"Utilizing Technology for Volunteer - Involving Organizations", paper by Mark Gannon - March 2001

ICT as Resource

"Perhaps the greatest benefit of information and communication technologies (ICT) is the capacity to share information" (Rykert 1999, p180). This may be an active process in that people become involved in online networking specifically to share information or it may be more passive in that people simply put information 'out there' in the hope that it will be discovered. However, ICT should be used in a strategic way to meet the needs of volunteer-involvers and volunteers whether actively or not.

In terms of email, one of the best ways to gain and share information on volunteer programme management is to join one of the many email discussion lists available (some are listed in Appendix 1). These allow practitioners and academics to share ideas and good practice or can act as peer support networks. A huge benefit of email discussion groups is that they transcend geography and therefore widen the knowledge base at the disposal of the volunteer manager. The nature of volunteer management as a profession, in the UK at least, is that it is quite small community. This can lead to the same ideas being regurgitated by the same individuals. A simple email discussion list can easily and quickly give an injection of new ideas that may never have been available through traditional channels of communication. It is also provides instant access to expertise that is unbounded by geography.

Web-based resources are also extremely important and can take various forms. They can include resources for volunteers managers, volunteers or others like researchers and policy makers. There are many 'good-practice' type websites online offering advice on how to recruit volunteers, how much expenses to pay or how to draw up a volunteer agreement. There are also links to books online with some excellent online bibliographies and sometimes the full text or summaries of publications. The Internet is also an excellent place to find data on volunteering. Many of the voluntary sector and volunteering representative and intermediary bodies have online resources as do many of the worlds volunteer centres. Some of the national volunteer centres have extremely advanced websites with very useful resources.

A huge benefit of the Internet, to volunteer-involvers at least, is that by and large the resources on it are free. The downside to freely available information, however, is that quality control is fairly difficult to ensure. This is an issue with the Internet generally though and not just volunteering-related resources.

Case Study: The National Centre for Volunteering is the national representative organisation in England on issues around volunteering, mainly dealing with national and regional organisations. Because they are based in London, getting information and resources 'out to the regions' has often been an issue. It has been given greater prominence with the Centre's recent move towards involving community-based organisations in their work. One of the main ways that the Centre has tried to reach it's geographically dispersed constituency is through it's website, which has developed considerably over the past two years and is an excellent example of how organisations can utilise ICT to provide a resource for it's constituency and beyond.

Like all effective web sites, the Centre's has been extremely well planned and designed and anyone visiting it can see the resources that are available immediately. The site is broken into several sections: About the Centre; Working with volunteers; I want to volunteer; Campaigns and Research. Each section contains an impressive array of resources. The 'Working with volunteers' section for instance includes all of the Centre's information sheets in both PDF and Word format, summaries of their 'Good Practice Guide' and 'Recruitment Guide', and full articles from Volunteering magazine.

The site is also becoming much more interactive. People can order publications through the website and as the next stage of development, the Centre will be creating a chat room for hosting real-time discussion sessions and an e-information service where people get responses to queries via email. The Centre's website is enabling the organisation to extend its reach both in terms of the types and range of organisations using its resources but also in terms of geography. Many queries and orders now come from outside the UK. The Centre has identified the use of ICT as one of its key strategic objectives for the next three years and the Internet is likely to be one of the key facets in this plan.

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