Preparing Your Agency

In these incredibly difficult economic times, there is perhaps one silver lining: volunteer resources.  For those organizations wise enough to seize it, the economic crisis can be viewed as an opportunity to take advantage of the skills and ambitions that today’s volunteers have to offer.  This Training Design can be used to guide volunteer leaders in exploring the challenges and opportunities of volunteer management during economic distress. Participants in the training  learn six strategies to capitalize on volunteer resources during tough times. The result?  A win-win for both organizations and volunteers.

 

Many organizations now look specifically at the ways volunteers connect with them and how they can create new opportunities to involve volunteers of any age. This feature story explores a relatively new way to create more pathways to volunteering – “flexible volunteering.”   Flexible volunteering offers individuals a variety of different and relatively simple ways to contribute their services. Janica Fisher of Humanity In Practice (H!P) in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, explains why flexible volunteering is the secret to engaging more volunteers, and how it can be used to create meaningful ways to support an agency at the convenience of the volunteers.

In this Keyboard Roundtable, we’ll explore one of the perennial issues of volunteerism:  When should work be done by volunteers and when should it be done by paid staff?   Convening Editor Rob Jackson brings together a range of perspectives to explore this issue. Our participants will look at why we have differing views from each other on this important topic, and what common ground we can find between proponents of volunteering and those whose goal is to defend the rights of paid workers.

Despite the prevalence of small nonprofits and all-volunteer organizations, training for leaders of volunteers is often geared towards the full-time volunteer manager working in a large organization.  While most training is valuable to volunteer managers in all sizes of organizations, this common focus does not give the leaders of volunteers in small organizations a chance to explore the challenges when volunteers are responsible for most of the work and staff resources are slim to nonexistent.  How to insure follow-up? How to avoid burn out? How to bring in new members? 

This Training Design is offered with small nonprofits and organizations in mind.  It is designed specifically to be delivered by volunteer centers, nonprofit management centers, academic programs and trainers/consultants who wish to meet the needs of volunteer leaders in small nonprofits, community-based groups and other informal all-volunteer organizations. It will provide participants with an opportunity to address common challenges, share ideas and learn practical tips to maximize their success through volunteers.

This is a landmark article, in that it tackles a critical subject rarely presented in depth:  what it takes to raise money to support volunteers and the infrastructure of a volunteer program.  As the title says, noted trainer and author Betty Stallings covers both the attitudes necessary to fundraising success and a wide variety of ideas for finding or generating adequate funds.  Included are:

• Reasons why it is a challenge to raise money for a volunteer program.
• How to develop a strong case for support – specific “talking points.”
• Moving from begging to marketing.
• Visualizing success.
• Suggested methods of raising resources for your volunteer program, including donations from current volunteers, outreach to corporations and foundations, special events, gifts in honor of volunteers, and other creative approaches.
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  • Read more about Generating Funds for Your Volunteer Program: The Mindset and Methods

The potential for partnership exists for every organization. Partnerships can be formed within the nonprofit sector as well as with for-profits and government. We can share space, equipment, staff and volunteers, training, experience, events, revenue – the list is endless. It is said that communities have the social capitol required to be self-sustaining. The challenge lies in mapping who can contribute what to meet the needs. This is the basis for forming a successful partnership.

In this article, Deb Anderson provides some of the fundamentals for creating and maintaining collaborations of all sorts.

What/who do you call senior leaders where you are?  Perhaps you use director, CEO, executive director, director of volunteers, board president and, for me, add bishops, archbishops, chairs of provincial or national committees, doctors (the great senior leaders in most voluntary health organizations, etc.). 

Now, count the levels between you and the senior persons you want to connect with…your direct boss, your boss’s boss, the “big cheese,” the prestigious chair of a key committee. 

Now choose the one to focus on that you most want to influence.  Get that person and his or her job firmly in your mind.  Picture his or her office if you’ve seen it.  Got it??

So, let’s begin to strategize together.  And strategize you must if you wish to truly influence these leaders.

Suzanne Lawson takes you on an exploration of why a volunteer program manager would want to influence senior leaders at all—and then offers some practical ideas for doing so.  This article is adapted from a speech Suzanne presented to the Toronto Association of Volunteer Administrators.