young people’s concerns about online harassment.

Even so, there are corporations that want to hold hackathons and there are nonprofits, hoping those corporations will make a hearty financial donation in association that more than covers the nonprofit's staff time to participate, willing to join in. The Ultimate Guide to Corporate Hackathons is focused on corporations, not nonprofits, but it's still excellent and easily adapted for nonprofits.

One-Ish Day Events for Tech-Volunteers: What it takes

The key to success with these days is a lot of preparation before the day happens. Your goal is not only to get the work done; you also want volunteers to have the experience of walking through the door or logging in, staying busy the entire time, never ever standing around or sitting at home waiting for a task or wondering when something is going to happen, having a great time, and leaving or logging off with a smile on their face. For you, that is going to take a HUGE amount of preparation - let's not mince words about that. But that preparation will be worth it: you will connect with new volunteers, connect with volunteers in new ways, create new supporters, re-energize current supporters, create excitement about your organization, and, if you go about this the right way, press coverage!

What these one day events for tech volunteers take in order to be successful:

The By the People project publishes a guide for How to Host a Transcribe-A-Thon, and although it's specific to its Library of Congress initiative, a lot of the advice is good for any edit-a-thon or transcribe-a-thon.

Never think of the only goal of these events is to get work done. Your goals should always include cultivating new and ongoing supporters. You want to turn people who attend these events into longer-term advocates and supporters of your cause, people who tell family and friends about your organization, who have their perception changed about a particular issue your organization is involved with, and maybe even are so moved by your work that they make a financial donation. To that end:

In the days following the event, you need to go through social media and "like" and respond to participants who commented about the event - this will be especially easy if they used the designated hashtag.

Evaluation

At minimum, as soon after the event as possible, you should report on your web site or blog (and share links on social media), and even via a press release:

Then you should have more substantial data to share in the weeks following the event, like:

Three to six months later, you should have data that answers these questions, even if you keep this data internal to use to improve future events:

The more follow-up data you have, the more data you have to say how and why your program makes a difference, and why donors should help pay for it. It will also make it much easier for you to find nonprofits, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), charities, community groups, schools and government programs to partner with for future events.

Should volunteers be charged for participation?

It is not unusual, nor automatically unethical, for a program to charge people who want to participate as a volunteer in a program. Even the Girl Scouts of the USA asks volunteers to pay a very small fee to become an official member (but will waive that fee for anyone who says they cannot afford it), and some Habitat for Humanity chapters and food banks asks groups coming from one organization, particularly from the corporate world, to pay a fee to help cover the costs of staff that set up the site for their feel-good-for-a-few-hours volunteering gig. The reality is that Volunteers are not free: people have to screen applicants (and even if a program has an automated system that screens applicants, someone has to be paid to build that system), train those volunteers (again, even if this is an automated system, someone usually has to be paid to build it), support the volunteers, track their progress, etc. 

In addition, charging a fee for participation greatly reduces the number of volunteers that drop out, and volunteer dropouts for these one-day events can derail the event altogether, cause more work to be done by the nonprofit that's left in the lurch without the expected number of participants, etc.

If you ask participants to pay a fee, be clear about what costs that fee will help cover:

For instance, if volunteers are receiving training as a result of their participation, could that training help improve their career opportunities? Could participating in the event help improve their career opportunities? Is it training they could get without participating in such an event and, if so, how much would such training cost? If there is a university class or coding school that provides a similar training and experience that you provide through this volunteering, what is the cost of that class? This data can all help you decide how much to charge, but don't charge so much that it looks like you are trying to make a profit nor so much that you would exclude traditionally under-represented groups. And note that most programs that have a cost they ask volunteers to pay will waive that cost for any qualified applicant who says they cannot afford it.

What if our team / group wants to do something more substantial?

If you want to engage in a more high-impact virtual volunteering experience, where volunteers mentor young people, provide expertise to professionals, create a video series regarding a public health topic, or otherwise mobilize online volunteers in activities that lead to a sustainable, lasting benefits to a community or cause, particularly for a community or audience that is at-risk or under-served, see this list of high-impact virtual volunteering project ideas (with links to programs who have actually undertaken these).

Also see

 
  Discuss this web page, or comment on it, here.


  Quick Links 

   my home page
 
 my consulting services  &  my workshops & presentations
 
 my credentials & expertise

 Affirmation that this is web site is created & managed by a human.
 
 My book: The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook

 contact me   or   see my schedule
 
 Free Resources: Community Outreach, With & Without Tech

 Free Resources: Technology Tips for Non-Techies

 Free Resources: Nonprofit, NGO & other mission-based management resources

 Free Resources: Web Development, Maintenance, Marketing for non-Web designers

 Free Resources: Corporate philanthropy / social responsibility programs

 Free Resources: For people & groups that want to volunteer
 
 linking to or from my web site
 
 The Coyote Helps Foundation
 
 me on social media (follow me, like me, put me in a circle, subscribe to my newsletter)

support my workhow to support my work

To know when I have developed a new resource related to the above subjects, found a great resource by someone else, published a new blog, uploaded a new video,
or to when & where I'm training or presenting, use any of the following social media apps to follow me on any of these social media platforms:

like me on Facebook      follow me on Twitter    Mastodon logo    follow me on Reddit    follow me on LinkedIn     view my YouTube
                videos


Disclaimer: No guarantee of accuracy or suitability is made by the poster/distributor of the materials on this web site.
This material is provided as is, with no expressed or implied warranty or liability.

See my web site's privacy policy.

Permission is granted to copy, present and/or distribute a limited amount of material from my web site without charge if the information is kept intact and without alteration, and is credited to:

Jayne Cravens
          & Coyote Communications, www.coyotebroad.com

Otherwise, please contact me for permission to reprint, present or distribute these materials (for instance, in a class or book or online event for which you intend to charge).

The art work and material on this site was created and is copyrighted 1996-2024
by Jayne Cravens, all rights reserved
(unless noted otherwise, or the art comes from a link to another web site).