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A nonprofit manager's guide to online volunteering
Author(s) -
Dhebar Beatrice Bezmalinovic,
Stokes Benjamin
Publication year - 2008
Publication title -
nonprofit management and leadership
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.844
H-Index - 54
eISSN - 1542-7854
pISSN - 1048-6682
DOI - 10.1002/nml.200
Subject(s) - the internet , service (business) , business , selection (genetic algorithm) , public relations , volunteer , marketing , computer science , world wide web , political science , artificial intelligence , agronomy , biology
As access to the Internet expands, volunteer managers have the option of using this new technology to manage pools of volunteers online. Online volunteering can appear deceptively simple: post an opening, select a volunteer, and then manage them by e‐mail. However, our evaluation of an active online volunteering service used by more than three hundred organizations and ten thousand potential volunteers indicates that additional planning and management are frequently needed. Through an analysis of two years of quantitative data and interviews with more than forty volunteers and managers, we have extracted suggested practices and programmatic implications for managers in the areas of program design, volunteer selection, training, ongoing operations, and evaluation.