Planning, Strategic

As volunteer managers struggle with a lack of time, the hours spent on volunteer training typically shrinks. The up-front investment in a volunteer decreases dramatically, depriving volunteers of a crucial connection with the organization’s mission.

In this Training Designs, Meridian Swift—a well-known volunteer manager, author, and blogger—explores why training should be embraced as an investment that will influence a volunteer's future commitment. Through this article, Swift will help volunteer managers discover ways to manage the time they need to make this investment. 

The United Nations is leading a worldwide effort to achieve clearly stated “Sustainable Development Goals.” Hundreds of organizations are selecting how they will contribute to the effort and, within that process, many are also determining where volunteers fit in. What are the essential elements of an environment that enables volunteerism? And what type of environment will ensure that volunteers make the greatest possible contribution to achieving sustainable development goals?

In this Voices, Bonnie Learmonth, James O'Brien, Shaleen Rakesh, and Goopy Parke Weaving identify and explore some of the environmental elements that contribute to the success of volunteers and the organisations that rely on volunteers to achieve their mission. These include contextual elements like how well people understand and recognise the impact of volunteerism; actor-based elements like the role of the state, civil society, and the private sector in enabling volunteering; relationships and power dynamics between actors; as well as system-wide factors like partnerships, technology, and funding.

The article draws on a discussion paper prepared by AVI (Australian Volunteers for International Development), VSO (Voluntary Service Overseas), and the Volunteer Groups Alliance for this year’s IVCO (International Volunteer Cooperation Organisations) conference. Between them, VSO and AVI have over 100 years of experience in sending international volunteers. The paper includes case studies of volunteering in an emerging democracy, Myanmar, and of private sector partnership in India.

Sustaining volunteer engagement is ultimately a balancing act. Volunteer management must utilise resources in the most effective way to address organisational needs while supporting volunteers in meaningful roles that allow them to not only flourish but to also have positive and rewarding volunteering experiences. Success happens when this win-win ratio is achieved.

As leaders of volunteers, we typically try to achieve a great deal with limited resources, tight budgets, and unforgiving timelines coupled with a lack of understanding about our role. So how can we achieve more with less and simultaneously increase the engagement of our volunteers? In this feature article, Christine Stankowski presents an option to do just that by applying what the business world calls a “process improvement framework” to the volunteer management process. This fresh approach, Stankowski believes, will increase volunteer retention, boost satisfaction and engagement, increase productivity, and improve problem solving. 

With apologies to Sesame Street and its well-known song lyrics, “One of these things (is not like the others)” applies to the world of volunteer management, too. Consider organizational constructs like boards, councils, committees, and advisory groups. When it comes to your organization or specific project, which is most appropriate? How do you differentiate one from the next? How can volunteer administrators most effectively involve and activate members of these groups?

In this e-Volunteerism feature, academics and volunteer organizational experts Ken Culp, Harriett Edwards, and Jenny W. Jordan help answer these questions while working to clarify the many diverse angles to this topic.  

In this e-Volunteerism feature, author Jill Jukes from the March of Dimes Canada’s Western Region argues that it’s time to update how organizations plan and prepare for volunteer involvement. Taking a close look at what she calls the traditional “Volunteer Engagement Cycle,” Jukes outlines why the current sequence of planning, recruitment, intake/onboard/screening, placement, training and supervision, recognition and retention, and evaluation does not always reflect current trends and realities. The remedy? Jukes proposes an entirely new Volunteer Engagement Cycle, one that that she calls Version 2.0. “This isn’t a monumental change to the traditional cycle,” Jukes writes, but one that renames and reimagines how organizations plan and prepare for volunteer engagement. Is it better? Will it work? Has Jukes merely proposed new words for the same things? In the end, Jukes asks you to decide.

What does it mean to move beyond volunteers as a “program” and, instead, embrace engagement as a strategy to fulfill your mission? The shift starts by understanding the benefits of developing a strategic plan for volunteer engagement. In this article, writer Beth Steinhorn highlights some of the research behind volunteer engagement strategies and shares a step-by-step process for developing a volunteer engagement strategic plan. She traces how one regional humane society developed such a plan and, as a result, is now lightening its staff’s heavy workload, bringing more skills into the organization, gaining more advocates, increasing resources, and ultimately helping more animals. 

 

Three British volunteers founded The National Trust in the UK 1895. In 2013, the Trust celebrated the involvement of over 70,000 volunteers in this conservation charity, one that protects historic places and green spaces while opening them up forever, for everyone. In terms of volunteer numbers, 2013 was the Trust’s most successful year ever, but that success isn’t just measured in volunteer numbers. In spring 2014, the Trust began the first phase of implementing a £1.2m investment in new systems and processes to support volunteering. A senior manager outside of the volunteering team described the change in volunteering and support at the Trust over the past three years as a “quiet revolution.”

In this e-Volunteerism feature, author Helen Timbrell, Volunteering and Community Involvement Director for the Trust, identifies the key things that helped bring about this “quiet revolution” – including how the Trust approached the challenge, the steps it took, and the order in which it did the work. Timbrell also presents how the Trust operated as a team and individually. This feature article is a follow-up to last year’s e-Volunteerism story about the Trust’s “Going Local” volunteer campaign, “Thinking Differently about Volunteering: Words from the National Trust.”

Ask care providers of chronically sick children or adults how they are coping, and Kathryn Berry Carter bets that they will say they are tired, stressed, and worn out. During her tenure as the Volunteer Services director of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, Berry Carter has witnessed first hand how caring for someone with complex medical needs can be tough physically and emotional.

Berry Carter often wanted to find an efficient way for hospital volunteers at St. Jude to help parents get a meaningful break. For years, she notes, “we limped along, providing some respite care for pre-scheduled needs.” In the fall of 2010, Berry Carter’s team became determined to take a hard look at this logistical challenge and to find a way to fix

In this article for e-Volunteerism, Berry Carter explains the steps she took at St Jude to implement a thriving and successful on-demand respite care program, one that has become an integral component of St. Jude’s family-centered care approach. Though the article mainly discusses respite care in a children’s hospital, Berry Carter describes how the same principles can be applied to respite care in settings ranging from senior nursing care facilities and Alzheimer day care facilities to hospital organizations and other pediatric programs.The St. Jude experience can be replicated in any of these settings, notes Berry Carter, who also provides tips on implementing any pilot program that explores new roles for volunteers, regardless of theme. 

For nearly a decade, Susan J. Ellis, the publishing editor of e-Volunteerism, has been encouraging (read: nagging) Andy Fryar, the journal’s manuscript developer, to write about an innovative volunteer program that he oversees in Adelaide, South Australia. After nearly 10 years of resisting, Fryar recently concluded, “I find myself completely out of excuses!”

In this feature article, Fryar presents a rather unique structural model for volunteer engagement and the innovative method of volunteer recruitment employed at the Lyell McEwin Regional Volunteer Association, a 750-strong, health-based volunteer involving agency based in Elizabeth, a northern suburb of Adelaide, the capital city of South Australia. Fryar has been chief executive officer of the Lyell McEwin Regional Volunteers since 1997, growing the organization from a workforce of around 180 volunteers to its current 750 members. Though volunteering at Lyell McEwin Hospital began in fairly typical hospital fashion, Fryar explains why the Regional Volunteer Association today is an outstanding example of new and innovative ways to run a volunteer program – in hospitals and other volunteer-dependent organizations. And he thanks Susan Ellis for 10 years of nudging and nagging to tell this story.