Ekaterina Gorshkova: The key is to cast all of one’s doubts aside

30 january 2023

In our January interview in the "About People and Good Deeds" column we discuss the finer points and nuances of smart, or intellectual, volunteering with a SIBUR volunteer Ekaterina Gorshkova.

Ekaterina, in keeping with our interviews’ tradition, let me begin by asking how it all started for you. How did you get into volunteering?
- Several years ago I attended a training session for lawyers where we were introduced to smart volunteering and the ProCharity platform. That was the first time I heard about a field of activity called smart volunteering.

Did you become a volunteer straight after that?

-      A lot of time passed between the moment I had heard about smart volunteering for the first time and the moment I actually decided to get involved. Smart volunteering had been presented to us as more of an opportunity for lawyers with their professional skills and competencies to be useful to charitable foundations and their beneficiaries.

It was obvious to me that the kinds of legal issues that nonprofit organizations have to grapple with are such that the competencies of a corporate lawyer would hardly be that much in demand. Plus, legal issues they had to deal with at the time were very few and far between. More often, my colleagues had to respond to requests that involved translation services.

Besides, law practice is not my only passion, and I wanted to be able balance it with other interests.

But you did change your attitude toward smart volunteering at some later point, didn’t you?

-      At some point, after learning about my video editing hobby, I was asked to help out a foundation and assist them with a video of theirs. After finishing that first job, I took a genuine interest in this and revised my portfolio on ProCharity accordingly. That's how I turned my hobby into a product that foundations need.

I'm far more interested in creating things that others are likely to find useful. Besides, when I switch to creative activities, I sort of reset my brain and this has a positive effect on my dealing with the challenges I encounter at work.

I find that helping nonprofits is a good way to hone one’s customer relations skills which is something that comes in quite handy in my line of work as well.

-      I sometimes review portfolios of volunteers who have been picked for a particular assignment on ProCharity. Based on my observations, there seem to be several kinds of them although I would not know exactly how many of them there are in reality or which of their group may be the largest.

I believe that the majority of them are simply people who care. There are volunteers who join in to gain some practical experience, and there are also those who see it as an opportunity to monetize their skills at some point in the future.

By carrying out a task, an individual gains new knowledge because quite often the job of a smart volunteer in many areas involves processing all sorts of information.

I do not think that there are those who respond to requests for help for the sake of gaining brownie points or some rewards. And yet, I can’t rule out that there may be some game mechanics involved that add to the excitement.

Which jobs on the ProCharity platform do you find to be the most challenging?

-      Well, sometimes it takes as little as 30 minutes to complete a task while it could take a whole month to complete another. However, the term "challenging" is something I would rather apply to a customer than a particular job. It’s not just that customers sometimes have difficulty putting in words as to what kind of an end-state they want to see. Rather, challenges tend to arise when the customer has already decided everything for himself, all the way down to the specific locations of certain items in a given frame. That is why I tend not to limit myself to just one set option, but instead offer my customers alternatives. The sector’s specialists who are professionally involved in this line of work explained to me later that I had intuitively homed in on one right approach. And I do of course get excited whenever customers go with my suggestions.

One of my videos, the one that won a prize at the International Lime Festival of Social Advertising and Communications, happens to be just one of those cases when the choice ultimately fell on the version that had been the exact opposite of the customer’s original vision.

But there have also been other cases in my experience when, after having followed the customer’s instructions to a tee and producing the result expected by the client and completely exhausted, I really felt like a hack who did not get to enjoy the fruit of their labor. Perhaps that’s one of those cases when my customer and I just happen to "see things differently”.

If this is the kind of pattern that I see developing in my interactions with a particular foundation, I’d feel hard pressed to responding again to their next request. This is probably the most challenging part of my work on the ProCharity platform.

-      In my line of work it is fairly hard to see at the outset what the end result might be. So, the gravest mistake one can make is to get down to work without parceling the job out into several chunks, or phases, and without presenting one’s sketches or drafts to the customer. Even when all you’re asked to do is translate a piece of text, you could always do a smaller bit of it first, show it to the customer and take into account any of their recommendations or suggestions, should they come up with any. In some cases, it would be wise to ask one’s customer for samples of completed work that are to their standard.

Alternatively, you can show your customer examples of your own past work in order to showcase your style, so to speak, especially since the ProCharity platform gives you an opportunity to ask for clarifications prior to pressing the "Respond" button.

You should not be shy about asking your customer questions. One should be ready to accept a difference of opinion as readily as we accept that we’re all different in our appearance.

What should be the very first step one would need to take when getting involved in smart volunteering?

-      The key is to cast all of one’s doubts aside. Whenever you succumb to your own doubts or to following somebody else’s, you may be depriving yourself of an opportunity to see a miracle. What kind of miracle, you’d ask? To find that out, you should try to become one.

In addition, I’d recommend that you join SIBUR's community of smart volunteers on CLICK. This is where my colleagues share their achievements, discuss their experiences, and provide their support at the initial stage.

-      Yes, I have had to do it once based on a mutual agreement reached with a foundation. At the time of posting its assignment, the customer had not yet had the necessary video files on hand. And I had not expected that the size and attributes of each of them would be too taxing for my computing power. We were able to quickly resolve this matter with the platform, and I offered a suggestion to the foundation to disclose more detailed information about the files in the description of the job, so that the next volunteer could clearly see whether his or her capabilities are adequate to meeting these requirements.

-      The number of assignments for creating videos on the ProCharity platform has fallen recently. As a result, I am currently waiting for the foundation to entrust me with an assignment that will help the foundation in its work on setting up a museum exhibition.

There are, of course, other smart volunteering platforms out there that I interact with, but will talk about them some other time.