Hey there and welcome to another video!
In this video I'm going to talk about some jobs or contracts that you can do
working from home while making a positive social impact. My name is Amber
Melanie Smith and I make videos sharing tips and strategies for change makers to
help you change the world while living life of impact and purpose. So, I
personally believe that you shouldn't have to choose between working to make a
living and making an impact. Before I was able to work for my nonprofit
organization full time I worked my fair share of other jobs.
I was a bartender. I
did data entry. I did everything that I had to to financially survive and get by
while my nonprofit was growing in background. But these days it's a lot
easier to find opportunities to work in ways that allow you to financially
sustain yourself while making a positive contribution to the world. In today's hyper-connected world, working remotely working from home is on the
rise! According to some estimates approximately 5% of the United States
population now works from home. There are, of course, a ton of opportunities where
you can work for a non-profit or social enterprise or other entity making a
positive impact in the world out in the world – in an office, with a team, or in
some other situation away from home.
But in this video I'm going to talk about a
handful of ways that you can work for one of these organizations or do some
positive social impact work remotely working from home. Working from home is
super appealing these days and can even save the organization or business that
you're working for some money by reducing overhead. So it's a win-win! I've
seen a lot of other blog articles or other videos talking about opportunities
to work from home, but of course I had to put my special twist on it and talk
about ways to combine working remotely while making a social
impact.
There are a lot of different ways you can work from home – whether it's
taking on an ongoing role, or working on shorter term projects – and many, if not
most of these, can allow you to make a decent living while knowing that you're
making a positive impact on the world. Some of these positions require a
little bit more experience, and some of them are appropriate for entry-level
jobs too. So I'm going to share a handful of my favorites, and I'm also going to
share where you can go about finding these opportunities that I'm talking
about. Okay! So first we're gonna cover ongoing
positions that you can have from home. The first set of ongoing jobs that you
can do that I'm going to cover are entry-level positions. For these
entry-level work from home positions you can expect to get anywhere between
around $12 and $18 per hour. Work from home example number 1: client
or member services. A lot of nonprofits, especially larger nonprofits, have a need
for customer service-like roles that help handle communications between the
organization's members or clients that they are serving.
So when we're talking
about organizations with a lot of clients or members, we might be talking
about an organization like Sierra Club, which helps protect the environment and
nature; or something like NTEN, which is an organization that helps nonprofits get
access to affordable technology. A lot of great causes out there have this
membership model and they need people in these roles to help manage hundreds or
hundreds of thousands of members across the country to do the amazing work that
they do. For these work at home jobs you can expect to be answering emails and
phone calls, directing people served by the cause to where they can go for help,
and more. And this is a great role for folks who like to interact with other
human beings – because the downside of course of working from home can be
feelings of isolation. So human interaction can certainly help with that. The next work from home entry level position I'm going to talk about is a
virtual administrative assistant.
Similar to the client or member services role, a
virtual administrative assistant can help nonprofit organizations ensure that
they can run smoothly behind the scenes while they're out there making a big
impact. So someone in this role will be helping reviewing files, creating
content or documents, and similar to the other role, helping with communications –
so answering emails or phone calls. You might even be doing some data entry
especially for organizations that are very research-based or need a lot of
help keeping track of all of the records about users or members. A wide variety of
causes need people in these virtual administrative assistant roles – from
promoting human rights to helping prevent domestic abuse – the third entry
level work from home job I'm going to talk about is a development assistant. "Development" is just a fancy word for relationship building and fundraising. This is a huge area of need for most nonprofit organizations and social
businesses. And if you can get really good at it, this type of work can pay pretty well, even in work from home roles.
As a
development assistant, you can expect to take on activities and tasks that
ultimately help the organization cultivate new donors, and attract new
donors, or show recognition or appreciation to its current donor
database. Tasks might include creating donor prospect lists, handling emails or
phone calls to donors, or managing donor databases. The next set of jobs that I'm going to
talk about usually require a little bit more experience, or in some cases a lot
more experience, but also pay a bit more. Again, you don't necessarily have to
have experience in a non-profit or social impact organization – a lot of the
skills that might be required to work in social impact fields are very
translatable from business.
So if you're coming from the private sector, you may
also be able to do some of these jobs. The first category of jobs that you
can do working from home that are a little bit more advanced or require more
experience include social media marketing and communications
coordinators or managers. These could include roles like a digital engagement
coordinator – where you are helping organize a strategy for online
engagement with the community members who are following a certain cause. It
could include something like a marketing campaign manager where you are helping
design a strategy to achieve an awareness, or fundraising, or recruitment
objective or a specific marketing campaign for a cause. A lot of
organizations need these roles, especially larger national ones who have
a large digital footprint and rely on engagement from online communities in
order to do the great work that they do.
