Tag Archives: record-keeping

keep volunteer info up-to-date or else

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logoI really cannot emphasize enough the importance of keeping your records regarding volunteers up-to-date…

“Ada” was a volunteer for two years with a very-well known national organization’s state affiliate. She was very active with the organization in that time, taking on a number of high-responsibility roles and helping to increase the number of attendees at local events. But a conflict with an employee lead Ada to end her volunteering. There was no dramatic departure: she simply stopped taking on new volunteering tasks, stopped attending volunteer meetings, and let her membership lapse. Not one person from the agency contacted her to say, “Hey, where’d you go?!?” Ada always assumed they hadn’t noticed – or were happy that she was gone. A year after she left the organization, she moved to a city almost two hours away.

Imagine Ada’s surprise when, three years after she left the organization, she gets a very friendly email from the director of individual giving from the organization, talking about something that happened in the town where she used to live. The email wasn’t addressed to anyone specifically, such as “Dear volunteers in such-and-such town”, but given the informal, chatty nature of the email, it was obvious that that’s who it was supposed to be going to. As Ada had been gone from the organization for three years, didn’t live in the city mentioned anymore, and had never heard of the person that was writing her this oh-so-chatty email, she was shocked. And a bit put off.

“They didn’t even notice when I didn’t renew my membership and I stopped volunteering,” she said. “And now, three years later, they write me as though we’re the best of friends?”

By not noticing the departure of this volunteer, by not updating its database to reflect that she had withdrawn, and by contacting someone who obviously had disengaged with the program for quite a while now with a message that made it seem like they were still involved and happy with the organization, this organization now has an even more entrenched negative reputation as being incompetent and/or insensitive with this volunteer. Ada may bring this up to her Facebook friends. She may bring it up in social gatherings with friends and family. She may bring it up to co-workers. And it’s that kind of word-of-mouth experience that people really, really listen to.

Also see:

global survey on volunteer management software – revisited

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In 2012, Rob Jackson (robjacksonconsulting.com) and Jayne Cravens (coyotecommunications.com) — ME — drafted and circulated a survey regarding software used to manage volunteer information. The purpose of the survey was to gather some basic data that might help organizations that involve volunteers to make better-informed decisions when choosing software, and to help software designers to understand the needs of those organizations. We also wanted to get a sense of what organizations were thinking about volunteer management software.

We promoted the survey every way we knew how – emailing our contacts directly, posting to various online discussion groups, posting repeatedly to our social networks, and asking others to share the survey with their readers and networks. Then we published the results of the survey here (in PDF); it includes an executive summary of our findings, as well as the complete responses to questions and our analysis of such.

It’s the two-year anniversary of this survey, and we think the results are still quite useful. Software companies and designers: you can learn a LOT from this report to improve your products and your communications with customers!

What we learned:

We learned how much managers of volunteers love spreadsheets, even those that have specialized software for managing volunteers.

We also learned a lot from this report that has nothing to do with software. In the survey, we asked a lot of questions that didn’t relate directly to software, like about how many volunteers these organizations managed, as well as what volunteers did. And the answers about what volunteers do at various organizations were surprising.

Rob and I did not have time to analyze all of the comments made in answer to some questions; for all questions, we listed the comments made, but we did not always offer any observations about such, or group the responses into categories. We welcome the efforts of other researchers to offer their own analysis of the data provided.

The thing I have learned since then: I’m not sure volunteer management software is what every organization needs to track and schedule volunteers. The more I talk to people working with volunteers, the more I think that seeking function-based software (scheduling, performance, etc.) rather than volunteer-management software is the answer for a lot of organizations. I’ll write more about that soon.