Tag Archives: experts

Summer Webinars on Volunteer Engagement

My dear colleague Erin Barnhart (Effective Altruism) is organizing summer webinars on selected Fridays regarding expanding skills in volunteer engagement, some featuring my other dear colleague, Liza Dyer, and some featuring me! The webinars are in June and July and, if interest is high, we’ll keep doing them!

These webinars are intense, fun, interactive, an hour long (never more), affordable and each focused on ONE aspect of effective volunteer engagement. We designed these topics based on what we are all hearing from people working with volunteers, in any capacity, as well as our own experiences as managers of volunteers and as volunteers ourselves.

Here’s the schedule:

Friday, June 8: Social Media + Volunteer Engagement 

Friday, June 15: Rebooting Volunteer Roles and Opportunities (Reinventing Your Volunteer Program series)

Friday, June 22: Reimagining Volunteer Recruitment (Reinventing Your Volunteer Program series)

Friday, June 29: Revising Communications and Supervision (Reinventing Your Volunteer Program series)

Friday, July 6: Revisiting Support, Recognition, and Retention (Reinventing Your Volunteer Program series)

Friday, July 13: Building Stronger Staff-Volunteer Relationships

All webinars at 11 PDT (Los Angeles time) / 2 pm EDT (New York time).

Individual webinars are $25 each, or you can buy access to all four of the webinars in the Reinventing Your Volunteer Program series for $75.

Register for any individual webinar at the links above.

Questions? Email Erin Barnhart at erin@erinlbarnhart.com

Why I still don’t like “International Volunteer Manager’s Day”

logoNovember 5 is celebrated by some as International Volunteer Manager’s Day. And I’m not fond of it. I’ve said so in conversations, and in a post on OzVPM back in October 2009 . But I wanted to revisit why I’m not fond of it.

I call it “hug-your-volunteer-manager” day. I compare it to Mother’s Day.  And I don’t mean that as a compliment. 

Mother’s Day didn’t transform mothers’ lives. It didn’t elevate the status of mothers. It didn’t improve maternal health. It didn’t make women want to become mothers. It wasn’t transformative regarding how society thought about mothers. That’s what the founder of Mother’s Day wanted, and instead, she saw the day become a commercial celebration, a day of sweetness, but not substance. In fact, the person who led the campaign to adopt Mother’s Day in the USA later regretted it because of how empty and commercial the celebration was, in contrary to her intentions, and even filed a lawsuit to stop a Mother’s Day Festival.

Maybe I would be more attracted to the day if it was a day less about cute memes and inspiring quotes and was, instead, devoted to encouraging people that are in charge of the engagement of volunteers to:

  • go to their supervisors and ask for salary and budget increases
  • put themselves on the agenda to address their organization’s board of directors regarding the importance of quality volunteer support and ask for a larger budget for this support
  • write their local newspapers and blog in response to whatever the latest volunteerism campaign is (because there is ALWAYS one going on somewhere), debunking myths like “volunteers are free” and talking about why volunteer management is essential to such a campaign’s success (and writing the campaign leaders as well)
  • have a meeting with the person responsible for the annual report to present a proposal regarding how the contributions of volunteers will be noted in the next annual report, and absolutely refuse for that information to be presented in terms of money
  • launch a new, updated, detailed section of the organization’s web site that gives volunteers as high a profile as donors, and ensure that the link to “support us” doesn’t just link to a page on how to make a cash donation
  • use social media to promote the impact of volunteers at the organization, or to assert volunteers aren’t cost-free, or to push back against those that want us to value volunteers primarily in terms of money saved by not paying staff
  • develop an action plan for the next year with concrete actions to elevate the role of volunteers and volunteer management within the organization (the board, the staff, partner organizations, etc.)
  • present a strategy to expand the engagement of volunteers at the organization
  • present a strategy for training staff to work better with volunteers, create more assignments, etc.
  • vow to never, ever write another Facebook post or blog or online discussion comment whining about how overworked and underpaid they are – or at least not to write one for six months.

No pins. No mugs. No flowers. No posters. No t-shirts. No buttons. No badges. No memes. Not for this day. Instead, concrete, even provocative, action, by managers of volunteers – real activism – to elevate respect for their roles and their work, to increase the recognition of the vital importance of volunteerism specialists, so much so that people choose it as a career. To be transformative regarding how society thought about volunteer engagement and those in charge of such.