Our feature articles are sourced from practitioners around the globe and seek to encourage new thinking, highlight innovative practice and stimulate debate in the world of effective volunteer engagement.
Engage Library
Feature Articles
While living in India, Israeli citizen Yael Caplin experienced the Purna Kumbh Mela - a remarkable religious gathering that takes place in Haridwar, where the Ganges enters the Northern plains of India from the Himalayas. Every 12 years, from mid-January to the end of April,…
January 2012
When massive earthquakes hit Christchurch, New Zealand in February 2011, university students wanted to help in the clean-up. But established first response agencies were wary of these young volunteers and too harried to work with them, so they turned them away. Sam Johnson, a…
January 2012
In 2010, United Way of King County, in partnership with 501 Commons, launched the Volunteer Impact Program (VIP) in Seattle, WA. Now moving into its third year of operation, this free program provides volunteer management training, assessment and consulting services to local…
January 2012
When Sarah Jane Rehnborg, Ph.D., wrote her doctoral dissertation at the University of Pittsburgh, she not only fulfilled an academic requirement but also helped document the basis of the new “Certified in Volunteer Administration” (CVA) competency-based credential for the…
October 2011
What does the field think about credentialing? In this Keyboard Roundtable, volunteer management colleagues from the UK, USA, New Zealand and Australia provide their personal and widely different perspectives on the value of a professional credential. One expert thinks…
October 2011
Legal tender, cash, currency, change, capital, funds, riches, dough, bread, moolah, scratch, greenbacks, dinero, bank. . . According to fun-with-words.com, there are more terms for money than almost any other word in the English language! Even if there weren’t so many terms for…
July 2011
Pets are therapeutic for people of all ages. But as aging pet owners and their families can attest, age and disability often restrict elderly or seriously-ill pet owners from seeking veterinarian services and general assistance for their pets. Some people even refuse to enter…
July 2011
When it comes to professional football in America, most people associate “special teams” with players who take the field for kick-offs, punt returns and kicking an extra point. But for the Miami Dolphins, an American football team based in Florida, “special teams” means so much…
July 2011
In late 2009, Volunteering England established a Volunteer Rights Inquiry to look into a rising number of volunteers who were complaining, sometimes very publically, about their treatment by their volunteer-involving organizations. After nearly 18 months of confidential…
April 2011
e-Volunteerism readers raved about Part 1 of Erin R. Spink’s presentation on "Volunteer Engagement: Defining the Future of the Profession." Posted in the last issue, one reader called it "a brilliant, educational and provocative article,” while another noted that it “challenges…
April 2011
How can texting a friend raise significant funds to help patients and families who are battling brain tumors? The answer is simple for Judy Zocchi and Olivia Questore, the two driving forces behind “Text for 10,” a unique fundraising event to benefit Monmouth Medical Center’s…
April 2011
Consider the term that has become popular in recent years in English-speaking countries: “volunteer engagement.” Do you really know what it means? Surprisingly, despite its widespread use, there was no research on volunteer engagement until 2008. In this two-part e-Volunteerism…
January 2011
In February 2010, United Way of King County in Seattle, Washington, launched an intensive volunteer management capacity-building model in partnership with Executive Service Corps of Washington. Called the Volunteer Impact Program (VIP), it was designed to help food banks and…
January 2011
In work-oriented societies, it can be confusing when people do something for no remuneration when that ‘something’ appears to be neither part of their livelihood nor part of their leisure. In simplest terms, the question asked by the average person in such societies is: Why work…
January 2011
Jana Mendez, Volunteer Initiatives Coordinator for Boulder County Government in Boulder, Colorado explains how she managed to integrate training on how to work with volunteers into a mandatory training session on employee supervision for middle management employees.
I knew the…
October 2004
"There is an essential integrity in a relationship with a volunteer that I find worth examining."
Sarah Elliston proceeds to analyze the fundamental differences between relationships with employees and relationships with volunteers:
"As I examine integrity as this simplicity…
October 2002
In the spring of 2001, Canadian Blood Services (CBS) contracted the services of an external consulting firm to conduct a review of its volunteer program. The research had two key purposes. The first was to explore how CBS might improve both the involvement, and the management,…
October 2002
Six months before it opened in July 2002, the Imperial War Museum North embarked upon an ambitious community volunteering programme, working with over 100 local residents – many from disadvantaged backgrounds. Volunteers worked towards vocational qualifications in the Museum,…
October 2002
Volunteer manager Laura Hamilton knew there had to be a better way to manage and schedule volunteers at George House Trust, the largest HIV Social Care Charity in the North West of England. So when her organization began to review rota management software packages to help manage…
October 2010
It’s common wisdom in the business world that “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” In this feature article, author Tony Goodrow proposes a method of measurement that gives a whole new yard stick to help demonstrate the successes of volunteer deployment in…
October 2010