Virtual Volunteering Portals

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Virtual Volunteering Portals for Charitable
Non-Profit Organizations
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Overview

• 1. Charitable Non-Profit Organizations (CNPOs)
• What is a Charitable NPO?
• The Social Context
• Organizational Structure
• Information Technology (IT) for CNPOs
• IT Challenges for CNPOs
• 2. Volunteer Management (VM)
• Why Volunteering?
• The Cycle (Planning, Recruitment, Screening,
  Orientation/Training, Supervision/Feedback,
  Recognition)
• Challenges

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Overview

• 3. Research Virtual Volunteering Portal (VVP)
• Vision/Problem Stmt
• Objectives/Deliverables
• Justifications
• Related work
• Progress Summary whats been done so far
• 4. Liferay A platform for VVP
• What is it? A portal?
• Why Liferay? Reasons for choosing Liferay

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CNPOs What is a Charitable NPO?

• A NPO is
• one which is not operating for the profit or gain
  of its individual members, whether these gains
  would have been direct or indirect. This applies
  both while the organisation is operating and when
  it winds up.
• One which any profit made by the organisation
  goes back into the operation of the organisation
  to carry out its purposes and is not distributed
  to any of its members.
• Australian Taxation Office 1
• A Charitable NPO is therefore a NPO which
  performs charity including relief of poverty, the
  advancement of education, the advancement of
  religion, and any other purposes considered
  beneficial to the community.
• Nation Master Encyclopedia 5

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CNPOs What is a Charitable NPO?

• Examples of other types of NPOs
• churches
• community child care centres
• cultural societies
• environmental protection societies
• neighbourhood associations
• public museums and libraries

• scholarship funds
• scientific societies
• scouts
• sports clubs
• surf lifesaving clubs
• traditional service clubs.
• Australian Taxation Office 1

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CNPOs The Societal Context
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CNPOs Organizational Structure
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IT in CNPOs Enterprise Resource Planning

• Functionalities that support the activities and
  operations carried out
• 1. General User Management
• In General Profiles, user account renewal/Track
  lapsed Users and memberships
• 2. HR Management
• Volunteers profiles, service assignments/scheduli
  ng (match available volunteers to schedules or
  assignments), service record, training and
  contacts management 6
• Staff profiles, task assignment/record, payroll,
  training and etc
• 3. Donation Management
• Online donation collection, pledge tracking,
  automated acknowledgements and receipts, donor
  targeting, membership lists and reports (donor
  details/history and etc)

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IT in CNPOs Enterprise Resource Planning

• 4. Fundraising/Advocacy/Campaigns/Events
  Managements
• awareness building, follow-up, grant proposal
  management, tracking reports appeals
• 5. Financial/Accounting
• Accounts Receivable/Payable, Cash Management,
  Payroll and so on
• 6. Reporting Tools
• financial summary, project summary, appeal, grant
  and campaign performance analysis
• Example of Popular Web Systems for NPOs
• DonorPerfect, Blackbaud Edge, Interpid Andar,
  StarSoft Donor Works, Tower Care Donor Pro and
  many more

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IT in CNPOs Challenges

• Keeping the cost down

Figure 1 Non-Profit Grantland Cartoons 4
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IT in CNPOs Challenges

• Lack of Finances gt Lack of Resources, Expertise
  and so on
• Lack IT Strategy
• Poor Performance in Fund-raising
• Integration (Internally, Externally
  NPO-Government, NPO-Donor, NPO-businesses,
  NPO-NPO, NPO-Volunteers)
• More streamlined General Administration Processes
• Staff and Volunteers (Human Resources Management)
  Recruitment/Retention/Management/Training

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VM Why Volunteering?

• Key to Capacity Building

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VM Why Volunteering?

• A few quotes
• If we didnt have the volunteers to do what
  they do, we wouldnt be in business.
• -- Joint Table on Capacity, Volunteering Sector
  Initiative 2
• Some Important Statistics
• In Australia nearly 4.4 million people over the
  age of 18 years are volunteers, representing an
  impressive 32 of the civilian population of the
  same age.
• In 2000 volunteers contributed 704.1 million
  hours of volunteer work to the Australian
  Community
• Volunteering in Australia has an estimated dollar
  value of 42 billion per annum.
• ABS 6

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VM The Cycle
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VM The Cycle

• Planning generally involves
• Designing volunteering policies and procedures to
  ensure good volunteer relationship management
• identify your volunteer needsWhat tasks,
  specifically, do I need volunteers for?
• Designing volunteer positions and its job
  descriptions (General tasks/responsibilities
  involved with the job, Time commitment, Any
  special skills that are needed/preferred, Number
  of volunteers needed)
• Informing/Educating relevant stakeholders of
  volunteering management system in place

