My experiences of the digitalisation in non-governmental organisations
I have worked in non-governmental organisations almost my whole work-life, the longest time in the Finnish Red Cross in Tampere and temporarily in The Finnish Nature Association. During this time there has been quite many changes with regard to digitalisation. In the Finnish Red Cross the biggest change has been transferring all our volunteer registers and lists, enrollments and most of our communication into a new digital online system. Now everyone who wants to volunteer have to eventually create a profile to that system to receive our information e-mails and be able to enroll to our events. The system is our official volunteer register and our main information channel.
In the Finnish Red Cross the volunteers are the ones who do all the important and significant work and we employees are only on the background coordinating the volunteer activities. The volunteers of Finnish Red Cross have usually been elderly people, even though we nowadays have younger people volunteering too. But as you can imagine the change for the digital system hasn’t been easy for everyone. There is a big amount of elderly volunteers who have zero problems with signing up in the system and enrolling to different kind of helping activities. But then there are those who have visited me or my co-worker multiple times and we have together learned how to enroll with the digital system.
Digitalised systems are the only way to handle our big amount of both volunteers and volunteer activities. The system we now use isn’t perfect but our Headquarters is constantly developing it. At the moment the big issue is that we have our volunteers and members in separate systems. This problem concerns many other non-governmental organisations too and I hope there will be some solutions soon.
Open digital society
When we started to use our new online system in the Finnish Red Cross, one of our arguments for the change was the EU’s new General Data Protection Regulation. Before the change we have had our volunteers’ information in some excels here and in some papers there. We didn’t really know who we had volunteering in which volunteering group. With the digital system we can now truly make sure that our volunteers know what information there is about them and they can easily ask to remove the information if they wanted.
Artificial intelligence in organisational work?
I recently discussed about using the Chat GPT with my 23 year old little brother. I found out that he uses Chat GPT almost every day with his studies and he couldn’t believe that I hadn’t used it at all. I explained that I haven’t been using it because I honestly can’t figure out any tasks I could need AI’s help.
Now with this assignment I wanted to test the Chat GPT in a way I could really use it in my work. I write a lot of different kind of small texts in my work, for example e-mails for volunteers and posts in social media. Almost all the time the main message in these texts is almost the same: how to get people to do some volunteer work. So that is something I could really use some help of AI, if it could provide me something little bit different than I usually write.
So I tested the Chat GPT by asking it to write me a social media post of Volunteers’ day that will be celebrated on 5th December. I tested the Chat GPT both in Finnish (because that is my working language most of the time) and English. Both texts were quite good, but the Finnish version wasn’t perfect grammatically. There were even emojis and hashtags in the texts. I could definitely use Chat GPT like this, at least to give some thoughts that I can work on with the social media posts.
In my opinion AI could be useful with this kind of situations when you need something to get started with. It can provide you a lot of useful information but you have to yourself filter it for your purposes.
Self-evaluation
This assignment was a good start for thinking the digitalisation. It was interesting to focus on the digitalisation that has happened in my work and to think what could happen in the future. One thing that I stayed thinking was the safety of an e-mail. I have known that the information in e-mails is not very protected but somehow I understood it now better. I probably will start sending encrypted e-mails more.
The blogs I commented:
Hello Kaisa!
It was interesting to read about the Red Cross volunteer registry. I wasn’t aware that such a thing exists. This is surely necessary. It was also nice to read that there are young volunteers as well. In my work, I have also noticed that older individuals often struggle with digital systems. However, you mentioned that most elderly people can use these systems, and those who can’t receive help from you.
I used to be a volunteer worker for the Finnish Red Cross and also a vice-chair for the local Red Cross. I made the first websites to the local Red Cross as well as Facebook pages. One aspect of digital society in non-governmental organizations is the digital communication. People are very interested on the local activities, which can be shared in social media. Social media is very good for sharing information on events, such as Nälkäpäivä fund raising event (Hunger day). Confidentality is very important in Red Cross actions, both locally, regionally, nationally and international level. Of course, this has to be taken into account, when digital communication is done.
Hello!
Thank you for sharing your insights of digital progression in the Finnish Red Cross. I was thinking about what you and Anniina mentioned about older volunteers and social media. It’s great that you are able to help them, because it could be easy to “shut out” people who are not familiar with digital devices or applications. Messaging with email is effective when there is a list of participants, but acquiring new members can be hard. For reaching different age groups, one must advertise in Facebook, X (formerly known as Twitter) and Snapchat or TikTok. For acquiring new members in older generations, I believe it’s still useful to advertise in tv and in printed media.
Hi, thank you for the interesting blog text. I was wondering could AI or other form of digitalization help you guys matching the people who need support and volunteers. Like matching people who could probably get along well, or have some kind of same interests. You had a good idea where you could use AI I’m still sceptic with AI, but that would be something that I could use as well.