How New Media has Changed the Landscape of Volunteer Engagement
Thursday night was a big night for the Entertainment Industry Foundation’s iParticipate
campaign. With unprecedented support from the industry, volunteering themes were written into some of America’s favorite prime-time shows.
It is an extraordinary example of what amounts to product placement for the greater good, so why isn’t it working?
This is a difficult and awkward conversation to have in a nonprofit world which often measures success by an organization’s appearances, not its impact. Nonprofits tend to operate in a place a bit like Garrison Keillor’s fictional Lake Wobegon where all the organizations are above average – particularly if you ask them.
iParticipate is new to Lake Wobegon, but it should come as no surprise that they too have quickly established themselves as an above average neighbor. In many ways they deserve that reputation.
If five years ago someone promised to organize a project that would write volunteering into the storylines of major TV shows, most would have considered it a well intentioned but impractical endeavor.
Last night the impractical became the possible as script writers put their spin on a changing social landscape.
Participating shows included:
Private Practice ABC – The practice brings their experts to a teen shelter to provide free check-ups for all the homeless teenagers.
30 Rock NBC – Kenneth volunteers at an animal shelter. He was never allowed to have a pet growing up so he decides to adopt all of the dogs.
Parks & Recreation NBC – The Parks team volunteers with Kaboom! to refurbish a playground.
The Office NBC – The group discusses volunteering.
This new reality is a reflection of how much the world has changed and how conversations about making a bundle have thankfully given way to conversations about making a difference.
But despite the best of intentions and millions of dollars worth of promotion and PSAs yesterday’s star-studded TV event didn’t work as planned.
How do we know? Well we’ve been waiting and preparing for what was promised by organizers from Entertainment Industry Foundation and Service Nation to be a massive spike in volunteering activity flowing from the campaign’s online home iParticipte.org. The plan was to use the unique star power of Hollywood to convince viewers of the importance of volunteering and drive millions of people to the new website iParticipate.org where they could find thousands of local volunteer opportunities pulled from sites like VolunteerSolutions, Craiglist, 1-800-Volunteer.org, Idealist and VolunteerMatch.
But the wave of new energy and excitement didn’t quite make it to shore.
Last night VolunteerMatch received a total of 874 new visits as a result of the campaign or what will likely translate into between 15 to 20 new volunteers.
Many will say as a nonprofit we ought to be grateful for whatever new volunteers we can find or explain away the results as just another example of how hard it is to convince people to volunteer, but we see it differently.
Part of the reason we do is that yesterday was an otherwise busy day at VolunteerMatch. As is pretty typical of a Thursday, we had a total of 33,250 visits, which if you are doing the math, means that about 98% of visits came from someplace other than the TV. Really? So where are they coming from?
The answer of course is Google and the long-tail of the internet. That is how much the word has changed, but not everyone is ready to believe it.
Without promotion or convincing or celebrity appeals, 14,376 people were on Google yesterday looking for volunteer opportunities and found VolunteerMatch. You might say, sure, but how many of them went to Google because they saw the campaign on TV? That’s tough to know exactly, but last Thursday we had 13,787 visits from Google.
That means that without any expensive PSAs, or TV production, or powerful sponsors, or celebrities, or any real extra effort at all, Google out performed Hollywood on Thursday 16 to 1.
That’s the world we live in. So what’s the lesson here? Should celebrities stop talking about volunteering? Is Google taking over the world?
No I don’t think so. I think the real lesson here is simple. The world has changed, and we need to catch up. New media, not old, is the future of volunteer engagement and if TV campaigns aren’t the secret-sauce of expanding volunteer engagement, let’s spend some time together looking at the facts to figure out what is.
But to do that we’ll need to move out of Lake Wobegon first — preferably to a place with lots of web engineers and where everybody has an above average appreciation of measurement and impact.
See you there.
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I remember a news story I read in the mid 1990s after race riots in LA. It asked why Michal Jordan and Magic Johnson were not visible in trying to stop what was happening. The writer said, that while these people were highly visible, their impact on the decisions kids make was not as much as we think, because they were not consistently involved in the lives of the kids they wanted to influence. A more influential person might have been someone less visible, but more consistently involved.
These TV shows, and other celebrities can influnce volunteerism and philanthropy, but not as much as we need, until they are more consistently involved, or associated with, different causes. If 30 Rock talks about a certain type of social issue, maybe the environment, and at the end of each show points to a directory listing environmental groups that people can join, the might influence a growth of involvement if they keep weaving this theme into their shows, and the actions of their actors, for many months, or even years.
Random acts of kindness are not the type of consistent, long-term marketing, that causes people to change habits. This was a good start. We need to see more.
It’s always a good thing when someone uses their celebrity to better a cause. The charities that celebrities draw attention to have made dramatic improvement worldwide. That being said though, this statement is powerful… ‘Google out performed Hollywood on Thursday 16 to 1′. Incredible.
Oh and forgot to add…agree completely with Patrick’s comment about the current disconnect in making human connections online. Goes along the lines of what I meant when I was talking about the importance of grassroots efforts…we’re so caught up in this exciting celeb/web 2.0 hubbub that that critical personal touch that every one relates to is overshadowed.
Thanks again for this! Really got me thinking!
Great post and lots of insightful feedback. Thanks so much for sharing this…I agree with Kristen here when she says that “it’s easy to over-estimate the power of stardom to mobilize people”. Not only that but I think it takes away from the work that these nonprofits do…I came across this post and thought it was highly relevant – OneXOne: Adding Value. The author is basically questioning the value added and overall effect of such high profile charity events that features big names in the entertainment industry. There are parallels between this and the questions that are raised in this blog.
