posted
12/15/11
Copyright © 2011 by Primary Key Technologies, Inc. and brought to you by YourVolunteers.
2012 is nearly here and given the slow recovery of the world economy, your organization may be looking to improve upon its 2011 volunteer strategy to either expand or better utilize an existing volunteer program. We offer a few tips to consider when building a new volunteer strategy.
Volunteer Involvement
CVS Northhamptonshire makes a great point about the importance of involving volunteers in the development of a strategy (“Developing”). The last thing that you want is a mass exodus of your existing, dedicated volunteers because of changes to your program. Keeping your volunteers aware of upcoming changes is vital to keeping your volunteers happy. If you plan to expand your program, volunteers need to know that their efforts were not lacking. Additionally, if the duties of the volunteers will be expanded to cover more of what paid employees used to do, it’s important to know that the volunteers agree that the new duties are appropriate.
The Recruiting Plan
We’ve previously offered tips on how to recruit volunteers, but as a volunteer manager, you still have to decide whether you will be interviewing all applicants yourself, if you will be asking trusted volunteers to help, if you will be accepting all who want to help, and if necessary, what your budget will be for background checks. Consider spending a significant amount of time developing precise job titles that let your potential volunteers know exactly what your potential volunteers will be doing. Expecting that all volunteers will be willing to spend their time peforming all of the tasks that your organization has is a quick way to lose said volunteers. It should be noted that giving a volunteer position the wrong job title is the Seventh Deadly Sin of recruiting volunteers according to VolunteerPower.com (McKee).
Expanding the Virtual Volunteer Program
We have recently offered some tips on managing a virtual volunteer program and have received good and bad feedback. Good from virtual volunteers and bad from volunteer managers. When developing a volunteer strategy, it may be easy to think that expanding or creating a virtual volunteer program might be the answer to your organization’s limited space, to your recruiting challenges, and to finding the specific skills that may be mostly contained in individuals who are not generally available during your office hours (e.g. web developers). However, as we mentioned in the post and as we received in feedback, working with virtual volunteers may be challenging since you do not have them onsite for a set number of hours and they may be distracted by other work, by their families or by the excellent season of television. If you will be adding a virtual program to your volunteer strategy, be sure to remember that you may need to include generous timelines and you should definitely seek to recruit more volunteers than you think you need.
Changing the Way that You Manage Your Volunteers
It should be crystal clear that we are partial to one particular free online volunteer management system, but we are fully aware that there are other systems available. If you will be expanding your volunteer program and you do not currently use a system, you should consider including the use of a volunteer management system in your plan. In addition, if you are expanding your program because your organization has fewer paid employees, it’s likely that your duties will be expanded beyond the management of volunteers. More volunteers mean more management, more data to enter, more spreadsheets, more emails, more phone calls, more training and more more more more. Online systems allow your volunteers to come to a website and enter their own information and to help manage their own schedules. If their updated schedule information is available online, you will less likely to be contacted when a volunteer has a question.
In leiu of or in addition to using a volunteer management system, you may want to consider creating a hierarchy where a volunteer reports to another volunteer (with a proper title, of course). However, as many of you know, volunteers are not always willing to follow the rules of traditional hierarchies (McDuff et al, 2009) and may want to report directly to you anyway to get faster answers and to move into different volunteer roles.
Build in the Ways to Thank Them (or Not)
There have been numerous articles, posts and books dedicated just to the topic of thanking volunteers published in the past few years which reflects the recent emphasis on gratitude. Nonprofit organizations are now competing with the increasing volunteer needs of schools, libraries, parks departments and for-profit corporations. Volunteers need to know that their work is appreciated and word will spread that your organization is one that understands the value of their service.
However, in an article he wrote for Nonprofit World, Nick Levinson makes the case that you should forget the “thank you” and you should instead take full advantage of what they have to offer and encourage them to grow and learn like you would a paid employee (Levinson, 2004). This could mean setting aside funds for educational programs that would benefit both the volunteer and your organization. Further, Levinson states that volunteers are self-motivated and generally do not expect a plaque or certificate and would prefer the constant recognition of their contributions rather than just an annual dinner (Levinson, 2004).
