Tag Archives: value

We’ve got to get better at addressing misconceptions about volunteerism.

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graphic representing volunteers at work

I live in the Portland, Oregon area, and a few years ago, the area experienced record-setting heat. In response, various city and county governments set up cooling centers: spaces in libraries, churches and convention centers where people without air conditioning and people who are unsheltered could come, with their pets, to get relief from the dangerous heat. One county government tweeted out several requests for volunteers, including one that said volunteers were needed “desperately.” I decided to amplify the message by posting it to various online communities I’m a part of, including posting it on the subreddit for Portland, Oregon. I highlighted some points in particular from the web site where people were to express interest in volunteering:

Must be 18+, have compassion for all guests. Social service experience helpful.

Please keep in mind that emergency response operations may be very hectic keeping you quite busy for extended periods. You may also experience very slow uneventful periods of time. Such is the nature of emergency and disaster response. Please take time before your deployment to prepare for this working environment.

These are 9-hour shifts. These locations are open 24 HOURS.

I did alter the message to say cooling center volunteers were needed URGENTLY, rather than desperately, because I think desperation is never a good place to recruit volunteers from.

The message was upvoted more than any message I’ve ever posted to Reddit. But there was also significant backlash. The criticisms fell into three areas:

  • Why aren’t these positions paid? Why are these volunteer roles instead?
  • Why are the shifts 9 hours instead of 4?
  • Why didn’t the city plan better & start recruiting sooner?

It’s a shame those first two questions in particular weren’t answered by the recruiting agency in their messaging. As regular readers of my blog know, to not say why positions are volunteer rather than paid is always a big no-no. And saying “we don’t have the money to pay, so these are volunteer!” would not be the answer I am looking for (and probably not most of potential volunteers either).

As for the third comment, I don’t know that the city didn’t start recruiting sooner; I didn’t look on HandsOn Portland, VolunteerMatch and AllforGood, for instance, to see if they had started recruiting there. I don’t know that they didn’t have notices on their own web site sooner than what I saw on social media. So I hesitate to criticize them for how they have recruited in terms of when and where.

I did take issue with one comment that was made, and pushed back at it:

Way too much money and benefits expenses being expended on volunteer “coordinators”

I noted in my response that managers or coordinators of volunteers are some of the lowest paid people at any nonprofit or other agency, and rarely is their only role managing volunteers. I also said:

Volunteers aren’t free: someone has to recruit them, read the applications, interview them, screen them (often, background checks, reference checks and extensive interviews are required), supervise them (both to ensure their safety and client safety, and to make sure they’re doing what they are supposed to), support them (train them, answer questions on demand, etc), record their hours and their accomplishments, address problems, and report regularly to senior staff about what the volunteers are doing. It’s a tough job, made harder by people who think volunteers are free, think volunteer management is “Hey, we need volunteers, come on down!” and the work all magically happens, and balk at coordinators who ask for better training for themselves, software to manage volunteers, etc.

Nonprofits have GOT to do a better job of addressing misconceptions about volunteers and volunteer engagement. This is just yet another example of why.

Also see:

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How Wikipedia’s volunteers became the web’s best weapon against misinformation

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Interesting article from Fast Company that offers insights on the quality of service volunteers – unpaid staff – can provide:

While places like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter struggle to fend off a barrage of false content, with their scattershot mix of policies, fact-checkers, and algorithms, one of the web’s most robust weapons against misinformation is an archaic-looking website written by anyone with an internet connection, and moderated by a largely anonymous crew of volunteers…

Wikipedia is not immune from the manipulation that spreads elsewhere online, but it has proven to be a largely dependable resource—not only for the topics you’d find in an old leather-bound encyclopedia, but also for news and controversial current events, too. Twenty years after it sputtered onto the web, it’s now a de facto pillar in our fact-checking infrastructure. Its pages often top Google search and feed the knowledge panels that appear at the top of those results. Big Tech’s own efforts to stop misinformation also rely upon Wikipedia: YouTube viewers searching for videos about the moon landing conspiracy may see links to Wikipedia pages debunking those theories, while Facebook has experimented with showing users links to the encyclopedia when they view posts from dubious websites…

Wikipedia’s lessons in protecting the truth are only growing more valuable.

