Volunteer Program/Resources Manager, Role of

Introduction

Nonprofit organizations everywhere are engaging in strategic discussions to discover how they can be more efficient and effective in delivering services to enhance their missions. Too often they are not thinking about the impact of proposed changes on their volunteer manpower. Or they are having the discussion after the changes are made. At that point in time, it may be too late to consider the effect on volunteer involvement. I have observed national and regional organizations that, through benign neglect, did not engage volunteers in their initial strategic planning discussions. The impact was tragic. They lost many dedicated volunteers and donors who felt overlooked in the process.

“A Tool for Engaging Volunteers in the Change Process” provides a series of questions which should be addressed by staff and leadership volunteers as they are starting the process of major change within their organizations. The changes can be as great as mergers or can be less drastic internal changes dealing with how services will be delivered in the future.

It is often very difficult for paid staff to think about the effect on volunteers when they are concerned about how planned changes will impact their own positions within the organization. So, although these volunteer-focused questions may sound natural to ask, they must compete with the uncertainty felt by others about the organizational changes.

This article includes a print-ready handout of the change process Tool and a ready-to-use Microsoft PowerPoint presentation of the Tool to use in a meeting or training session.

In March 2005, a pioneering 48-hour event was held in Canberra, Australia: The 1st Annual Retreat for Advanced Volunteer Management . The 50 participants came from all of the Australian states and territories, plus representatives from New Zealand, Singapore, and the US. The intense but relationship-building retreat exceeded all expectations, with prospective outcomes that will strengthen volunteerism in the Pacific region in many ways.

The co-producers of the event explain how it evolved, the goals of the program, how the facilitation model was designed, and participant reactions. They also reflect on what the retreat meant to the emerging national professional associations of Australasia and plans for making the opportunity an annual one. They also explain the provocative slogan “Not just 50, not just 3” to which the retreat “alumni” committed in the last session.

The article is accompanied by audio “sound bites” recorded on site, in which participants explain what made the two days an “advanced” experience for them.

Think about the communications methods you – and others at your organization – use with volunteers right now. Is your organization getting the information it needs about volunteers and their activities via these methods? Information such as:

• Their accomplishments as volunteers
• Their feedback on assignments, relations with staff, other volunteers, and clients
• The number of hours they are contributing
• Tools/resources they are finding particularly useful
• Obstacles they are encountering
• Their suggestions or criticisms

What information are you getting via the communications methods you are using now, and what information are you lacking? In addition to volunteers sharing this information with you directly, is everyone who is working with volunteers sharing information with each other?

A lot of questions! But in thinking about these, you can already begin to see where your communications with volunteers is working, where it is lacking, and how you might make improvements.

Jayne Cravens gives us all practical tips on using Internet communication to engage volunteers successfully.

Sabotage!

The very word conjures up images of old war movies – silhouetted black and white figures blowing up railway lines in the midst of the night to prevent enemy advance. Indeed, sabotage is in fact a very real tool of war. Sadly it has also been a tool of some corporations who have used the technique to delay competitor success, while some individuals also deliberately sabotage the lives of their colleagues, families and even themselves in some bizarre notion of personal victory.

Sabotage is also at work within the volunteering sector. It is not too difficult to find volunteer administrators who, through poor work practices or a lack of a true understanding of their role, are unwittingly sabotaging their own volunteer programs. This results in a weakening of the value of volunteering in the eyes of their line managers, program volunteers, and the general public, as well as an undermining of the whole profession.

Martin Cowling warns us to be aware of the five 'lethal factors' of sabotage that can easily sneak into our management practices, describes how to confront them, and suggests how to deal with each in a decisive manner.

In 1980, VOLUNTEER: The National Center for Citizen Involvement (predecessor of the Points of Light Foundation) published Exploring Volunteer Space: The Recruiting of a Nation, by Ivan H. Scheier. As has been the case so often with Ivan’s writing, the book was way ahead of its time and unfortunately is now largely unknown. It is a joy to be able to use this “Voices from the Past” feature section of e-Volunteerism to reintroduce new readers to the very-much-still-relevant pages of Exploring Volunteer Space. In the Introduction, Ivan says:

The further cultivation of volunteering is the theme of this book; intensifying, energizing, and expanding it, working out from today’s career leadership of volunteering. The core is the director, coordinator or administrator of volunteer programs, plus resource people and organizations at local, state and national levels. These leaders number an estimated 70,000-80,000 people in the United States today…Without this leadership, there would be no significant volunteer movement for anyone to analyze here. Nevertheless, this leadership seems thin on the line, because the volunteer helping army is far larger than we suppose, and visible leadership, however, talented, shrinks drastically in relation.