There is definitely a need to strike a balance between new and old media to engage volunteers but I think we need to remember the importance of grassroots efforts… the basic, fundamental strategies that all nonprofits should keep in mind when gathering volunteers
I agree totally agree with Joanne, Micheal and Patrick. Awareness-raising of this sort might not need to need prompt immediate action in order to be successful. In fact, it might even be better for it not to. It wouldn’t be helpful in the long term to have a lot of people who immediately jump up from their televisions, run to their computers, and start looking for volunteer opportunities in a moment of excitement prompted by a celebrity, only to lose interest a week or two later because they were not really ready to volunteer, or not that committed to begin with. But slowly, over a period of time, as the message permeates throughout our pop culture, it may create a real cultural shift–which takes time, but in the long run will be far more valuable than a short-time surge in web traffic.
I’m not saying that the campaign didn’t have it’s problems. I think it’s easy to over-estimate the power of stardom to mobilize people, and, like most of these big Hollywood PSA campaigns, I’m sure there was at least a twinge of self-congratulation involved. Personally, I just don’t respond to celebrities on the big shiny box asking me to do something . And as much as I believe in this cause, it would be slightly worrisome to me if masses of people did.
Overall, I think it’s just too early to tell what sort of impact it’s going to have; and that impact may not be as cut and dried and a measurable as just looking at numbers.
Great stuff Greg. Very insightful. Since your statistics so obviously demonstrate that volunteer engagement is heavily intertwined with new (social) media you would think that old media would take note and listen purely out of self-interest. This seems like a classic case of traditional media thinking-inside-the-box. Iparticipate needs to be promoted at the junction of old media and new media where its content is distributed and discussed on the internet and mobile platforms…
Good discussion here. To me, three things stood out — two in Greg’s post and one in Michael’s comment:
First, I think it’s great that Greg is willing to be transparent with VolunteerMatch’s data to make a point and, second, that he’s willing to offer such a candid assessment, which is most valuable because it’s backed by data. We always hear that nonprofits need to produce more data for decision making and need to be more transparent about what works and what doesn’t if they want more resources.
Third, I think Michael’s point is important about longer term cultural change. Implementing messages of service and active citizenship throughout various touch points in society is important. A high school student sees something on TV about service + gets encouraged by a guidance counselor to get involved + see’s a friend on Facebook volunteering, etc. All of that adds up.
iParticipate is a multi-year campaign, so it will be interesting to see how it changes and grows. I would suggest a more robust grassroots (online and on-land) effort in tandem with the wide reach of TV shows — all of which will be most successful with candid assessment and data.
I’d just like to pick up on Michael’s point above. The advertising world is changing. More and more emphasis is placed on clickthroughs as a measure of an advertising campaign’s effectiveness. However, many point out that this fails to value the brand awareness generated by the ad campaign whether it’s using old mass media or social new media. The key challenge is for volunteer opportunity providers to work at clearly articulating long term goals. These might just then provide us with the kind of baseline we need that allows us all to demonstrate the effectiveness of whatever methods (Google, television,etc) we’re using to build a call to action to meet these long term goals.
My other point would be to say that at the moment the part of volunteer engagement that has most successfully transferred to the web is the recruitment/brokering part. This is no accident. It’s because brokering volunteering is essentially about an exchange of information, which is what the web is really good at. The bits of volunteer engagement that are more about human connections are lagging at the moment, e.g. understanding the difference you make to someone, reaching people in society you might otherwise never meet or be able to support, the mutual learning experience, etc. These aspects of what make volunteering really engaging, are still hard to replicate through online communities and the social web. One day they will be, and when they are the web will be transforming good intentions into actions much, much more effectively than it currently does.
I think you make an important point here about the long tail and how Google is more powerful than TV in regards to bringing people in. But I would also say that we don’t know what connects with people and what makes them turn to Google in the first place. It might just be that days or weeks or months later there are some folks who decide they want to volunteer, and that the show they watched had something to do with their choices.
Cultural change is harder to measure than immediate clicks. Did Al Gore’s movie have an impact on the Climate Change debate? Sure it did. But 20 years of slogging debate made the time ripe for it. And so with iParticipate, I don’t expect so much immediately, but I think it helps push the culture in the direction many of us have been working for a long time. It is both pushing and reflecting how far we’ve come. If we stop any activity that doesn’t result in immediate ROI we give up on long-term cultural change. So this is not an excuse for them overreaching on results, but it does say there is value there for the long-term goals.
I see the iParticpate campaign as one as awareness. It’s like advetising to raise the awareness of a brand. It doesn’t translate to immediate purchases, but plants the idea in viewers’ heads….an idea that may well sprout later. The shows, after all, don’t have a call to action usually (the PSAs do but not where volunteering is part of the story line), but demonstrate how volunteerism works and why it’s a good idea and how it can help society. I think it is unrealistic to think that people will immediately call the nearest nonprofit. At the same time, I think you underestimate the link between the TV component and the searches on Google. Mass media often drives people to the Internet. Let’s not criticize this worthy campaign and complain that we didn’t sell that many potato chips, so what’s the point? The point is that good causes are becoming part of the dominant cultural conersation.
well put greg – thanks for sharing this data w/ the rest of us. – premal
This is a good perspective on non-profits and social media. While old media methods may still be somewhat useful, today it’s about meeting would-be volunteers where they interact the most- and that’s online and through social media. Plus, it can be a lot cheaper…
Great article, thanks for posting!