Examples might include organizations
that do advocacy, helping promote certain policies to law makers to make sure that
people are treated fairly and equitably. Another great role for someone with a
little bit of experience who enjoys that human interaction could be something
along the lines of organizing trainings or even teaching special topics. Depending on the organization and – especially a lot of education
organizations – rely on people helping create content for online courses or
teaching that content to people to spread the word and raise awareness
about their cause. Another approach to this is being a training coordinator, so
maybe you aren't the one necessarily going out and doing the trainings or
doing the trainings online, but you are the one coordinating the trainers who are doing that, so it's almost like scheduling and
managing other people in that role.
Another fairly well-paying role that you
can do from home that relates to the development side of things is grant
writer. If you are a great writer who has a real talent for word smithing and
turning complex ideas into things that are very easy to understand,
then grant writing could be a really great role for you. Writing grants can
range from writing for smaller grants or even very very large complex federal or
government grants that take a little bit more work BUT could bring in a lot more
money for the cause that you care about. More work from home roles along the
finance route include bookkeeping or accounting. So if you've got skills in
that area nonprofits really need you as well. And another one of those for you
folks who are great with math could be budget coordinator. This is a person
whose job it is to help make sure the organization its meeting its goals and
hitting its budget milestones.
Some of the roles that I mentioned before in the
entry level section can also be done at a higher level – like doing membership
coordination or program management or even being an executive assistant. if you're not necessarily looking for a
permanent work from home position but you're interested in a couple of freelance
short-term projects or other gigs that you can do from home, there are a couple
of great options out there for you too. Similarly to private businesses, a lot of
nonprofits and social enterprises need some of the same roles and projects done
for them too. So if you are a web designer or web developer, or graphic
designer, or a marketing strategist, these are opportunities for you to take those
skills and apply them to helping a non-profit or social impact organization. If you have a lot of experience in nonprofits and social impact
organizations, you might consider something like consulting – where you're
helping those organizations define and refine their strategies to make an
impact.
For those who love to write, like I do, there are a lot of opportunities to
do some copywriting or content creation for organizations who really need that
help getting the word out about what they do in a clear and concise way for
their audience. Okay, so where do you find these
opportunities to work from home or get freelance or short-term projects to do
at home while making an impact? I will tell you! There are a lot of online job
boards that specialize in social impact jobs. To name a few, we're talking about
Bridgespan.org, Idealist.org, Social enterprise.us, workforgood.com, and
a couple of others too.
I'll include the links to these below in my description
with the right description. You can also find some of these nonprofit or social
impact jobs where you can work from home on traditional job boards to like SimplyHired, FlexJobs.com, or Virtual vocations.com. A lesser-known place you
might be able to find some of these jobs is through your local Young Nonprofit
Professionals Network chapter. So this is a national organization that is just
what it says it is – for young nonprofit professionals – but on their listserv, they
often shoot out messages about different job opportunities to work for nonprofits
in your local community, and some of those are work from home or remote
positions.
Finally I want to talk about a new company that has just emerged over
the past year or two that is called WETHOS — it is a super cool platform
where you can actually join a team of other people with a variety of skill
sets. And you are on this team, and you're doing a freelance project for a social
impact organization or a non-profit. You might be on a team that is
developing a super awesome marketing campaign to promote women's equality or
you might be part of a team that's putting together a killer interactive
website to raise awareness about autism.
It could be any number of projects but
Wethos is a great platform if you enjoy collaborating with others and working
from home on the shorter term projects where you can make a big impact and then
move on to the next project. If working from home and making an
impact at the same time is something of interest to you, but you don't feel like
you have the skills right now to get started, don't worry. There are lots of
ways to build up that experience in order to get opportunities to do this. I
always always recommend volunteering or interning with an organization who has a
cause or a mission that you really care about to get your feet wet in some of
these areas. If you are currently in college or about to be in college, then a
lot of universities have programs where you can learn about nonprofits and
social enterprise and social impact these days.
It's a huge area of interest
for a lot of people, so the colleges are just now starting to catch up and offer
classes on these topics. So if you know of other nonprofit or social impact job
opportunities that I didn't discuss here please let us know put them in the
comments below share with everyone so we can all learn from you. I really hope you
liked this video! Please don't forget to give me a thumbs up, and SUBSCRIBE for
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the World or Bust! Group members are always posting inspiring tidbits that we
can all learn from, so I hope that you can join in on those conversations there
as well. As always the link for all of these things will be in my description. Thank you again so much for watching.
Until next time!.
