Thursday Buzz: Help Get Volunteers With Disabilities On Board

Everyone wants to help—including volunteers with disabilities.

“Accessibility and diversity are about accommodating everyone, not just people with disabilities or people who are from minority groups,” Susan Ellis, the president of Energize, Inc., explains on the  (opens in a new tab) Wild Apricot blog. “You want to make volunteering as welcoming to the widest number of people possible.”

The idea is that people with disabilities want to help out, and organizations with volunteer opportunities should work with everyone who wants to help, by taking steps to make the process more approachable. Accessibility is important when working to accommodate all volunteers.

Ellis notes that some disabilities are easy to identify, while others aren’t, but there are many ways to accommodate without having to call a person out or (illegally) asking whether he or she has a disability.

Make it easier for everyone, with or without disabilities, by presenting opportunities to help based on what people can or cannot do. This might require building in flexible deadlines, dividing up a task, or clearly outlining an assignment.

Infographic of the Day

Such a pretty picture! #simpledatavisualization  (opens in a new tab) https://t.co/Zbi47xJEXO  (opens in a new tab)

— Anne Toth (@clean_freak) May 25, 2016  (opens in a new tab)

Slack is gaining ground in the instant messaging game. It’s also a productivity app, an organization space, and a strong collaboration platform. “It’s designed to be a trojan horse,” Associations Now‘s Ernie Smith wrote last fall. It’s only gotten bigger: This week, Slack reached 3 million daily active users  (opens in a new tab), with 2 million connected simultaneously.

(Plus, the company debuted a login tool that allows services to accept Slack identities.)

Other Links for Your Day

Memorial Day is the start of the summer vacation season, but most of us still have to keep working—which makes devoting time to actually planning vacations a challenge. Fortunately, Kristin Wong at Lifehacker has some awesome IFTTT recipes  (opens in a new tab) to help take the headaches out of the vacation-planning process.

“Creating a purpose-driven model for communities will be a breakthrough in performance, engagement, and impact for many organizations,” writes Bill Johnston  (opens in a new tab) at SocialFish.

Need a reading list for the summer? Prolific reader (as well as philanthropist, billionaire, and cofounder of Microsoft) Bill Gates shared his recommendations  (opens in a new tab) for great reads with the One Grand Desert Island Books blog.

(iStock/Thinkstock)