Works Cited
“Developing a volunteer strategy.” Retrieved 12/14/2011 from the website of CVS Northamptonshire at http://www.cvsnorthamptonshire.org.uk/.
Levinson, N. (2004). What’s Wrong with “Thank You?” Plenty. Nonprofit World.
MacDuff, N., F. E. Netting and M. K. O’Connor. (2009). Multiple Ways of Coordinating Volunteers
With Differing Styles of Service. Journal of Community Practice.
McKee, T. The Seven Deadly Sins of Recruiting Volunteers. Retrieved 12/14/2011 from the website of VolunteerPower.com at http://www.volunteerpower.com/articles/7Sins.asp
Image: Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
posted
12/02/11
Copyright © 2011 by Primary Key Technologies, Inc. and brought to you by YourVolunteers.
Just as the concept of telecommuting expands the ability of a workplace to recruit employees, opening up your organization to virtual volunteering allows you to recruit skilled service providers who want to make a differenec from anywhere in the world. While virtual volunteers can serve as your organization’s pubic relations people, accountants, grant writers, mentors or in any number of roles (Mukherjee, 2010), this post will focus primarily on my own experiences as a volunteer web, software and database developer.
Why We Volunteer Virtually
Bottom line: we want to help, but work and life get in the way. Virtual volunteering allows us to work on our own schedule, e.g. while we wait for a response from our paying clients, while we’re at home wondering why NBC has put Community on hiatus. We also do not have to commute to an office, a shelter or a community center through traffic to do the kinds of things that we know we could do at home.
Why We Don’t Volunteer Virtually
The modern world has our faces in our computers, smart phones, and tablets as we read the near-infinite emails, tweets, posts and updates regarding pending deadlines, customer complaints, and the links to YouTube videos of kittens. Volunteering onsite at a shelter with our phones off may be that quiet time that we all need and may provide those social connections that we in the IT industry don’t value enough (like sunlight). The last thing we need is a pushy volunteer coordinator looking to impress his/her superiors by showing how well he/she managed virtual volunteers through emails, tweets, posts and updates to get a project done. Unless you’re one of the lucky organizations that gets a virtual volunteer who is out of a job and looking to prove something, most of us are just trying to balance work, family and service.
Why You Want a Virtual Volunteer
As mentioned, with virtual volunteers, you are not limited to those in your community. Also, many of us, particularly in the IT field, have our own equipment that tend to be on the higher end of the spectrum not necessarily for the work that we do, but because that Starcraft 2 game requires some serious computer hardware. We also generally have a massive library of reference materials that we use in our own work that, when we work on site, we tend to wish that the Kindle came out 15 years ago and all of those books were on it. By recruiting virtual volunteers and by not restricting your volunteers to business hours, you’re able to work with professionals in the field who will do the same work for you that they do for some of the world’s best companies.
Why You Don’t Want a Virtual Volunteer
When you bring in a volunteer into the office, you have them for a volunteer shift. If they are there for a four hour shift, they likely will not be distracted by television, needing to do their laundry, or the new Call of Duty game. Seriously, have you seen the new Call of Duty game? They should rename it “Call of Distraction.” In addition, a 2006 article in the Chronicle of Philanthropy has a couple of volunteer managers agreeing that virtual volunteers tend to be higher maintenance (Gardyn, 2006). It may be true, but just a suggestion to everyone looking to hire IT virtual volunteers: don’t call them names like high maintenance or they’ll start to hear the Call of Duty.
Make It So
If you post a Craigslist ad for a virtual volunteer and get a response from a highly qualified IT professional looking to help, don’t take down the ad. One virtual volunteer for an IT project is good, two is great, and three is even better. Most of us are used to working together and writing only parts of a project. The best idea would be to choose one to be the lead, step back a little and watch the magic happen. Let the team develop a timeline and the deliverables. One of the toughest parts of IT projects, both volunteer and paid, is conveying to a client that building a website or software product is not like building a Word document unless you imagine that each word in the document has a whole lot of other words hidden behind it.