But all is not well at Wikipedia among the volunteers:

As many of the site’s own editors readily admit in dozens of forums, the community is plagued by problems with diversity and harassment. It’s thought that only about 20% of the editing community is female, and only about 18% of Wikipedia’s biographical articles are about women. The bias and blind spots that can result from those workplace issues are harmful to an encyclopedia that’s meant to be for everyone. Localization is also a concern given Wikipedia’s goal to make knowledge available to the whole world: The encyclopedia currently exists in 299 languages, but the English version still far outpaces the others, comprising 12% of the project’s total articles.

The community has also struggled to retain new blood. Editors often accuse each other of bias, and some argue that its political pages exhibit a center-left bent, though recent research suggests that the community’s devotion to its editorial policies washes that out over time. Less-experienced editors can also be turned off by aggressive veterans who spout Wikipedia’s sometimes arcane rules to make their case, especially around the encyclopedia’s more controversial political pages.

The article’s author took a crack at editing, using WikiLoop Battlefield, a community-built website which lets anyone review a random recent Wikipedia edit for possible vandalism or misinformation. After using it to correct and entry, a few days later, a message popped up on the author’s Wikipedia user page.

“Congratulations,” it read. “You have been recognized as the weekly champion of counter-vandalism of WikiLoop Battlefield.”

For a moment I felt like a hero.

I wonder how many volunteers can say an organization they support made them feel that way.

And for those of you interested in editing Wikipedia – this Wikipedia Cheat Sheet is essential.

Volunteering to build community cohesion

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One of the reasons I loathe the way the Points of Light Foundation and other organizations promote the value of volunteering – with a monetary value and number of hours – is because it ignores the far greater value of volunteering and the far better reasons for an organization to engage volunteers.

I’ll say it yet again: engaging volunteers isn’t always just to get a task done. Sometimes, volunteering has much larger, more important goals – like a group volunteering effort done to help demonstrate solidarity and understanding between different groups. Volunteers can help build community cohesion and better community understanding. Volunteers can help change minds – without ever asking volunteers to change their minds.

Do you really think the best, most efficient, cheapest way to build affordable housing is by gathering a different group of volunteers each day to build a house together? No – no, it’s not. If that’s why you think Habitat Humanity does what it does, you are REALLY missing the larger point of their mobilization of volunteers.

Here’s yet another example of what I mean when I go on this regular tirade: in Washington County, Oregon, members of an Islamic mosque’s congregation and members of a Jewish temple’s congregation got together to volunteer for a Habitat for Humanity build project in November 2018. Here’s a tweet about the event, with a photo:

This happens all the time, all across the USA. Habitat chapters LOVE bringing together different groups to volunteer side-by-side. Is the value of that the number of hours they volunteered and the monetary value of those hours? No.

If your organization is recruiting volunteers just to get tasks done, you are missing out on the value of volunteers.

And on a side note: four months later, this tweet had only two “likes” and no retweets. Every person on the build site should have been invited to retweet and “like” this if they are on Twitter. Every staff person at Habitat with a Twitter account should have been invited to retweet and “like” this. Don’t post something as wonderful as this and hope it might get noticed – ask your staff and volunteers, including your board members, to share it! Here’s more advice on using social media.

If you have benefited from this blog or other parts of my web site and would like to support the time that went into developing material, researching information, preparing articles, updating pages, etc., here is how you can help.

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Deriding the monetary value of volunteer hours: my mission in life?

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moneysignsDuring a presentation on volunteers at a local government agency that I attended a few weeks ago, the program manager proudly noted that the agency’s volunteer contributions are the equivalent of 21 full time employees, and gave a value of their time at more than a million dollars, based on the dollar value per hour promoted by the Independent Sector. That was one of her very first points in her presentation, and this was the ONLY reason offered during the entire session as to why this agency involves volunteers; she then went on to what volunteers do.

I wonder how the agency’s volunteers would feel to know that they are involved because they replace paid staff? Because they “save money”?

This agency said the greatest value of volunteers is that they are unpaid and mean the agency doesn’t have to hire people to do those tasks. I have so many, many examples on my blog and web site – linked at the end of this blog – regarding why those statements lead to outrage, and how they actually devalue volunteer engagement. These statements reinforce the old-fashioned ideas that volunteers are free (they are not; there are always costs associated with involving volunteers) and that the number of hours contributed by volunteers is the best measure of volunteer program success (quantity rather than quality and impact).

