Membership Development

Are you helping to develop the next generation of volunteers? Today’s youth are tomorrow’s adult volunteers—if they grow up with the empathy and mindset to contribute their time and talents to their communities. Unfortunately, some studies have shown that contemporary youth are actually less likely to volunteer, even though community engagement appears to be more important to them than it was to their parents a quarter-century ago.

This Along the Web column examines the importance of involving children and teens in the volunteer experience and explores ways to introduce children and teens to volunteering. Because reaching children also means reaching their parents, this column identifies frequently suggested approaches to family-oriented volunteering for different age groups. By examining what appeals to parents, organizations may be able to find new ways to reach families, involve youth, and help encourage the volunteers of tomorrow.

What’s one way to increase the effectiveness of an organization that wants to involve volunteers in meaningful ways? In this e-Volunteerism feature, volunteer management experts Melanie Merrill and Ruth Leonard of Macmillan Cancer Support, London, write that in order to ensure continuous improvement of the volunteer experience, those who manage volunteers need to be well prepared, supported, and developed.

In this article, Merrill and Leonard explain how they equip volunteer managers through their Volunteering Quality Standards program, a unique framework developed to help raise standards in volunteer management and improve the volunteering experience of Macmillan’s 25,000 volunteers. The writers briefly describe these standards, and illustrate how “ensuring the voice of the volunteers” involves strategy development innovation on the part of volunteer managers. They conclude that “empowering volunteer managers through developing their skills ensures exemplary and impactful volunteer experiences” for those who give their time, energy, and experience to Macmillan. In other words, it’s how Macmillan brings out the extraordinary in everyone involved.

This e-Volunteerism feature provides an important introduction to a new collection of volunteer resources and written materials recently produced by CNIB, an organization previously known as the Canadian National Institute for the Blind that will celebrate its 100^th anniversary in March 2018. The materials include a series of manuals, toolkits, and training guides on a range of topics—all designed to enhance the volunteering experience with CNIB.

According to writer Jennifer Spencer, a team of CNIB employees assembled these materials on a wide range of topics, including advocacy, fundraising, being a program ambassador, and how to create a culture of volunteerism. This new collection of volunteer resources and materials is available on CNIB’s website. “This was purposefully done to make the material as accessible as possible, and to allow people from different organizations to adapt and tailor the manual for their needs,” writes Spencer. “By sharing these materials with the wider e-Volunteerism audience, we hope that you will be challenged not only to borrow from our resources but to create your own.”

When volunteer management consultant Sheri Wilensky Burke hears about an organization’s poor volunteer retention, she often discovers that the organization has not defined retention goals. “It’s common to set goals for recruiting volunteers and other metrics, but often organizations don’t consider what successful retention really means,” she notes. “Surely it is not realistic (or even desirable!) to expect that every volunteer will stay forever. But without setting goals for the desired length of volunteer commitment, it is difficult to assess if the organization has an actual problem keeping volunteers engaged or instead has a perception problem in its assessment of their retention.”

In this e-Volunteerism feature, Burke argues that volunteer evolvement is critical to volunteer retention—and makes the case that volunteer evolvement goes a long way toward meeting volunteer retention goals. Here, she defines volunteer evolvement as enabling volunteers to take on greater responsibilities within an organization, much like a volunteer “career ladder” that offers them the opportunity for growth and new experiences. “Even the most engaged volunteers can get bored from doing the same thing repeatedly,” she argues. “Just like paid staff who want professional development and promotion, many volunteers similarly desire new challenges in their volunteer careers. What better way to recognize your most committed volunteers than by asking them to take on new tasks and/or assume a leadership role?”

Whatever Happened To . . . is a recurring feature at e-Volunteerism that allows us to revisit past articles to see what has been happening since we first published the stories. 

In this issue, we revisit “Perspectives on Membership Development,” a story from 10 years ago about the Soroptimist International of the Americas, a global volunteer women’s organization. In 2005, the story revealed, Soroptimist International had recently faced a downward spiral in membership numbers and the closing of local clubs. Unlike other similar organizations in the same situation, Soroptimist had risen to the challenge by deciding to motivate its members to revamp tradition, discover new ways of doing things more relevant to women, and grow its membership.

In this fascinating update, Soroptimist’s Executive Director Elizabeth Lucas and Senior Director of Membership Marketing Darlene Friedman explain what Soroptimist is doing today to meet the challenges facing all volunteer and member-based organizations. The organization has created “an online community empowering offline action” called LiveYourDream.org, “a self-motivated community of people who wish to support women and girls in their quest to lead better lives, while gaining inspiration in their own lives.” We can all learn from this so-far successful approach to engaging non-members in volunteer activities (more than 50,000 people have signed up to date), and other changes Soroptimist has made to revitalize its approach to volunteerism in the 21^st century.

Volunteer-involving organizations – whether nonprofits, government agencies or all-volunteer associations – regularly search for new philosophies and technologies to maximize volunteerism and advance the organization’s purpose. However, implementing the use of personality profiles rarely makes the list of strategic initiatives. But in today’s social world, understanding an individual’s personality is critical to serving up relevant communications and interacting in meaningful ways. In order to succeed, organizations must emotionally engage their volunteers.

In this feature article, authors John Marshall and Hugh Massie take readers step by step to illustrate and explain how to use personality profiles in volunteer-involving organizations. And, the authors argue, "the investment of time and resources to incorporate personality profiles into the process of recruiting, organizing and engaging volunteers is one that pays off tenfold."

Soroptimist International of the Americas is an international volunteer organization for business and professional women who work to improve the lives of women and girls, in local communities and throughout the world. Bucking the trend of other large service clubs, Soroptimist is, in fact, asking its members to revamp the traditional club in order to grow its membership numbers. Find out how from excerpts of materials published in Soroptimist's Best for Women magazine and an interview with Executive Director, Leigh Wintz.

In 1971, behavioral scientists and innovative trainers Eva Schindler-Rainman and Ronald Lippett published The Volunteer Community: Creative Use of Human Resources. Though the book is now out of print, many of its concepts continue to resonate.  In this Voices from the Past, e-Volunteerism is pleased to publish an excerpt of Chapter Four, in which the authors present a force field analysis of volunteer motivation. The analysis helps explain what pushes people towards a “yes” to volunteering, and what pushes them towards a “no.”  The authors do the same analysis on another equally important volunteering decision: whether to continue as a volunteer, or to drop out.

What does a canned meat product called SPAM™ have to do with volunteer recruitment?  In this article, the authors explore the answer to this question by reviewing the key steps in volunteer recruitment, a process that helps remind an organization that it needs not only a clear purpose but people to rally around that purpose.  All it takes is a little S.P.A.M. − Skill development, Product knowledge, Audience understanding and Motivation.