International scope - mentioning several countries

In this issue, Points of View tackles an often elusive topic that nonetheless seems always challenging to volunteer managers: how to expand an organization’s leadership and find the right volunteers for the job.  In “Trolling for Leadership,” we look at using real recruitment techniques to find new board members and trustees. And we  provide an extended discussion on how volunteer program managers can take steps to work with volunteer boards and trustees, steps that result in important benefits for organizations both big and small.

In this Points of View, the authors won’t argue for a return to the old and casual systems for volunteer involvement.  After all, this is a different world with different problems – with criminal record checks serving as a perfect example of something that volunteer managers learned the hard way need to be done, as imperfect as they currently function.  But a goal of volunteer resource managers should still be to extend a welcome to prospective volunteers, making the process go as well as it can in today’s more complex environment. This Points of View presents some ideas that will help more people clear the hurdles of the volunteer process and help them actually cross the finish line as accepted volunteers.

Many volunteer program managers bemoan the fact that they receive little support from top management.  In this issue’s Points of View we consider the consequences of having entirely too enthusiastic backing from executive decision-makers – whether politicians or agency administrators – especially in the early stages of developing a volunteer effort.

There are two levels of possible over-enthusiasm.  The first is the growing tendency of national governments to voice advocacy for volunteerism, whether through proclamations of country-wide recruitment campaigns, actual legislation channeling funding for various projects, or just loud speechifying on how important volunteering is to the social good and civil society.   The second is at the individual organization level, in which the attitudes and actions of top managers lead to increased volunteer involvement (maybe).

One of the more interesting leisure pastimes is watching the Internet colossus Google release new tools and gadgets to supplement its basic search engine.  One of these we’ve been contemplating lately is www.google.com/trends.   One of the things about search engines like Google is that they provide an opportunity to see what people are interested in based on what search terms are utilized. 

For those of you who are wondering what any of this has to do with volunteerism, we’ll stop to make a point so obvious that many volunteer managers tend to forget it. 

Volunteering is a leisure activity that people fit into the rest of their lives, making the determination to allocate some of their discretionary time to volunteering based on how much time they have available and how interesting or important volunteering seems compared to other activities in which they might engage.  In one sense, volunteering is a competitive sport, but the major competition is not other volunteer activities as much as it is other activities, period.

Google Trends allows you to see what people are searching for, and to see in which cities the term is search for most often.  And since you can’t have a “trend” without a timeline, you can see a graph plotting usage over the past years in which Google has collected data.  See what we learned by searches on volunteer, volunteering, and community service and what all this might mean to you.

Volunteering is intricately intertwined with many areas of society and public life, some obvious and some that should be better recognized. In this issue of “Points of View” we discuss public policy arenas that relate to volunteering.  For each arena, we pose some philosophic and practical questions designed to provoke deeper thought. 

You’ll note there are no answers here, since our goal was to brainstorm the issues.  However, any question below could – and probably should – become the focus of academic or government research, or the subject of an article in e-Volunteerism.

Linda Graff started this conversation via e-mail and the rest of us just decided to pile on our opinions and questions.  Feel free to join in with us….