Put this in contrast to a paper on volunteer resource management practices in hospitals which I read today. The post about it on LinkedIn promotes this quote, “volunteers contribute greatly to personalizing, humanizing and demystifying hospitalization.” The paper, “Hospital administrative characteristics and volunteer resource management practices” is by Melissa Intindola, Sean Rogers, Carol Flinchbaugh and Doug Della Pietra and the description never once mentions the value of volunteers as being a monetary value for their hours, money saved, employees replaced, or any other old-fashioned statements to tout why volunteers are involved. I haven’t read the entire paper (it’s $30 – not in the budget right now), and maybe they do talk about these values, but from the summaries of the paper, it sounds like they understand the far better reasons for volunteer engagement, and that this understanding guides their recommendationss.

I’m not opposed to using a monetary value for volunteer hours altogether, but it should never, EVER, be shown as the primary reason volunteers are involved, or even the secondary reason to involve volunteers. If a monetary value is used, it should always come with MANY disclaimers, and should follow all of the other, better, more important reasons the agency involves volunteers. It should come many pages after the mission statement for the volunteer program and the results of volunteer engagement that have nothing to do with money saved.

Years of whining about this has paid off: the Independent Sector noticed yesterday and tweeted some responses to me. Not sure why it took so many years for them to notice my oh-so-public whining, particularly since I tagged them on Twitter every now and again…

I guess it’s time to again recommend this new book, Measuring the Impact of Volunteers: A Balanced and Strategic Approach, by ChristineBurych, Alison Caird, Joanne Fine Schwebel, Michael Fliess and Heather Hardie. This book is an in-depth planning tool, evaluation tool and reporting tool. As I wrote in my blog about this book, “I really hope this book will also push the Independent Sector, the United Nations, other organizations and other consultants to, at last, abandon their push of a dollar value as the best measurement of volunteer engagement.”

Also see:

Measuring the Impact of Volunteers: book announcement

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Want to make me cranky? Suggest that the best way to measure volunteer engagement is to count how many volunteers have been involved in a set period, how many hours they’ve given, and a monetary value for those hours. Such thinking manifests itself in statements like this, taken from a nonprofit in Oregon:

Volunteers play a huge role in everything we do. In 2010, 870 volunteers contributed 10,824 hours of service, the equivalent of 5.5 additional full-time employees!

Yes, that’s right: this nonprofit is proud to say that volunteer engagement allowed this organization to keep 5.5 people from being employed!

Another cringe-worthy statement about the value of volunteers – yes, someone really said this, although I’ve edited a few words to hide their identity:

[[Organization-name-redacted]] volunteers in [[name-of-city redacted]] put in $700,000 worth of free man hours last year… It means each of its 7,000 volunteers here contributed about $100 – the amount their time would have been worth had they been paid.

I have a web page talking about the dire consequences of this kind of thinking, as well as a range of blogs, listed at the end of this one. That same web page talks about much better ways to talk about the value of volunteers – but it really takes more than a web page to explain how an organization can measure the true value of volunteers.

9780940576728_FRONTcover copyThat’s why I was very happy to get an alert from Energize, Inc. about a new book, Measuring the Impact of Volunteers: A Balanced and Strategic Approach, by ChristineBurych, Alison Caird, Joanne Fine Schwebel, Michael Fliess and Heather Hardie. This book is an in-depth planning tool, evaluation tool and reporting tool. How refreshing to see volunteer value talked about in-depth – not just as an add-on to yet another book on volunteer management. But the book’s importance goes even further: the book will not only be helpful to the person responsible for volunteer engagement at an organization; the book will also push senior management to look at volunteer engagement as much, much more than “free labor” (which it isn’t, of course). Marketing managers need to read this book. The Executive Director needs to read this book. Program managers need to read this book. The book is yet another justification for thinking of the person responsible for the volunteer engagement program at any agency as a volunteerism specialist – a person that needs ongoing training and support (including MONEY) to do her (or his) job. This book shows why the position – whether it’s called volunteer manager, community engagement director, coordinator of volunteers, whatever – is essential, not just nice, and why that person needs to be at the senior management table.