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VM The Cycle

• Recruitment generally involves
• Selection (defining target volunteer groups),
  interviewing, and screening
• Need for good selection policies (frequent
  follow-up, clear Job description, mutual
  understanding between CNPOs and Volunteer,
  volunteer commitment and expectation)
• Screening generally involves
• assessing risk, and discerning the suitability of
  an individual for a given task (an appropriate
  match between volunteer and tasks. Preventing an
  wrong person doing the wrong job at the wrong
  time)

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VM The Cycle

• Training/Orientation generally involves
• helps your volunteers feel confident and prepared
• decrease the chances of problems occurring by
  helping volunteers know what is to be expected
• Introduce mission, rules, policies and
  procedures outline programs and services
  outline organizational structure, Introduce
  Volunteering at the organisation and
  responsibilities

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VM The Cycle

• Supervision/Feedback generally involves
• Ensuring that the volunteer has completed his/her
  task assigned on time, below the budget and to
  the expected quality
• Recognition generally involves
• Recognizing and rewarding volunteers through
  celebrations and recognition events planned in
  their honour

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VM Challenges

• Challenges
• People will commit to short-term projects and
  things that have a beginning and an end. We have
  people who have been volunteering for 60 years.
  Were not going to get 60-year volunteers now.
  Were lucky if we can get them for six weeks.
• -- Joint Table on Capacity, Volunteering Sector
  Initiative 2
• How to recruit and retain Volunteers?
• Who would be the ideal volunteer?
• Why would they be interested in the volunteer
  opportunity?
• Where and when can you reach these people?
• Are the volunteers fulfilling their role
  effectively?
• Volunteer are not paid, how do we keep them
  motivated?
• values and benefits explained and reinforced
• Incentive and rewards programs

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Research Vision

• Vision
• To enable charitable non-profit organizations to
  make more efficient and effective use of web
  technology in its operational management task,
  creating a true e-nonprofit
• Problem Statement
• The development of a model/framework supporting
  the systematic realization of the Volunteering
  Management Procedures for Charitable Non-profit
  Organization

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Research - Objectives/Deliverables

• Objectives/Deliverables
• Virtual Volunteers Management's Handbook for
  Charitable NPOs - Summarize a generic set of
  challenges that volunteer management systems
  (planning, recruiting, supervision, evaluation,
  service delivery and volunteer motivation) face
  in an online environment
• Virtual Volunteers Portal (VVP) - Propose and
  implement an efficient, extensible and reliable
  portal reference architecture as a platform
  independent design according to the handbook
  above.
• Case Study Reports evaluation reports of VVP in
  production environment
• VVPUser Manual - guides and other relevant
  documentations for the framework implemented

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Research - Justification

• Justification of research
• Most nonprofit and voluntary organizations
  identified human capital staff and volunteers
  as their greatest resource
• -- Joint Table on Capacity, Volunteering Sector
  Initiative 2
• 1. Lack of standardization of VVM and
  administration practices
• 2. Lack of reference portal architectures which
  support the operational tasks of VVM
• for CNPOs

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Research - Justification

• 3. Wide geographical distribution of Australian
  Volunteers gt going to work
• becomes difficult 6, VVM means a greater
  volunteer resource pool.

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Research - Justification

• 4. Management is one of the most common volunteer
  activities amongst volunteers 6

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Research - Justification

• 5. Short voluntary hours and low frequency of
  volunteering gt need for greater flexibility7

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Research - Justification

• 6. substantial financial resources spent on
  volunteers 7

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Liferay What is it?

• Liferay Portal is an open source portal that
  helps organizations collaborate
• more efficiently by providing typical
  infrastructural services and a
• consolidated view of disparate
  applications through portlets
• Open Source MIT licenses (zero licensing
  fees) gives rights to use, copy, modify, merge,
  publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
  copies of the Software
• Infrastructural Services User Management
  (SSO, Sessions Life Cycle), Security, Access
  Management, Scalability (Clustering Load
  Balancing), Fail Over, Integration
• Consolidated View Single Personalized
  Interface and Point-of-Entry
• Porlets Independent pluggable
  components/application to the portal

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Liferay What is it?

• Liferay Interface

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Liferay What is it?

• High-Level Architectural Diagram

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Liferay Why Liferay?

• 1. Abundant set of features (1)
• Personalization Customization - Streamline each
  persons interaction so they only see what they
  care about (modification of colors, layout,
  functionalities)
• Single sign-on
• Out-of-box Portlet News feed aggregators,
  Weather, Blogs, Calendar, Document Library,
  Journal (CMS), Image Gallery, Mail, Message
  Boards, Polls, RSS, and Wiki
• Session Management
• Logon/Authentication

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Liferay Why Liferay?

• 1. Abundant set of features (2)
• Application Server Agnostic work on lightweight
  servlet containers like Jetty and Tomcat, or on
  J2EE compliant servers
• Internationalization Chinese, Dutch, English,
  French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean,
  Portuguese, Spanish, Turkish, and Vietnamese are
  already included
• Administration administrators to easily manage
  users, groups, and roles through a GUI interface
  (Groups signify a collection of users. Roles
  signify permissions that a group or user can be
  bound to. Access to portlets are also restricted
  to users based on roles.)

