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Recruitment

The Search for Outstanding People

Have you ever wondered what grantmakers and foundations look for when considering whether or not to give money to your group? In this excerpt from the new book, Grassroots Philanthropy: Field Notes of a Maverick Grantmaker, leading philanthropist Bill Somerville and writer Fred Setterberg take you behind the scenes and describe how the search for outstanding people often drives the process, and explain why it should. Somerville outlines how he defines “outstanding” people, and reveals what grantmakers should look for in nonprofit leaders. You’ll want fundraisers in your community to think like this!

With its insights into fundraising and its application to volunteer management,
e-Volunteerism readers will no doubt find this article both interesting and valuable. Consider how a search for outstanding people might affect your volunteer recruitment goals. 

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Trolling for Leadership

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.

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Baby Boomers in Action! An Initiative in Iowa to Recruit Baby Boomer Volunteers

Anticipating the huge number of Baby Boomers entering retirement in the next two decades, RSVP of North Central Iowa leaders decided to focus their attention on how to engage that cohort in volunteer service.  Attracting even a small percentage of the area’s approximately 22,000 Baby Boomers into volunteerism could yield enormous dividends for the citizens in the region. In this feature story for e-Volunteerism, RSVP Director Elaine Hanson and consultant Elizabeth Weinstein reveal how the organization responded to the “call to action” – a move that resulted in series of activities and research projects aimed at capturing the hearts and talents of potential Baby Boomer volunteers.

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Deconstructing Engagement: Beyond the Buzzword

The term ‘engagement’ has gained appeal in both the for-profit and not-for-profit sectors to explain and understand relationship management with paid and voluntary staff. Yet little to no research has been done that focuses specifically on a volunteer’s engagement and how that might differ from a paid employee’s. This feature story will deconstruct the concept of engagement and suggest variables which need to be acknowledged in studying this concept and how it applies to volunteers. Looking to the future, we’ll also explore how to move forward to increase engagement capacity within the volunteer management profession.

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Finding and Keeping Volunteers in Sport and Recreation: What the Research Tells Us

Surveys in different countries show that people often choose to volunteer in the sport and recreation field.  During 2006, Sport and Recreation New Zealand (SPARC) commissioned research to look at how to motivate and recruit more volunteers, and successive SPARC studies show how important volunteers are to sport in New Zealand. This edition of Research to Practice considers how this detailed research can be applied across all volunteer-involving organisations.

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The Other Half of the Volunteer World

Much of volunteering happens outside of formal agencies and what we call “volunteer programs.”  Think of the thousands of all-volunteer associations, civic and service clubs, faith communities, professional societies and other groups with none or only a few paid staff – but each has its own leaders, most often volunteers themselves. These leaders are, in all ways, practicing volunteer management, but they do so in isolation from our field.  Working with volunteers who are self-led and working with those in agency-based programs has more similarities than differences, yet there is little evidence that volunteer program managers ever talk to the officers of all-volunteer groups or vice versa.  In this Points of View, we discuss how this is a great waste of potential.

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GoVolunteer User Research Report (2005)

GoVolunteer is the recruitment website of Volunteering Australia and is run in partnership with SEEK, an Internet employment website. From the 9th to the 31st of May 2005, a survey was placed on the website with the intention to collect data from people visiting the site. Analysing this data would enable a comparison of online tools for recruitment with more traditional methods, and help Volunteering Australia target its activities.

The survey gathered 1,413 responses out of a total number of 49,291 site visits. As sample sizes go, this ought to tell us a great deal about people using online volunteer matching sites.   What we do not know is whether the respondents are representative of users. For example, as we shall see below, the responses came overwhelmingly from women. Is that because more women use the site, or that women were more likely to answer the survey?

Happily the report also includes its own ‘applications of findings’ section to draw out the lessons of the research. This Research to Practice looks at the report and the findings.

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To Volunteer or Not to Volunteer


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.

 

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Membership Recruitment Made Easy

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.

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Creating a 'Fear-Less' Speakers Bureau Program

It has been said that public speaking is one of the number one fears of people.  Knowing that, how do volunteer program leaders attract volunteers to an organization’s public speaking program?  And then, what do volunteers need to know once they get there?  This article will share tools, activities, and content to create an effective speakers bureau program for volunteers.

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