YouthNet blog

Thursday May 24, 2007

Government websites revisited

More than a year ago I posted here about the lack of information about volunteering on government websites. Given that promoting volunteering is a stated government objective and that it cuts across a huge amount of government work, it seemed reasonable to expect them to at least provide some basic help and links. Yet hardly any did.

Checking back, things don't seem to have improved. A keyword search on the Department of Health site still produces nothing helpful. Likewise the Courts Service and The Department for Work and Pensions,

On the site where someone ignorant of the remit of government departments might expect to find information about volunteering, the Department for Communities and Local Government , I can't find anything, even under the heading "Community cohesion." And here's what a keyword search produces.

Even on the site with formal responsibility for volunteering it would take a dogged user to find helpful information if you actually wanted to volunteer. Here are the keyword search results.

As I said last time, I might have missed something, but then so would other people looking for information. And if the sites are this bad for volunteering, how good are they for other information that people might be looking for?

The exception, now as a year ago, is the self-proclaimed "Website of the government" (known more commonly as "directgov").  It's easy to use, comprehensive and apparently made with users in mind. Try this result for a keyword search for volunteering. There's even a page with a link to do-it.

Of course, directgov has a different remit, but government departments really should learn from it. They could start by giving less prominence to speeches by Ministers and more thought to what members of the public might actually find useful.

Thursday May 17, 2007

Vital statistics

The volunteering world is ever so slightly obsessed with statistics. Funders always want to know who's doing what and why they're not doing more, and organisations want to show who they're reaching and who might be susceptible to a new campaign.

For years the most authoritative study was the National Survey of Volunteering, by the Institute for Volunteering Research (IVR). Conducted every ten years, it's a major survey based on random face-to-face interviews. The key finding of the most recent version was that 48% of the population had taken part in 'formal volunteering' (ie with an organisation) in the previous 12 months.

That figure always seemed very high to me. Can almost half of the population really volunteer every year? However, the Home Office Citizenship Survey 2003 (pdf) came up with a similar figure of 42% of the population doing formal volunteering.

What then are we to make of a new survey by The Samaritans? It found that "Many young people had thought about volunteering, but few had acted on it: 65.4 per cent of 16-24 year olds have thought about helping their community in their spare time, but only two per cent actually turn out and volunteer."

That's right, two per cent. Two!

Figures for young people volunteering have always been slightly lower than for the rest of the population, but the 1997 National Survey still found that 43% of all 18-24 year-olds undertook formal volunteering.

Clearly something is very different in the methodology. Yet if I ask myself how many people I know actually do formal volunteering, the percentage is probably close to what the Samaritans came up with.

Does any of this matter? Well, the focus on young people volunteering in recent years stemmed from a reported fall in their participation found by the 1997 National Survey. And no doubt organisations like v will be conducting surveys to find out how much impact their work has achieved.

A tip: if your organisations wants to show the impact of its work, use the Samaritans methodology before a project starts and then later switch to the IVR approach to demonstrate how much volunteering rates have increased.  

Thursday May 10, 2007

Genitals, grub, rock'n'roll and t'internet: TheSite.org quizzes

We've recently launched quizzes on TheSite.org that cover everything from knowledge of STIs to weird UK laws. It was a project that took a while to develop, not because it was overly complicated, but because we wanted to come up with something that added value to the site rather than just acted as a five-minute diversion.

Quizzes on TheSite.org, we reckoned, should have some... educational value. maybe even edu-tainment!  But seriously, there did seem like an opportunity to provide some fun functionality that had an information layer hidden underneath. The risk, as always with this is you can't find the balance and the fun stuff is pushed sideways as you try and wedge in some sort of message.

I think Kim, our journo who put this together did really well at finding the balance. See for yourself by taking the quizzes.

You can also post your results on any blog/social network page you might have, like I've done below. Just don't call me a geek.

How tech-savvy are you?

You scored 10 out of 10

You know, there's no shame in being a geek. Really. If anything, at least friends and family can rely on you for tech help. Now all you need to do is put your knowledge to work and look at saving money with your computer and keeping safe online.

Thursday May 03, 2007

Greening Apple

Imagine winning a Webby Award, and it being only the second best thing to happen to you that week.

That's the happy circumstance for the people behind Greenpeace's Green My Apple campaign.

On Monday they won the Activism Webby for their site which, parodying Apple's look and feel, attacks the company for using "hazardous substances that other companies have abandoned". It's actually quite a straightforward campaign, but because Apple's branding is so strong, hijacking it is very effective.

Greenpeace was pleased with the award, yet, as they said: "It's a victory that has a bittersweet taste, in that the Webby Awards celebrate a world made possible by the very electronics industry which our e-waste campaign is challenging, and which our Green my Apple project is but a part."

However, by Tuesday there was reason to be more cheerful. Apple announced a shift to a greener policy that, while not everything that Greenpeace has asked for, did represent significant progress.