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Comment by ralph84 | Hacker News Reader

In general they also don't need your sporadic untrained volunteer time either. The volunteering events that HR departments love to organize where employees earning six figures spend hours on make work always strike me as an incredibly inefficient way to actually help people in need.

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Charities run these sort of events primarily as fundraising. People who have spent some time volunteering are way more likely to donate and continue donating. It's common that it costs the charity more to supervise the untrained company people than it would to hire for the tasks, but it's still positive when you factor in future funding.

So true. I helped out sorting produce at a food bank for a company organized event. Clearly we were an imposition on the workers there who were far more efficient and then pulled away to spend a half hour training us to do their job poorly for three hours.

Great for coverage in the company newsletter though.

I'd give a call-out to Habitat for Humanity in the US (providing lower-cost homes to qualifying families).

From the builds I've worked, they seem more than happy to exploit your muscle and tell you exactly what needs doing. It helps that home construction is mostly repetitive (nail this way, 100 times).

Also, surprise finding that about 1/4 of IT colleagues don't know how to drive a nail.

1/4 seems low

There's "I can make this nail go in if I work at it for a while" and "in straight with four hammer blows".

It was generally "I don't understand what 'smack it hard' means."

When you're driving 16d's, no sense beating around the bush.

I'm probably one of the people who thinks they know how to do it, but in reality don't.

Imho, it's mostly the right weight hammer + accuracy. Sadly, the latter of those lessons was personally learned only through the smashing of many a finger, to the tune of my grandfather's amused laughing.

That's where nailers come in handy. Using a hammer is kind of like coding on an Apple II.

Great organization there, and the people donating time do actually work enough hours to amortize the training time. It’s less useful from a corporate publicity standpoint though because of the time investment. Plus your employees are being trained into an opportunity for work that may be more satisfying and still decently paid, and then leave.

I'm not the volunteering type, but I went to a work-arranged event where we tutored kids. I ended up feeling mostly guilty after doing it because it would be better for these kids to have ongoing mentoring by the same person than a revolving pool of tech randos.

Sometimes it is just that many randos care at all that matters, and that inspires a person to feel that they matter because you care.

Sometimes you do just need bodies to move dirt or spread mulch or stuff envelopes or whatever. Obviously the phenomena you describe is real, but please don't write off volunteering as a whole.

Or you could do your normal work for 100$/hours, then donate that to pay two people at 50$/hours to do it. By spending the same amount of time, you helped twice as much.

Sometimes there's value in getting your hands dirty, in connecting with your local community, in having a sense of satisfaction from personally doing a good thing, in seeing how those less fortunate are struggling.

Not every problem is a pure efficiency maximization problem. There are intangibles to consider as well.

The question is then, why do organisations ask for volunteers? They could just appeal for money and pay for people to e.g. rattle tins. Maybe having volunteers signals something to the public, e.g. that the charity is doing good work.

Having been part of an org that asked for volunteers, we did it for two reasons:

First, to try to have a pool of repeat volunteers who we could rely on. In any other context, we would call these people "employees" but we ran on such a shoestring we couldn't pay everyone for all of their labor. Sucks, but such is the nature of the non-profit world outside of the glossy donor magazines. Most of these generous souls were recruited from friends and family or were people who'd received services from us in the past.

Second, is for advertising and to drum up support. People are far more likely to donate to a group they've volunteered with, even once, in the past as they feel a sense of ownership over the organization's outcome. Those "bring a bunch of six-figure salary folks to a group to pack boxes for a few hours?" They tended to result in some of the best donations we received for the whole year.

Free Staff? Is there another term for this that's proper and also doesn't imply compensation?

Is the word you're looking for "volunteer"?

"volunteer staff" is probably close.

"volunteer" by itself is not, because it implies nothing about it being long-term.

Neither one really gets the connotation right.

Repeat volunteer. Long term volunteer.

This is actually a double-edged sword, at least in the USA. You can’t have volunteers and employees do the same work, even at a charity. If you do, you fall afoul of federal wage laws. So you aren’t allowed, for example, to have a mixture of paid and volunteer workers acting as docents at a museum to help with staffing challenges, or have a mix of volunteer and paid workers work the register.

Sorry, I was unclear; I meant we would love to hire all of these amazing people who come back to volunteer week after week, but we can't afford it so we rely on donated labor.

The (very small number of) paid staff jobs and volunteer roles definitely don't overlap. First because our lawyer agrees with you, and second because we feel like that would be extremely rude to have one person be paid while another person is doing the labor for free. If one person is getting paid to do the role, everybody doing that role should be getting paid.

We try to do right by our volunteers. For example, when we have a new paid opening, we tell our volunteers about it first. And sometimes someone donates some money with a note of "do something nice for the volunteers, if you can," so we'll throw a party for our amazing volunteers or buy a nicer lunch (everybody gets fed but sometimes it's boxed sandwiches with chips and other days it's a full taco spread from a local restaurant)..

I'd ask in response if you've ever seen an organization asking for volunteers that isn't also asking for money.