It is important to keep the project moving forward with continual prodding, but at the same time, you can choose to either work with virtual volunteers with years of experience in the field who might be a little busy with their paying work or with that college student who once tweeted that their professor is soooo boring and therefore assumes they can do any kind of web development. In other words, a little bit of patience and a generous timeline on a project will likely result in a better product. If you have a tight timeline and things are falling behind, and your inclination is to get angry and write an email to your virtual volunteers WITH ONLY CAPITAL LETTERS, take a look at your organization’s checkbook to remind yourself how much you are paying for a service that is normally really expensive. If you don’t believe me, get a few quotes from around town. Be warned that when you receive the quotes, you’ll likely want to send a virtual hug to all of your virtual IT volunteers.
Works Cited
Gardyn, R. (2006) Volunteering Goes Virtual. Chronicle of Philanthropy.
Mukherjee, D. (2010) An Exploratory Study of Older Adults’ Engagement with Virtual Volunteerism. Journal of Technology in Human Services.
Image: David Castillo Dominici / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
posted
08/28/11
Copyright © 2010-2011 by Primary Key Technologies, Inc. and brought to you by YourVolunteers.
You have a huge special event coming up, you’ve signed up for an online managment and scheduling system — now what? After the question about recruiting, this is probably the question that we receive most.
Become Familiar with the System
Many of the available systems are fairly extensive and there is a learning curve. Give yourself plenty of time before using it to be sure that you can work with it. When the usual craziness happens in the days immediately before your event, you don’t want to be struggling with the system trying to figure out how to get it to do what you need it to do.
Set Up the Tasks
It’s important to give your volunteers as much information as possible about the tasks they’ll be doing. Is there a person they’ll need to find? Is there a meeting place? What will they be doing? It’s also important that they know who you are and how they can contact you. Always keep in mind that not all potential volunteers have email addresses so you’ll need to include other ways for them to contact you.
Answer Questions before You Get Them
If you’ve done this before, you know that you’ll get a lot of the same questions (e.g. do I get free admission, will the free t-shirt look good on a burly man in his 40′s, etc.). If you have a place to go ahead and answer these questions, be sure to do so before the first volunteers come to your site. This will save you an enormous amount of time, especially in the weeks immediately before your event (i.e. when there’s no time to spare).
Make Sure that Your Volunteers Know that They Are Part of a Team
We know that you’re busy in the planning of a successful event, but it’s really important to keep in contact with your volunteers. In some cases, they will be flying across the country to volunteer for you, so you’ll want them to know that they’re efforts are appreciated and that the event can’t succeed without them. We don’t have any evidence-based research to support this, but it seems pretty clear to us that volunteer managers who don’t follow this advice seem to have more no-shows than those who do. Tweet, do video blogs, do podcasts, write messages on the website, but just do something to let them know that you are a living, breathing human being and you need their help. Whatever it is that you do, always keep in mind those volunteers without email since they usually are just as dedicated as the others and you don’t want to risk alienating them by only sending out updates by email. If you’re responsibilities to the event keep you from being a good volunteer leader, ask one of the volunteers to take the lead.
New Volunteers
You’ll want to keep a close eye on the online system that you use for new volunteer registrations. When you use an online system, it’s pretty common for volunteers to sign up for an event but not input their availability or choose specific tasks. You’ll need to follow up and encourage them to complete the process or you risk losing their help at the event. Even if they do complete the process, it’s a nice touch to send them a thank you message anyway for their willingness to help.
Recruiting
You’ll be one of the lucky few if you have an event where you’ll have plenty of volunteers coming to you without having to do any recruitment. The earlier that you start the recruitment process (see our previous post for ideas), the better your mental health will be as the event draws near.
Confirm, Then Re-Confirm
If you’ve started the recruitment process well ahead of time (like you should have), you’ll need to check in with your volunteers at least a month before the event to be sure that they’re still able to make it especially if many of them will be traveling. This will give you enough time to find replacements if necessary. Immediately before the event, you’ll want to confirm again. Even if you only have a couple of days to schedule replacements, it’s still better than trying to do it on-site at the event.
Copyright © 2011 by Primary Key Technologies, Inc. and brought to you by YourVolunteers.
