Re: Volunteer TW Services (was: Ethical Questions)

[Elna Tymes <etymes -at- LTS -dot- COM>]

Deborah -
> How about you folks? How
> have you approached volunteer TW work, and what responses
> have you had?

We learned that there are few non-profits who truly understand how to
work in a bottom-line oriented business manner, and that in most cases
they are very clear what they want of volunteers, and your contribution
of services doesn't mean much to them.

Let me give you a case in point.  We have for several years hosted the
web page of a local crisis center for abused women and children.  The
web page is updated about three times a year.  We provide both the
hosting (a $50/month value) AND the translation of Word files and their
graphics into HTML pages (which runs $250-350 every time they change
things).  They just put out a "thank you" flier listing all of their
donors, and we weren't included.  I wrote to ask why, and they said that
they thought the one-line "web site provided by Los Trancos Systems" in
their newsletter was sufficient. I responded by pointing out that we
were actually providing two different kinds of services, and hosting the
web site was only one of them, at which point they got a little huffy
and decided they were going to rethink their whole policy of in-kind
donations.

IF we do any donated work, we are careful to negotiate a contract that
spells out just what we'll be doing, the process by which we do it, and
any expectations of the recipient organization.  We make it clear this
is the process by which we do for-profit work, and is the only way we
can afford to do donated work.  This alone makes a lot of nonprofits
demur, because they have their own, usually rather warped, view of how
businesses ought to operate and are only too willing to impose that
vision on us.  Occasionally we get a nonprofit that understands that
we're trying to do things on a businesslike basis, and will work with us
on that basis.

Another situation where we made a rather large donation to a prestigious
local university was an example of the same problem.  We negotiated a
contract where we were to donate approximately half the labor costs in
fixing a rather complex display.  They agreed, and told us all about the
existing hardware, software, and network connections.  Except that they
were wrong - the hardware wasn't as it had been described once we got
the covers off, the software was somebody's bad dream of spaghetti code,
and the network as installed was nothing like what they'd told us. Even
so, we installed the system as separate units and got them working,
promising to come back as soon as the networking issues were handled.
However, the docents who maintained the display area had a bad habit of
stashing our sheets of instructions in piles of other papers, then
insisting that there weren't any instructions.  These same docents kept
climbing a ladder to the cabinet where they could hear a noise they
thought was 'the computer' (actually a separate fan, used to move heated
air into a wall intake) and unplugging the power strip (and computer and
display) at the end of the day, so that the docents who worked at the
beginning of the day came in to a system that seemed nonfunctional -
which they then reported to management as "broken."  Management got on
our case about systems that didn't work, and despite our trotting over
there immediately every time we heard there was a problem, fixing what
we found, and explaining what we found and what needed to be done (or
not done), started spreading the word that we were 'flaky.' So much for
large donations.

And you wonder why we get grey hair.

Elna Tymes
Los Trancos Systems