United States

Discussions of legal issues involving volunteers are usually conducted philosophically, using generic examples or what-if scenarios. In this feature, Donald W. Kramer, an American lawyer and editor with extensive expertise and experience in nonprofit legal matters, shares actual court cases and reviews their implications for volunteer leaders and volunteers. While all of the examples are from the United States, Kramer's article covers a range of concerns that surface in many countries around the world. If you and your organization tend to want to run and hide when you hear the word “lawsuit,” Kramer’s article, which includes a sample volunteer agreement template, will no doubt prove helpful. 

In this Research to Practice, author Laurie Mook reviews the use of social computing technologies by volunteer coordinators at nonprofit organizations. Mook looks at research on use and non-use of technology, based on interviews with 23 volunteer coordinators from three different metropolitan areas of the western United States. The study was conducted by Amy Voida, Ellie Harmon and Ban Al-Ani of the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine.

As background, the researchers take the perspective that the work of volunteer coordinators is bridge-building work—bringing together numerous public constituencies as well as constituencies within their organizations. And one might expect that this class of work would be well supported by social software, some of which has been found to enable bridging social capital. However, the researchers find that, in many ways, this class of technology fails to adequately support volunteer coordinators’ bridge-building work.  The study then offers a number of strategies for bridge-building via social computing technologies, reviews the numerous challenges faced by volunteer coordinators in their use of these technologies, and presents opportunities for designing social software to better support bridge-building between organizations and the public.

How many of you have actually taken the time to create a strategy for your own professional development? Have you considered what you would like to achieve professionally over the next year or the next five? So many of us discuss the need to professionalize volunteer management so that our organizations will value volunteers and the work we do, leading to greater investment in volunteerism and viewing us as internal experts. But for that to occur it must start with each of us. 

According to Sheri Wilensky Burke and Gerald (Jerry) Pannozzo, it's important for each individual to invest in professional development. There are many strategies out there to accomplish this: subscriptions to publications such as this one; memberships in professional associations, attending conferences and workshops; mentoring; and the strategy Burke and Pannozzo describe as peer career coaching. In this feature article, read how these long-time colleagues used peer career coaching to collaborate on a mutual support plan to increase their professional skills and opportunities. After reading, perhaps you can, too. 

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 nonprofits to strengthen their ability to deliver services through the effective involvement of volunteers. In a 2011 article called “The Volunteer Impact Program (VIP): An Innovative Approach to Strengthen Volunteer Engagement Capacity,” e-Volunteerism introduced the VIP model, shared some preliminary results for participants and discussed lessons learned in delivering this intensive program to local nonprofits. In this new feature, authors Nikki Russell and Liahann R. Bannerman revisit VIP and report on some exciting long-term positive results and the challenges of delivering VIP to nonprofit organizations.

Volunteer “voice” in nonprofit organizations has not been the topic of a lot of study. What happens, for instance, when volunteers encounter situations they find dissatisfying? This issue’s Research to Practice looks at this subject through “Volunteering an Opinion: Organizational Voice and Volunteer Retention in Nonprofit Organizations,”published in the academic journal, Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, in October 2011. This study reviews the experiences of over 380 volunteers at several nonprofits in Southern California. It used an online survey to ask volunteers how they reacted to a particular dissatisfying circumstance, and then related their responses to their motivations for volunteering - and the degree of satisfaction with their experience. As writer Laurie Mook points out, the research reveals a relationship between the particular motivation leading volunteers to work for the organization and how they respond to dissatisfaction. The study also provides suggestions for eliciting constructive feedback from volunteers while also encouraging volunteer satisfaction and retention.

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 the green stuff, it’s evident that money is an important part of our lives, for good and bad. After all, while many claim that money makes the world go ‘round, others claim that it is the root of all evil.

Certainly money and compensation is the root of a great debate among those who supervise a volunteer workforce. When it comes to the volunteer manager position, there is a disconnect between the demands of the position and the pay level attached to it. In this e-Volunteerism feature story, writer Paula Gangel analyzes a range of comparative salary levels to try and understand why there is such a discrepancy between work demands and compensation for the Director of Volunteer Services position. And Gangel presents options to help volunteer managers earn the proper amount in every paycheck. 

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 more. The Miami Dolphins Special Teams, Driven by Chevy, is a new volunteer program that serves as one of the cornerstones of the Miami Dolphins Foundation. Although not the first volunteer initiative in professional sports, it is the first and only full-time volunteer program operated by a professional sports team. Started in 2009, the program is specifically designed to engage episodic volunteers in community service using the unique incentives and branding only available to a professional sports team.  To date, the program has attracted 3,204 volunteers who have logged 43,835 hours of community service.

In this feature story for e-Volunteerism, Leslie Nixon, the Manager of Volunteer Programs for the Miami Dolphins, takes readers behind the scenes to show a business model of volunteerism from a decidedly unique perspective. Whether you’re a football fan or not, this story will give you a new way to think about volunteer opportunities.

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 Davis S. Zocchi Brain Tumor Center in Long Beach, New Jersey.

In 2007, Zocchi had just learned to text. Questore, like all teens and tweens today, could nimbly text like the best of them. And both shared the experience of losing a loved one to a brain tumor. So Zocchi, the CEO of a multi-media company, and Questore, then a middle school student, created an innovative fundraiser – one that has been repeated every year since.

e-Volunteerism Senior Editor Margaret O. Kirk interviews both Zocchi and Questore for this story, which presents their creative, replicable idea and probes the volunteer management challenges that both faced in this inter-generational, modern media effort.

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 meals programs more effectively recruit, involve and retain high-value volunteers. During this nine-month program, key staff benefited from cohort-based training and peer learning, and worked with volunteer consultant teams to assess volunteer management capacity and develop action plans. They also received small grants to implement key elements of their action plans.  

This e-Volunteerism feature article offers a summary of the VIP experience. It shares the preliminary results for VIP participants, and identifies lessons learned in delivering an intensive volunteer management capacity-building program to local nonprofits