I really hope this book will also push the Independent Sector, the United Nations, other organizations and other consultants to, at last, abandon their push of a dollar value as the best measurement of volunteer engagement.

For more on the subject of the value of volunteer or community engagement, here are my blogs on the subject (yeah, it’s a big deal with me):

Make volunteering transformative, not about # of hours

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Online Q & A sites, like Quora and Yahoo Answers, are packed with young people asking “how many volunteering hours should I have to get into a great university?”

It’s a question that makes me want to cry. In my answer to these questions, I try to explain that number of volunteering hours means nothing to university admission boards or scholarship committees, that, instead, such volunteering should be about engaging in activities that demonstrate your skills in problem-solving, research, networking, persuasive speaking and consensus-building, and that in talking about such, you should emphasize what you learned, challenges you faced, what it was like to work with people different from yourself, etc. – not number of hours completed. I say so as best I can on my web page about Ideas for Leadership Volunteering Activities.

But Richard Weissbourd on the PBS News Hour this week said it better than I can. Weissbourd is a senior lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the lead author of a new report that calls on colleges to lower the pressure on students to impress admissions committees by racking up achievements and accolades. On the PBS News Hour, he said the goal of volunteering by young people should be “meaningful ethical engagement. It’s being involved in your community, concern for others, concern for the greater good, for the public good… it’s not about doing a brief stint overseas. It is about doing something meaningful, doing something in a diverse group, doing it for a year, nine months to a year, doing it for a sustained period of time. And the chances are greater that you’re going to get something out of that kind of experience, and you’re going to be able to describe in the application in a way that’s meaningful and expresses what was meaningful about it to you.”

Video and full transcript here.

I cheered and clapped. And my dog got scared and ran into her crate. Ooops.

Now, if I could just get the Corporation for National Service, the Points of Light Foundation, the Independent Sector, and others to stop valuing volunteers by number of hours given and a dollar value for those hours…

Also see:

Volunteer engagement is MUCH more than just HR management

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Back in 2010, when my blog was somewhere else other than WordPress, I blogged about how the then new Reimagining Service initiative promoted the idea of applying private sector human resources practices to nonprofit organizations. Per some recent online discussions I’ve seen where this issue is rearing up again, I am reposting those two original blogs, which detail why I (and so many other managers of volunteers) believe that volunteer engagement is so much more than just HR management.

All links are on archived on archive.org.

Part 1: Don’t let them equate volunteer management with HR management
(08:15, 6 April 2010)

Human Resources (HR) management and volunteer management are NOT the same thing. It’s not just that one deals with paid staff and one with unpaid staff. The bigger difference is that HR is about getting the work that needs to be done in the most efficient way possible with paid staff. And that’s great. That’s absolutely necessary. But volunteer management is NOT getting the work that needs to be done completed by unpaid staff, in order to save as much money as possible. That’s old paradigm. That’s an idea the modern volunteer manager or “service leader” is trying to shed.

My favorite question to ask people who think HR management and volunteer management are the same thing is this: if I gave a nonprofit all the money in the world to hire all the staff needed for absolutely every possible position, to get absolutely all the work done that needs to be done, would that nonprofit still involve volunteers? If their answer is “no”, or “Yes, because nonprofits always need to be looking for ways to save money” or “Yes, because nonprofits will always have more work to be done than paid staff can do”, I know they don’t really understand the true value of involving volunteers.

If you see volunteer management as just HR management, then you will love Reimagining Service, which promotes the idea of applying private sector human resources practices to nonprofit organizations. It’s all about “there’s a lot of work to be done; let’s get volunteers to do it!” It ignores emerging trends regarding volunteer management and takes us several steps back. Don’t get me wrong – “Reimagining Service” is not without some good ideas; it’s nice that it says that volunteers aren’t free (something the nonprofit sector has been saying for many years). It’s nice that the people behind it see a need to fund volunteer management.

But I hope that some folks will crash the Reimagining Service Forum, to be held on Tuesday, June 29th, from 10:30am – noon, in New York City at the National Conference on Volunteerism and Service and try as much as you can to educate the HR professionals and corporate representatives there about the new paradigms regarding volunteer management and the realities of the nonprofit sector.

