By Simon Doyle
A couple of weeks ago Renata Soutter posted a volunteer opportunity for a “web wizard” with Volunteer Ottawa. Her organization had launched a website last year and now needs people to maintain it. But not all charitable organizations have the technology resources and skills to do this. So Soutter listed the web wizard position as a job to be done from home.
As cash-strapped non-profit organizations shift into the more accessible and efficient world of everything digital, they are increasingly in need of costly equipment and tech-savvy volunteers.
Meeting this need, however, is becoming easier. It can be done from volunteers’ homes, saving organizations the cost of space, software and equipment.
Soutter, 34, is a paid manager at Masc, a local organization that puts on arts workshops for children and youth, getting them involved in activities like dance and theatre. She says for the past three years, Masc has used anywhere between five and 10 “virtual volunteers” at a time, for tasks such as desktop publishing, editing, writing, web design, and technological assistance.
“Because we’re a growing organization, space in the office can be an issue for us,” Soutter says. “So we don’t really have the physical space to have a lot of our volunteers working here.
“The fact that a volunteer can work at home or at a remote location works really well for us because they might have more advanced computer technology than we can afford here in the office, and they have software, again, that sometimes we don’t have.”
A 2002 study by two University of Victoria professors found that one-third of non-profit groups in Canada are now working with virtual volunteers. Due to government cutbacks, volunteer organizations are under pressure to do more with fewer resource.
Lisa Hartford, a spokeswoman for the Canadian Centre for Philanthropy, says governments have shifted from core funding to project-based funding, which makes it difficult for charitable groups to pay for things such as rent and computer equipment. “Sometimes it comes down to … either a fax machine or a new Microsoft Word licence,” Hartford says.
Half of all Canadian non-profit agencies are run by volunteers alone, she adds. “We expect there to be considerable potential for organizations to use more virtual volunteers as the years go on.”
Virtual volunteering is also creating opportunities for people with disabilities, people too far away to travel to a workplace, and those bound to the home for other reasons, such as looking after a family member.
Virtual opportunities are showing up on volunteer centre websites, such as the Volunteer Opportunities Exchange, a national site run by Volunteer Canada. This site offers a virtual volunteer search option that brings up job descriptions like data entry, database management, project management, technology support, translation, desktop publishing and communications.
With so many people connected, finding virtual volunteers is increasingly easier. The latest figures from Statistics Canada say that in 2003, 7.9 million – or 63 per cent of Canada’s 12.3 million households – had at least one member who used the Internet regularly. This is a 54 per cent increase from 1999.
This does not mean that people are volunteering for non-profit groups on the other end of the country, however. Although Soutter once recruited a volunteer technical assistant based in Toronto, she prefers to meet her virtual volunteers at least once, so she tends to look within the Ottawa region.
Soutter, who does more communications than technical work, says staying knowledgeable about changing technology is a challenge.
“Working with a volunteer, especially a student or a young person or someone in university, it’s amazing, because their skills are so developed. So that’s a real bonus for us.”