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
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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!