  • Do your best to help the panelists and speakers understand that there are better reasons to involve volunteers far beyond “there’s work to be done.”
  • Explain to them that some tasks are actually best done by volunteers — because that’s what the clients want, or because of the nature of the task. Explain to them that some organizations remain volunteer-only not to save money, but because of the nature of the organization’s mission.
  • Explain to them that organizations involve volunteers when it’s not always cost-effective to do so — it may be because the organization wants the community to be involved in their work, or because they organization wants to be more transparent to the community regarding its operations, or because the organization must address criticism or misconceptions about the organization. That’s why many organizations reserve certain assignments for volunteers, even if there might be funding for paid staff.
  • HR management is most certainly a part of the responsibilities of volunteer managers — ensuring policies and procedures are being followed, recording the service volunteers are providing, overseeing the performance review process, etc. But volunteer managers are also entrepreneurs and program managers, looking for ways to involve volunteers not based entirely on the work that needs to be done but, rather, based on the mission the organization is trying to achieve, and reporting on the results of volunteer involvement far beyond number of hours donated, number of volunteers involved and amount of money saved.

I wonder how these folks are going to respond to union representatives who, based on the message of Reimagining Service, are worried that volunteers replace paid staff to save money? Or paid nonprofit professionals who see this as an effort to replace them with with corporate employees on-loan and other volunteers — why pay for qualified, trained nonprofit professionals when you can get corporate folks acting as paraprofessionals “for free”?

Let’s stop letting the corporate sector define what’s best for the nonprofit sector. Let’s start advocating for ourselves!

PART 2: Victory! Volunteer management is, indeed, something more than HR!!
(07:17, 15 July 2010)

You may recall that myself (and more than a few others, I’ve since learned), were none-too-happy with the Reimagining Service report, issued earlier this year, which promoted the idea of applying private sector human resources practices to nonprofit organizations. The original report is all about “there’s a lot of work to be done; let’s get volunteers to do it!” It ignored emerging trends regarding volunteer management and, in my opinion as well many others, takes volunteer management / volunteer engagement several steps back.

The report equated volunteer management with human resources repeatedly in the report, and implied that what we need is more corporate HR folks in charge of volunteer management at nonprofits. While there are elements of human resources management in volunteer management, the latter is SO much more. As I blogged back in April: Human Resources (HR) management and volunteer management are NOT the same thing. It’s not just that one deals with paid staff and one with unpaid staff. The bigger difference is that HR is about getting the work that needs to be done in the most efficient way possible with paid staff. And that’s great. That’s absolutely necessary. But volunteer management is NOT getting the work that needs to be done completed by unpaid staff, in order to save as much money as possible. That’s old paradigm. That’s an idea the modern volunteer manager or “service leader” is trying to shed.

I wondered in my blog back in April how the Reimagining Service folks were going to respond to union representatives who, based on the message of Reimagining Service, are worried that volunteers replace paid staff to save money? Or paid nonprofit professionals who see this as an effort to replace them with with corporate employees on-loan and other volunteers — why pay for qualified, trained nonprofit professionals when you can get corporate folks acting as paraprofessionals “for free”?

I emailed the authors of the report, via their web site, to cite my concerns and to beg that they talk to actual volunteer managers. I got no reply other than an automated thank you. I found out that others had also written and gotten no reply as well.

So I encouraged anyone attending the National Conference on Volunteerism and Service in New York CIty last month to crash the Reimagining Service Forum and try to educate the HR professionals and corporate representatives there about the new paradigms regarding volunteer management and the realities of the nonprofit sector.

I didn’t get any updates from attendees to the Reimagining Service Forum. But I did get an email the Reimagining Service on 13 Jul 2010, and imagine my STUNNED surprise: not one mention of human resources management. Not one implication that volunteer management is only about getting free labor in the face of budget gaps (though volunteers-as-free-labor is, indeed, still there). There is still a lot of very corporate language, and no call for corporations and the government to pay for all these resources that volunteer management needs in order to be successful (how many times do we get told by granters that they won’t pay for administrative costs when we ask them to fund volunteer management?!).