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Liferay Why Liferay?

• 2. Solid Technical Architecture (1)

Struts MVC framework, i.e. View - display
logic is concentrated in a few template files
read by Tiles. Controller Action Servlets to
dispatch and co-ordinate requests Model
Porlets, Session EJBs and Java Support
classes EJBs Spring AOP, Proxy and
IoC Hibernate ORM tool for the persistence
layer which enables pluggable databases
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Liferay Why Liferay?

• 2. Solid Technical Architecture (2)

JSR-168 Porlet API Compliant deploy any JSR 168
compliant portlet WSRP Compliant enable the
production and the consumption of
WSRPs Security JAAS to propogate the
authenticated user principal across the servlet
and EJB tiers. SSL compatible, LDAP
Integration. Scalable N-Tier Cluster uses
OSCache to provide deployers with a clustered
cache. You can scale by adding more nodes without
sacrificing on caching
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Liferay Why Liferay?

• 3. Open Source MIT licenses (Zero Licencing
  Cost) rights to use, copy, modify, merge,
  publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
  copies of the Software
• 4. Based Open Standards and Framework based on
  J2EE, Struts, Spring, Hibernate, Lucene
  (documentation search), XSL and so on
• 5. Active User/Developer Community Liferay has
  1,500 registered users on its forum
• 6. No. of Liferay Portals in production these
  include Bankok Airlines, EducaMadrid, BT Group
  and a random search of liferay on google (255
  hits click http//www.google.com/search?hlenieU
  TF-8qinurllayoutinurlp_l_idbtnGSearchmeta)
  
• 7. Development tools agnostic can be developed
  with any Java and J2EE compliant tools

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Liferay Why Liferay?

• 8. Comprehensive documentation 1

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Liferay Why Liferay?

• Hightlight 1. Installation documentation for
  different servers 1

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Liferay Why Liferay?

• Hightlight 2. Development documentation 1

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Conclusion Related Work

• Online recruitment service for volunteers and
  NPOs
• 1. VolunteerMatch http//www.volunteermatch.org/
• 2. VolunteerWorks http//www.volunteer.ca/volwork
  s/index.htm
• 3. Australian Volunteering Search
  http//www.volunteersearch.gov.au/
• 4. The Center of Volunteering http//www.voluntee
  ring.com.au/index.asp
• 5. Community Builder NSW an e-government to NPO
  collaboration site, URL
• http//www.communitybuilders.nsw.gov.au/
• For more, go to http//www.ee.usyd.edu.au/jcheng/
  frame-content-nfp.htm

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Conclusion Future Plans

• Finalise requirements statement and use cases by
  end of August 2005
• Implement and Test the Volunteering planning
  portlet by end of September
• Final Thesis Proposal by end of September
• For more information on project, go to
• http//www.ee.usyd.edu.au/jcheng/frame-content
  -research.htm

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References

• 1 ATO, Are we a Non-Profit?, URL
  http//www.ato.gov.au/nonprofit/content.asp?doc/c
  ontent/24481.htmpage3pc001/004/031/002mnu144
  2mfp001/004stcy1
• 2 GraJoint Table on Capacity of the Voluntary
  Sector Initiative (June 2003), The Capacity to
  Serve A Qualitative Study of the Challenges
  Facing Canada's Nonprofit and Voluntary
  Organizations, Voluntary Sector Initiative.
  Online. Retrieved 5th May 2005, from
  http//www.vsi-isbc.ca/eng/knowledge/pdf/capacity_
  to_serve.pdf
• 3 De Vita C. and Fleming C. (April 2001),
  Building Capacity in Nonprofit Organizations, The
  Urban Institute. Online. Retrieved 23rd May
  2005, from http//www.urban.org/pdfs/building_capa
  city.pdf
• 4 Grantland Cartoons. Retrieved 23rd May
  2005, from http//www.grantland.net/
• 5 National Master Encyclopedia. Retrieved
  15th August 2005, from http//www.nationmaster.com
  /encyclopedia/Charitable-trust

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References

• 6 Australian Bureau of Statistics (20th June
  2001 and last modified 18th March 2005). 4441.0
  Voluntary Work, Australia, Australian Bureau of
  Statistics
• 7 Peter D. Hart Research Associates (February
  2004). Research Findings for VolunteerMatch
  Results Of Online Surveys Among Potential
  Volunteers And Nonprofit Partners. Peter D. Hart
  Research Associates, Inc.
• 8 Jason Cheng's Portal, http//www.ee.usyd.edu
  .au/jcheng
• 9 Independent Sector, http//www.independentse
  ctor.org/

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Suggestions? Comments? Questions?
Thank you!
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Volunteer - National Standards

• Procedure for involving volunteers according to
  the national standard
• 1. Policies and procedures
• 2. Management responsibilities
• 3. Recruitment
• 4. Work and the workplace
• 5. Training and development
• 6. Service delivery
• 7. Documentation
• 8. Continuous improvement.