Voluntary work is the best sort of win-win situation there is. Voluntary organisations get skilled help to achieve their aims free of charge. This keeps donation requirements down. Volunteers get an outlet for skills and interests they love doing, but don’t normally fit into their day job. And the satisfaction of being part of a team making a positive difference in the world.

It struck me that forming virtual teams – teams that collaborate over the internet, using tools like yuuguu – solve a lot of problems with volunteer based projects. If you manage volunteer projects, it would be worth your while to see if this can work for you.

Why?

A virtual team solves three barriers to being able to use a willing volunteer: time, place and (of course) money.

Work with volunteers where they live

By using your social media and traditional advertising skills, you can probably hook up with people who would love to volunteer on your project.

But what if they live far away?

If your project involves some aspect of digital work – designing, producing websites, videos, copy, graphics – then virtual work solves this problem directly. You no longer need to have your volunteer sit in your office to use a computer provided by you. You can direct and review work using screen share. You can transfer files electronically. You can chat using Instant Messages. It’s not uncommon for entire projects to be done in this way – just as we work here at Yuuguu.

Doing this opens your project up to a far wider pool of volunteers; with geography no longer an issue, you can work with anyone willing and able, wherever they live.

Work without a travel budget

A lot of project time – and budget – gets eaten up in meetings. It’s important to spend this money wisely at the best of times, and even more when you are a trustee of a charity. Ok, so you simply cannot build a well in a remote country without getting people, materials and tools on site. But you certainly can hold the design reviews of the engineering drawings virtually. And hold progress show and tell meetings virtually.

There are many possibilities for real world projects to work virtually. The well team could snap progress on bore hole excavation on a camera phone, and use screen sharing to show the remote project manager. Instant Message chat and telephone conferencing can bring together remote construction workers, the on-base project manager and the design consultancy to iron out the unexpected.

By taking the view of doing what meetings you can virtually, you can maximise the budget spent on the real objectives. A massive help – not to mention a right and proper PR boost – for any charitable organisation.

Work whenever your volunteers can

Another huge benefit is this: your volunteers will generally have day jobs. These jobs will clearly have first priority on their time; after all, you aren’t putting food on their table. So volunteers can be limited in when they can work. By forming a virtual team, you can reduce the burden of working at different times. Certainly, using yuuguu, you can send instructions and questions to volunteers who are offline, and they can pick these up when they come online. As soon as they do, yuuguu ‘Presence Indicators’ – traffic lights that say when you are working – will help you catch up quickly and efficiently. Much more so than email.

By opening up this flexible working, you can again include more volunteers than before – people who would love to help, but simply cannot work during your normal office hours.

This will be a useful tool for many of you, courtesy of Overdrive Interactive. Click the link to download two pdf files, which help to untangle the maze of Social Media tools on the web today.

Each pdf contains clickable links to all the sites for Social Media and Search Marketing that the authors felt were the most useful.

With an enormous number of tools out there, all with slightly different audiences, uses and – if you like – local customs, it can be difficult to get past the super-popular ones. We all know that we should tweet and facebook in business these days. But looking further afield has its advantages. Your specific business might well have ready-made groups of prospects, partners or co-workers elsewhere. It would be wise to introduce yourself!

Yuuguu’s Instant Messages are most often used for fast, frequent communication between a team. These messages tend be short and to the point. But each message can actually be very long indeed, making Instant Messages ideal to hold in-depth meetings.


The key to using long messages effectively is to keep them readable. And that means breaking them up into paragraphs. This simple video shows you how.

I came across a nice review of Yuuguu the other day on a site discussing tools for teamwork. I commented on it partly as a thank you, and partly as I think there’s much more to Yuuguu for collaboration than the review picked up on. Yuuguu is far more useful for teamwork than simply a screen sharing facility.

The thing is, when we started yuuguu we were clear that we were building a team collaboration app. It’s grown a little since then, so it is also good at other things. But back in the day, we had a metaphor of ‘just like being in the office’. So, I took the time to explain how yuuguu features came about as a response to the question ‘What would you do in an office – and how would you do it over the internet?’

This is what I said. Hope it helps you get more from yuuguu!

We designed Yuuguu ground-up as a collaboration tool. It gets used for all sorts of stuff like web conferencing, sales calls, demos and what have you where it works very well. But it really is best at the remote teamwork application you talk of.

We started with the idea of ‘what do you do when you are in an office?’. We realised that the value of being in an office is that you can look up from your desk and see who is in, who is busy, and who looks free to help. So we added presence indicators to yuuguu – green and red lights by the side of everyone’s name which say ‘available/busy/do not disturb’.

You would then next perhaps shout or walk over to a colleague you thought you could work with. So, on yuuguu, we added instant message chat. You can send a quick ‘got a sec?’ kind of message by clicking your colleague’s name, typing the message in the drop down box and hitting enter.

You would then give them some context about why you wanted their advice. In the office, you walk over to your desk and start pointing at work on your computer screen. This is where the screen sharing and remote control features came in. We made sure that you could show your screen to up to 30 people, so you can do group-work with yuuguu. We later added ‘web share’ which is where people can view your screen share with just a web browser, without downloading the yuuguu app itself.

Of course you need to talk whilst you’re doing this, so we added low-cost, no-set-up voice conferencing using real telephones. We later added Skype integration, as a lot of people were wanting to work that way.

About the way in which you share your screen and the other person can accept/decline, we made it that way as a privacy control. Nobody can just ‘log in’ to your computer and see what you are doing unless you explicitly allow them to, and are fully aware of it. We saw that as much more appropriate to professional teamwork. That said, we’ve been asked to change it a few times, so currently we support a button ‘Please show me your screen’ which turns things round a bit. We might well make a more remote login style thing in the future.

No self-respecting Instant Message chat is complete without its quota of smileys, or ‘emoticons’ to give them their more grandiose name. You can use them – or switch them off – in Yuuguu.


This video shows you how.

Yuuguu’s Instant Messages are a great way to conduct meetings. What’s more, they provide an easy way to find out what was discussed. So, if you’re the wrong side of your morning coffee, and need to find out what was said yesterday, the ‘Recent Chats’ feature is just for you.


Now what colour was that button, again?

One common question we get is ‘how do you log out of yuuguu?’ It’s a good question where you have multiple Yuuguu accounts – or you are using a shared computer and want to stop other people from seeing your messages. This video shows how it’s done.

In keeping with out ‘keep it quick, keep it simple’ philosophy, we’ve made it easy to pick just the group of people you want right from the contact list. You can do this other ways, but this way is the quickest – and not everyone knows it’s even there.

What happens when you find a great new nickname for one of your contacts? You change their name on your contact list, like this video shows.