Even so — I’m calling VICTORY! The pressure of many people, not just me, has altered the message of Reimagining Service in very good ways! Bravo, everyone who made their voices heard, via email or in face-to-face conversations! Pressure DOES work! Keep it up! Let them know what you think, especially if you manage/support volunteers in any capacity!

Here’s the text of the July 13 Reimagining Service email:

Dear Reimagining Service Community,

We enjoyed seeing so many of you at the National Conference on Volunteering and Service a few weeks ago.  To those of you who attended the Conference and came to the Reimagining Service Forum, thanks for your interest and participation, and a special thanks to everyone who participated in the Forum discussion session.   We appreciate that you took the time to share your valuable insights and expertise.  This work will be better due to your many contributions.

If you were not able to attend the Reimagining Service Forum, here are a few headlines to bring everyone up-to-date (all of the tools and resources referenced below are available at www.reimaginingservice.org):

  • Reimagining Service is a self-organized community of individuals from nonprofits, the government, and private sector.  We are inspired by the renewed call to service and believe that volunteerism can help solve some of society’s most pressing problems.  In order to maximize the potential of service, we seek to convert good intentions into greater impact.
  • Reimagining Service believes that one way to increase the impact of volunteering is to encourage the creation of more Service Enterprises.
  • What is a Service Enterprise?  It is a nonprofit or for-profit organization that fundamentally leverages volunteers and their skills to successfully deliver on the social mission of the organization.  Research summaries and tools about both nonprofit and corporate Service Enterprises are available on the Reimagining Service website.
  • Much of the thinking behind Reimagining Service stems from new research conducted by the TCC Group that quantifiably demonstrates that nonprofit Service Enterprises outperform their peers on all measures of organizational effectiveness.  The TCC Group research also shows that strong volunteer management practices are essential to becoming a Service Enterprise.
  • Recognizing that volunteer management and infrastructure require financial resources, the Reimagining Service Funding Action Team has created a resource guide with two objectives: 1) to help nonprofits make the case for funding to support volunteer management; and 2) to share information with funders on the value and need for providing this type of financial support to nonprofits.  The resource guide is available on the website, and the Funding Action Team is also pursuing other strategies to direct more funding to volunteer management and infrastructure support.
  • Reimagining Service is looking at both the supply of and demand for volunteers.  Many of the ideas proposed by Reimagining Service are directed toward businesses and corporate volunteer managers.  To deepen the impact of service, we believe we need to look at the entire “volunteer ecosystem,” not just at nonprofit’s practices.
  • For the past 15 months, Reimagining Service has been entirely volunteer driven, but we have determined that this effort now needs dedicated staff to lead the work on a day-to-day basis.  Instead of creating a new nonprofit, Reimagining Service will “live” at the Points of Light Institute.  Under this new structure, Reimagining Service will continue to function as a multi-sector coalition and maintain an open-source model of operation: all research, learnings, and tools will be posted on our website as they are created, and will be available free of charge.  More detail on this next phase of Reimagining Service will be shared later this summer.
  • We have articulated four Reimagining Service principles (see below), and encourage you to become a signatory to the principles to demonstrate your commitment to bringing these ideas to life.  Please visit www.reimaginingservice.org to sign on.

Well hope you’ll review the materials on the website, and, if you find them useful, please encourage others in your network to do the same and to sign on to the Reimagining Service principles.  If you have questions, feedback, or suggestions about anything on the website, please email us at reimaginingservice@gmail.org.  Please remember that Reimagining Service is still 100% volunteer driven, and it make take a little time for us to reply.  We appreciate your patience.

Many thanks and we hope to hear from you,

Reimagining Service

REIMAGINING SERVICE PRINCIPLES

Principle 1:  Make volunteering fundamental, not an add-on.  Service Enterprises use volunteers to fundamentally increase their ability to achieve their strategic objectives and advance the social mission of their organizations.  Nonprofit Service Enterprises leverage volunteers to deliver programs as well as administrative, fundraising and volunteer management support.  Corporate Service Enterprises align their service model with their business model which allows them to leverage their core competencies to create the most community impact while they inspire, engage and develop their talent.

