Volunteers of America Reaches Out in Cyberspace

Last year during the summer, at the launch of Volunteers of America’s Operation Backpack, a young girl stood up to make a comment after Page Davis, the host of the decorating program Trading Spaces, spoke. “I know someone who got a backpack through Operation Backpack,” said Reginy, now a resident assistant at Fordham University.  “I was the girl that got a backpack when I was a junior in high school, and we were homeless and living in a shelter,” she added.  

To Rachel Weinstein, Director of Development and Communications at Volunteers of America Greater New York, these moments describe the impact that the work of the social services organization has on the lives of disadvantaged people around the country.  In Reginy’s case, this one backpack, which was full of school supplies, gave her the motivation to excel in school to the point that she ended up being at the top of her class.  Eventually, Reginy got a full scholarship from JP Morgan Chase and is now working and going to school.  Operation Backpack in New York, a program through which homeless children get school supplies at the end of every summer, is just an example of the many community programs the organization puts together annually to help the underprivileged in the United States.  

Volunteers of America is a large human services organization serving two million people in 400 communities across the nation.  It provides services to the greatest range of people, from preschoolers with developmental delays to seniors who wish to age at home, as well as homeless people and battered women.  Its New York chapter reaches out to forty thousand people every year.

Launching campaigns at social gatherings; however, are not the only strategies that Volunteers of America uses to reach out to the public and to donors.  For a year now, the organization has been putting effort into using online tools and social media.  “We mapped out our social media strategy last year.  We started our Facebook profile, MySpace, Twitter, Flickr.  We are on Youtube,” says Liz Mates, Senior Manager of Online and Social Media Strategy at the national office of Volunteers of America. “The goal was to get our name out there, build our brand’s awareness and make connections with reporters and donors, and see where they are at,” she says.

Volunteers of America’s social media outreach has yielded progress in terms of following.  “We have 700 fans on Facebook, 45 followers on Twitter, and we are now seeing comments on the things that we post.  We are definitely getting connected with more people who feel passionately about the issues that we cover,” notes Ms. Mates.  The organization has also been able to engage donors more dynamically through social networking sites. “The first step in donor development is engagement, and I think that with our new website and relatively new presence in social media, we are in the engagement stage,” explains Kathleen McBride, Vice President of Communications and Online Strategy.

Aside from followers, social media has granted the organization an opportunity to leverage many of their programs and events.  Last summer, Volunteers of America hosted a panel discussion at the National Press Club, Boomers Bust: From Greatest Generation to Crisis Generation, which featured personalities such as Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, former Senate majority leader Tom Daschle and cultural anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson, and focused on conversing about the future of elder care in America. “We identified through Twitter and social media outlets who is talking about the issues that this panel would be discussing,” says Mates.  For this event, Volunteers of America reached out to eighty bloggers that cover aging issues and politics, some of which posted the event on their sites.  A few bloggers even asked to be invited to the panel discussion and covered the event on their blogs. “We did some work after that to see the level of pick up that we got in the social media realm.  The bloggers definitely helped.  It’s a little hard to quantify social media.  But, I think our name is getting out there more,” mentions Mates.

This social media undertaking is headed by the national office of Volunteers of America, which assists local offices such as the New York chapter to put their website and social media plans in action.  “One of the roles of the national office is to help facilitate information and knowledge sharing,” says McBride.  “So, we have webinars on a number of communications topics regularly.  We have done webinars on social media.”

 While the endeavor is an important outreach method due to the popularity of social networking sites, it is only a part of a larger communications strategy.  “We view the social media avenue as only just one channel in a multi-channel communications effort,” explains McBride. “We continue with our public service announcement campaign, we are in traditional media across the country in the news about the work that we do.”

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