January 19, 2010
Volunteering widget: Basic gateway to civic engagement
Engaged citizens rarely pop out of thin air. Often, volunteering is the “gateway drug” that gets them hooked on learning about, and working to enhance, their community.
If your news organization wants to encourage local civic engagement, but lacks substantial time or resources for this effort, then enabling local volunteering (not just covering it) can be a key step along this path. One of the easiest ways to achieve this is to use “widgets” to deliver the strength of existing volunteering services on your news site.
(This is part of a series of guest posts by Amy Gahran. Amy is looking how news organizations and other institutions can implement the findings of the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy, This joint project of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Aspen Institute Communications and Society program produced the report, “Informing Communities: Sustaining Democracy in the Digital Age.” Read more articles in this series.)
VolunteerMatch.org is a popular nonprofit online clearinghouse for all kinds of volunteer opportunities, both in-person and online. Just enter into their search engine your location and/or the type of volunteering that interests you (such as “environment” or “seniors”) and you will get a list of current opportunities, with details and contact information.
You can incorporate the power of the VolunteerMatch database on your news site, for free. VolunteerMatch offers a SearchLite widget. This bit of HTML code allows you to place a special search box on your web site, so that people can search for local VolunteerMatch.org opportunities directly from your site.
Other widgets that support volunteering are available. For instance, DoSomething.org (another clearinghouse) offers several. Also, the Volunteering in America widget from the federal Corporation for Community and Government Service presents and analyzes “the latest Census Bureau data on volunteer trends and demographics for all 50 states and more than 125 cities.” You can find many other volunteering widgets by searching Widgetbox.
Strategic positioning of volunteering widgets. Where you display a volunteering widget can help make the connection between volunteering and civic engagement. On web pages where you cover local civic news (such as school board meetings or city council meetings), experiment with placing a volunteering widget in the sidebar, or in a box positioned mid-story. It’s easy to treat it as a kind of public service ad, since widget code often comes in (or can be customized to fit) standard online ad dimensions.
Positioning a volunteering widget alongside your explicitly civic content (not just near stories about local volunteer efforts) implies the “you can take action” connection.
Use the widget information Some widgets provide reporting for the sites where they are embedded. If your widget tells you what kinds of volunteering opportunities people are searching for on your site, that might spur particularly attractive coverage.
...It’d be great if local governments would create matching services for local civic engagement opportunities. I haven’t seen this yet, but I can envision a VolunteerMatch-like widget where people could search for opportunities to help with (or join) a local school board, or city council, or planning committee. That might be a perfect fit for a civic-minded news site.
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Tags: knight foundation, civic, knight commission, local
Comments
Robert here from VolunteerMatch. Great post Amy - I love what Knight is doing to encourage publishers to look at volunteer engagement as a rising form of localized and actionable content. Just wanted to add a couple of other ways we make the volunteer opportunities in our network available to 3rd party publishers. Don’t forget that news sites that are noncommercial in natural can take advantage of VolunteerMatch’s full feed API of data now available under a Creative Commons license. http://www.volunteermatch.org/legal/creativecommonslicense.jsp. Also, we have made RSS feeds available for use from the site. Just run a search, look for the RSS icon, grab the URL, and place it wherever you’d like. In this way, a small-market news site can embed a feed specific to their community and/or cause from VolunteerMatch. Keep up the good work. http://www.volunteermatch.org
By Robert Rosenthal, 01/20/10 at 10:17 am
Terrific conversation, Amy. Getting more people to volunteer is fantastic, keeping them coming back - even better. One in three people don’t return to volunteering and cite poor management/coordination as the # 1 reason.
Another way publishers can support and foster local service is to help volunteer leaders at small nonprofits, grassroots community groups and schools better manage their volunteers. Ideally suited for community properties, VolunteerSpot (http://www.VolunteerSpot.com) has a widget that lets anyone coordinate service activities simply and easily. Not a match service, but an online volunteer scheduling and sign up tool that saves valuable time, supports informal volunteer leaders, and keeps people engaged in service. Private branding options are available.
By Karen_VolunteerSpot, 01/20/10 at 10:16 pm
Great discussion. Getting people to volunteer means making sure others are able to see what is needed and that others are also involved.
MySignUp.com provides those exact requirements.
See an active example—its simple to use—at http://www.mysignup.com/springfling
We try to provide a single page for volunteer organizers instead of many pages, this helps make the experience for our user’s volunteers be a quick simple task so they aren’t lost or confused or so they dont just give up
By cgstackhouse, 01/25/10 at 7:03 am
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