Principle 2:  Volunteering changes the core economics of organizations.  Service Enterprises have impact beyond what their cash resources allow.  Nonprofit Service Enterprises use volunteers to reach more constituents with quality services at the same level of resources.  Business Service Enterprises deploy employee volunteers and their skills as a multiplier for their philanthropic strategy, greatly increasing their impact on strategic community issues.  In both instances, volunteers partner with paid staff to multiply the impact of the organization.

Principle 3:  Don’t let supply dictate your volunteer programs.  Service Enterprises don’t let the supply of volunteers drive what gets done, they focus on their strategic priorities.  They match those priorities with the core skills that are resident in the community €“ from businesses to professionals to educators to the trades.  They clearly communicate what they need to recruit volunteers and build the required infrastructure to manage them.  Business Service Enterprises identify their company’s core skills, then put them to use to address community priorities.  With this, Service Enterprises have begun to shift the metrics from hours to impact.

Principle 4:  In order to get a return, you have to invest.  Service Enterprises are able to get as much as three to six times the value out of volunteers as the cost to manage them.  This is tremendous leverage for the community, but does require an upfront and ongoing investment.  Both nonprofit and business Service Enterprises invest in people, plans and programs to enable volunteers to create critical impact.

Volunteer Management: Once More with Meaning

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I’m not the only one constantly harping that we need to stop talking about volunteers in terms of money saved or in terms of “Hey, we’ve got all this work to do, let’s get some volunteers to do it” – and, instead, start talking about the true value of Volunteers.

Here’s a fantastic article from 2008 by Jennifer Woodill for the Nonprofit Quarterly that echoes what a small but growing number of managers, researchers and volunteerism advocates have been saying – there are much better reasons to involve volunteers than we don’t have to pay them!

And I don’t think it’s volunteer managers that are the biggest obstacle in changing this mentality – it’s donors, particularly from the corporate sector, as well as big organizations like the United Nations Volunteers program and John Hopkins University, which just cannot let go of the idea of volunteers being great primarily becaues they mean not having to pay employees or consultants to do work.

Way to go, Jennifer!

Also see:

Do NOT say “Need to Cut Costs? Involve Volunteers!”

The Value of Volunteers (and how to talk about such)

No more warm, fuzzy language to talk about volunteers!

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Volunteers are neither saints nor teddy bears.

But you would never know it from the kinds of language so many people use to talk about them.

Back in November 2009, I got a mass email sent out from United Nations Volunteers to several thousand people that illustrates this oh-so-well. It said, in part:

This is the time to recognize the hard work and achievements of volunteers everywhere who work selflessly for the greater good.

Selflessly?

And then there are those companies that sell items for organizations to give to their volunteers, with phrases like:

Volunteers spread sunshine!

Volunteers… hearts in bloom!

In a word – yuck.

Not all volunteers are selfless! Yes, I fully acknowledge that there are still some volunteers that like to be thanked with pink balloons and fuzzy words – but could we at least acknowledge that there are many thousands of volunteers who do not respond to this way of being recognized?

Volunteers are not all donating unpaid service to be nice, or to make a difference for a greater good of all humanity or to be angels. Volunteers also donate unpaid service:

  • to gain certain kinds of experience
  • for a sense of adventure
  • to gain skills and contacts for paid employment
  • for fun
  • to meet people in the hopes of making friends or even get dates
  • because they are angry and want to see first hand what’s going on at an organization or within a cause, or to contribute to a cause they feel passionate about
  • to feel important
  • to change people’s perceptions about a group (a religious minority in a community may volunteer to demonstrate to the majority that they are a part of the community too, that they care about other people, etc.)

NONE of those reasons to volunteer are selfless. But all of them are excellent reasons to volunteer, nonetheless – and excellent reasons for an organization to involve a volunteer.

These not-so-selfless volunteers are not less committed, less trustworthy or less worth celebrating than the supposed selfless volunteers.

Let’s quit talking about volunteers with words like nice and selfless.  Let’s drop the fuzzy language and start using more modern and appropriate language to talk about volunteers that recognizes their importance, like

powerful
intrepid
audacious
determined
qualified
innovative
revolutionary
fastidious

Let’s even call them mettlesome and confrontational and demanding. That’s what makes volunteers necessary, not just nice.

In short, let’s give volunteers their due with the words we use to describe them.

