Digital tools I use in my job
The most used digital tool in my job is our own digital online system called Oma Punainen Risti. Using Oma I send e-mails about upcoming events and helping activities to my volunteers, contact our new volunteers and create events to volunteers to enroll. Oma Punainen Risti is our volunteer register and at the moment there is almost 2300 volunteers who live in my area, Tampere. I could say that every time I need volunteers to do something, even in a short notice, I can find the volunteers using Oma.
I use Trello to organise my work. Actually I couldn’t manage without it because I wouldn’t remember every tiny task I have without it. Also me and my co-worker use a shared Trello board for planning our social media posts.
Communicating with the volunteers I also use WhatsApp. I have group chats for different volunteer groups and we them use when we have something urgent to communicate. I also use WhatsApp with volunteers personally, it is often easier to reach the volunteers than calling them, when they are at work during daytime.
For Social Media we use Facebook and Instagram. We usually do the same posts in both because it is easiest and fastest that way. I know that it could be more effective to post the same post on the different days in Facebook and Instagram but at the moment we don’t have the recourses to do so. Our posts are most likely information of some upcoming event on training or “reports” from some volunteer activity. Also we have some campaigns like Hunger day, Valentines day and Week against the Racism when we post about those subjects. We also share Finnish Red Cross Headquarters’ posts about current international aid. Most of the weeks we have 5-7 posts in both our social media channels.
The Social Media tools I could use in my job
We used to have a Twitter account but we didn’t have any employee or volunteer who would have had time or interest to follow the discussions there and make some own posts (or tweets, are they still tweets now when the name has changed?). Still I believe it could be useful if we were in X. One thing that Finnish Red Cross does is helping the authorities in different kind of situations. The authorities often use X for official announcements and we could maybe help with that. Maybe we could reach some people who don’t follow the authorities accounts. Of course to do so, we should have some amount of followers in X. On the other hand at the moment it seems that the discussion atmosphere in X is not the politest one for the non-governmental organisation that is always impartial and neutral.
Many who volunteer in Finnish Red Cross are elderly people. With the social media channels we now use (Instagram and Facebook) we reach mostly people over 30 years old. To reach out younger people who could become volunteers it would be good to use TikTok and/or Snapchat. TikTok would be better to reaching out new volunteers and Snapchat a good tool to keep in touch with the younger volunteers. So maybe we could first start to use TikTok and then later Snapchat, if there is a good amount of young volunteers who use Snapchat.
With both TikTok and Snapchat the biggest reason not using them is the lack of time to create the content. In TikTok there are almost only videos and making a video takes more time than making just a post with a picture. First you have to shoot the video and after that edit the video and especially editing can really take some time. Also the videos should be quite short and of course the content should be so interesting that it would stand out. Maybe one way to try using TikTok would be doing collaboration with some TikTok influencers. That way we could reach out more young people and faster than only using our own account.
I believe that in Snapchat it would be quite nice way to keep in touch with younger volunteers who maybe don’t attend to volunteer activities so often. If we could send them greetings about the different kind of activities we have, that could be a good way to keep them along. For young people it can be easier to attend to activities when you already have seen other volunteers and volunteering even through Snapchat or some other social media channel.
I think that if we would like to start to use TikTok and/or Snapchat we could also do it with our volunteers. Creating videos in both medias would definitely be a inspiring volunteering task for someone.
Padlet and Mentimeter
Padlet and Mentimeter are both tools that we could use when we are planning or developing something. We have these kind of events with our volunteers couple times a year. At the moment we are mainly using just different papers and post it -notes in these events. With these papers there is always the difficulty after the event when we would like to work on the ideas and we then have to move them to some digital form. It would actually be simpler if we use some digital tools in the first place.
Padlet is a tool for group working. You can create own padlets for every group or use just one padlet that everyone is writing on. There is a lot of modification options in padlets: you can create a bullet lists, timelines or more visual presentations with pictures. Users don’t need to sign up, they can access the padlet just using the link.
Mentimeter is also a good tool for group working. It is a right tool to use if you would like to have participants’ opinions about something. For example it is a good way to collect the feedback. It can be also used as a starting point for a conversation about some subject. The facilitator creates questions in the Mentimeter and then shares a link to the participants and they use their phones to write the answers. With the answers you can create different kind of visual presentations, such as word clouds.
Self-evaluation
This assignment was a good reminder that there actually is many digital tools that I could use more in my job. So easily you just do things in same old way but it is always refreshing to try something new.