If you can volunteer in addition to sending money, depending on the org they will have some shitwork to do that is unpleasant/monotonous (would cost money to get someone to do) and low-skilled (you probably won't screw it up, and they don't have to waste skilled staff on it - and the skilled staff hate doing it even more than you will.)

> Or you could do your normal work for 100$/hours, then donate that to pay two people at 50$/hours to do it. By spending the same amount of time, you helped twice as much.

This view doesn't take account of the massive range of skills required to deliver actual services (conservation, relief, etc), which would be cripplingly expensive to deliver through paid / contracted staff.

Concrete example: I've been volunteering at a raptor conservancy trust in the UK for two years. The advantages of volunteers is that the Trust gets a pool of enthusiastic people who can be tasked on a wide range of tasks on a very flexible basis. Actual volunteer tasks (I have done about half of these) include

* engagement with the public (crowd control, explaining what is going on, etc)

* animal husbandry (cleaning, water bowls, etc)

* construction (e.g. new aviary builds)

* infrastructure maintenance and repair (aviaries, fences, benches, signage, etc)

* equipment maintenance and repair (lawn mowers, power tools, etc)

* grounds work (gardening, weed control, etc)

* photo-library management / social media editing

* IT support

* conservation surveys (e.g. species surveys / transects)

* nest box deployment

And many more. The volunteers' free time allows the Trust's paid permanent staff to concentrate on their core competencies: looking after birds of prey and supporting global breeding projects and anti-poacher activities. The Trust is often able to match volunteer duties to the individual volunteers who enjoy them most / have a demonstrated aptitude - e.g. a retired guy who enjoys pottering with machines one day a week can maintain a small fleet of lawn mowers, strimmers, ATVs, pressure washers, etc, without the Trust incurring a regular maintenance contract. People with DIY carpentry skills can put up signs, make nest boxes, fix seats, etc.

Volunteer support has also been essential during the pandemic, when the Trust's revenue was slashed as a result of lockdowns.

Your consistent volunteering over multiple years is great and helpful. What doesn’t have anywhere near the same impact for the charity is a group of randos showing up for an afternoon in matching company shirts after a morning scavenger hunt, play-act volunteering for a few hours, then disappearing to the company-sponsored drinks and dinner event never to be heard from again.

Thank you!

> What doesn’t have anywhere near the same impact for the charity is a group of randos showing up for an afternoon

Yes, I totally agree. It's the long term commitment that makes volunteers useful. Rando newbies need monitoring and don't know how much they don't know about the real problems. So can only be given a narrow range of tasks. They can't be trusted with tools that are dangerous or tasks that have expensive failure modes.

But some percent stick around? I would go going back to habitat for humanity if not for the fact the work sites are all closed due to covid.

> But some percent stick around?

Yes, these are the ones that you start to invest time in.

Coming back to the organisation I volunteer for, the majority of the volunteers are already 'members' (e.g. they have purchased annual season tickets, etc). A few will drop out after a few weeks, typically when they realise that the work can be physically demanding and in all weathers. But once people demonstrate reliability and earn trust, then they usually get the chance to do more interesting things.

My hourly rate is over one thousand dollars an hour, and I still volunteer because it's fulfilling to get your hands dirty.

Sorry that I'm selfish.

If you regularly volunteer for the same task then you are helpful. A one day and never seen again probably wasn't helpful.

I've volunteered one offs before. A local urban farm needed to plant dozens of trees. They spent 15 minutes teaching them turned loose the group. We got them planted in like an hour. Then we moved onto weeding and litter cleanup.

Yes, I volunteer for something that requires a week of training. I volunteer a day every month or so.

Well, at least you recognise that you're doing it for yourself; self-awareness is the first step. Maybe you could donate money too, to make up for it.

I'd be willing to bet most people on this site are paid salary, not hourly.

You can still divide your salary by how many hours you work in an average year.

Sure. But I can't choose to work another hour instead of volunteering, make $60, and donate it. Salary doesn't work that way, and which is why these comparisons never make any sense to me.

In fact, if I decide to work another hour, I would be making less per hour.

most of America isn't making $100/hour. I don't make $100/hour. Heck, 2 years ago, I wasn't even making $50/hour.

I get your point, but for a good bulk of people, their time is in fact worth less than their total individual income for that day.

I’d see those as one day internship to get to know an organization and what they do day to day.

The same way as companies allow kids to come to “do” their parent’s work for one day, it’s more of a PR move + keeping your org in touch with people from different culture/positions.

They do however love the opportunity to grow a sense of loyalty and investment in people earning six figures

Our local minor league baseball team supports fund raisers by having the charity's volunteers work the concession stand for a night for a percentage.

That's how I spent 4 hours making roller dogs one Sat night.

The few regular crew does set up and tear down while the manager has a stressful evening herding cats. =)

I think the volunteer time is not helping either, but there is more to it, through involvement that those people (we) have a understanding of the issues at hand that simply can't be replaced by promotional brochures and other forms of advertisement, which often just seems distant.

Feel good virtue signaling

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