And don’t even try to say volunteers save money, because that starts yet another blog rant…

A missed opportunity with volunteers

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A colleague recently told me that she and a group of co-workers arranged to go to a nonprofit thrift store for one day and help the organization sort through computer donations. She and her colleagues had a great time:

“It was super fun!”, she said. “I got to sort through equipment, to tear apart computers, to take a hammer to outdated computers. We had a great time!” But she added, “No one ever asked me for my name. They didn’t have a sign in sheet. They didn’t capture any of my information. And I have no idea what all this work that I did means to them.”

I felt like I had been punched in the stomach. Again.

These volunteers merely got work done. This nonprofit merely got free labor. Nothing more.

Here was a great opportunity for this nonprofit organization to make connections that could lead to more volunteering, more volunteers, more awareness of its work and new financial donations! Here was an opportunity for these volunteers to learn about all that this nonprofit does, that it’s not just a thrift store but, in fact, a job training organization. A rich, longer-term, meaningful relationship could have been created.

Instead, the nonprofit just got some work done, and the volunteers had fun for a day. There is more to volunteer engagement than that – even for onsite episodic or microvolunteering volunteering like this, with just a few hours of work no requirement for future commitment.

I have no idea what all this work that I did means to them.

That comment in particular is the one that hurts me to the core as a volunteer management advocate.

Here’s what should have happened:

  • There should have been a sign in sheet for the volunteers. The names, postal mailing addresses, phone numbers and email addresses of every participant should have been captured. This isn’t just to create a way to followup with volunteers later for further volunteering or fundraising; it’s to mitigate risk, to have a recourse in case volunteers damage property, hurt someone, or engage in inappropriate activity. It also says to volunteers, “You are more than just bodies doing work to us. You are people. We recognize that.”
  • Someone from the organization should have taken photos of volunteers in action, and asked for a group photo as well. The photos should have been posted to Flickr with recognition of the volunteers, either by their names or by the company they were representing. Some of the photos should have ended up on the organization’s web site as well. Photos could have been tweeted during the work as it was happening. Posting photos is a great, easy, cheap way to thank volunteers, to entice others to volunteer, and to say to everyone, “We are a nonprofit that is doing things!.”
  • Someone from the organization should have emailed each of the volunteers the day after the event, thanking each person for his or her service, noting why the service was of value to the organization, and telling the person how he or she could volunteer again in the future. The email should also have invited each person to subscribe to an email newsletter or follow the organization on Twitter or “like” the organization on Facebook – something that would allow the person to stay connected to the organization, know about new volunteering opportunities, etc. The email should have also invited each volunteer to opt-in to receiving postal mail from the organization.
  • Local TV stations should have gotten an email or fax from the nonprofit an hour before volunteers arrived, saying, “Hey, here’s a great video opportunity for you…” TV stations are often scrambling for video the the evening news cast. Someone taking a hammer to a computer would have ended up on a local news station for sure!

That’s volunteer engagement / community engagement 101. That’s not extra work – that’s what any organization should already be doing with volunteers that are going to show up for just an hour, or just half a day, or just one day. If an organization can’t do that, should they be involving volunteers at all? I don’t think so.

Also see

How to Get Rid of Volunteers – My own volunteering horror story. One of the most popular blogs I’ve ever published.

Creating One-Time, Short-Term Group Volunteering Activities
Details on not just what groups of volunteers can do in a two-hour, half-day or all-day event, but also just how much an organization or program will need to do to prepare a site for group volunteering.

Keeping Volunteer Information Up-to-Date
Suggestions on how to keep volunteer information up-to-date, with the goal of getting the information your organization needs with minimal effort on your part.

Required Volunteer Information on Your Web Site
If your organization or department involves volunteers, or wants to, there are certain things your organization or department must have on its web site – no excuses! To not have this information says that your organization or department takes volunteers for granted, does not value volunteers beyond money saved in salaries, or is not really ready to involve volunteers.

Mission statements for your volunteer engagement
(Saying WHY your organization or department involves volunteers!)
In addition to carefully crafting the way you talk about the value of volunteers, your organization should also consider creating a mission statement for your organization’s volunteer engagement, to guide employees in how they think about volunteers, to guide current volunteers in thinking about their role and value at the organization, and to show potential volunteers the kind of culture they can expect at your organization regarding volunteers.