In the excerpt presented here, we share Ivan’s thoughts on “Thick and Thin Leadership” – “Practical Issues in Career Effectiveness.” Over time, we’ll revisit Exploring Volunteer Space and give our readers more excerpts. And, since Ivan is Consulting Editor for this journal (/team/scheier.php), we may even hear from him directly in response.

Meetings, no matter what format is used, take considerable time. I hear many stories about the difficulty organizations are experiencing as they recruit volunteers for the board, a committee or a special project team because of the number of meetings required or because these individuals have ‘heard about the meetings’ from others! Imagine the difference if current volunteers were promoting involvement by saying: “You really want to be part of our group…we have the best meetings I have ever attended!”

So, we want to ensure we aren’t wasting volunteers’ time, nor discouraging others with unproductive, boring, never-ending meetings. This training design might be used as part of an orientation for individuals taking on the role of chairing a committee or as a tool to assist a group that has identified that their meetings need to be more focussed….

Barb Gemmell provides group exercises and worksheets on the five key meeting elements – Minutes, Agendas, Groundrules, Involvement and Consensus – so that you can add MAGIC to your meetings, too.

Colleen Kelly suggests that volunteer management has taken the road more travelled – the easier road – because when we began the process of formalizing volunteer involvement we did so mainly from the point of view of organizations recruiting volunteers to “fill positions” largely defined by paid staff. “I feel that this is one of our most pressing current challenges: developing a people-centred process, rather than a position-centred one – the road not yet taken.”

Based on an experimental project at Volunteer Vancouver, Kelly presents the concept of deploying entrepreneurial volunteers (EV) as “Scopers” to assist organizations in determining innovative ways to utilize highly- or specially-skilled prospective volunteers. She notes there are two approaches:

• Working with the ED: We can begin a process of working with organizations to determine the very specific tasks that highly-skilled volunteers can do for the organization.

• Working with the EV : We can teach the entrepreneurial volunteer how to go through a process of finding – and getting – the right volunteer position.
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Liz Adamshick shares her experience in soliciting financial donations from volunteers and her realization that volunteer administration professionals must work more collaboratively with fundraising professionals. She notes:

It took many conversations to bring us to the point of drafting and sending a letter, and logistics were central to the discussion. Philosophically, the financial development director and I were on the same page: Donating money to an organization is a personal decision, and not ours to make for our volunteers.

Up to this point, we had been making this decision for volunteer staff, simply by not inviting them to consider supporting us financially. But our respective departments each worked with separate databases for the audiences we reached and tracked. We lacked any kind of contact management system that would allow us to identify overlap between these audiences, and specific evidence of their dual support of the organization through volunteer involvement and financial donations…

So while we had a skeletal system in place, we still had to meet on several occasions to exchange and compare lists, identify which volunteers were already donors (some were major donors, and had just recently been solicited to support more substantially a different campaign), and determine what to do with donors and volunteers who resided outside our organization’s jurisdiction…

During this process of refining lists, reviewing drafts of solicitation letters, and periodically touching base on related philosophical questions, I began to think more creatively about the potential for a deeper level of collaboration with my financial development colleague, and recognized that our respective professions had more in common than either of us had explored in the past.

Read Adamshick’s recommendations for why and how we must learn to work together.

Through several years of working in public relations (PR) and journalism, I've heard many publicity officers of social and sporting clubs and PR officers of non-profit organisations complain they are not getting 'enough exposure': 'I sent a release to The Times last week, and they didn't publish it' or 'I e-mailed a three-page letter on the annual general meeting two days ago, and the radio station didn't put a word of it to air'.

Having studied both public relations and journalism, I know that newspapers and the radio/television media, especially outside of capital cities, are always on the lookout for good local items of interest. I also know that there are rules that the media themselves must follow, in order to meet their own time lines.

If we learn to submit a press release using the right procedure, and if we do it right, it will go to air or be put into print. That is the basis of this article.