I read these words a lot about volunteers from the organizations they support:
unwavering dedication and selflessness
tireless commitment
always ready and available
Those qualities are, absolutely, worthy of recognition.
But I wonder…
Does your nonprofit require volunteers to have “unwavering dedication”? Or “Selflessness?” Do you expect volunteers to be “tireless?” Is that realistic?
I’ve touched on this before, back in 2018 with the blog Some people think they aren’t perfect enough to volunteer with you. It’s fine to have minimum time requirements for volunteers, and to celebrate volunteers that go above and beyond, but here’s the reality: most of your volunteers aren’t going to have unwavering dedication, they aren’t going to be tireless, and they aren’t selfless and THAT’S OKAY. Those dedicated volunteers who also have strong personal boundaries and don’t want to overextend themselves can also be really terrific volunteers.
Absolutely, honor your outstanding volunteers, but also have frequent messaging about
how easy it is to sign up to volunteer (and is it?)
the variety of ways to help as a volunteer in terms of time commitment and time of day to help (and is there?)
the benefits to volunteering for the volunteer (because the reality is that very few of us are completely selfless!)
And you also need to have a culture with volunteers that, while it absolutely can encourage a high quality of service, it also welcomes suggestions, even criticism, from volunteers, and that volunteers won’t be penalized for needing a break – for not being “tireless.”
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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.
If you have benefited from any of my blogs or other parts of my web site and would like to support the time that went into researching information, developing material, preparing articles, updating pages, etc. (I receive no funding for this work), here is how you can help.
Do you head a nonprofit or non-government organizations (NGO)? I have a challenge for you. It’s a simple challenge, but a revealing one, and I’m daring you to do it:
Make this list, entirely on your own, with no consultation with others, of each person at your organization that you believe is supposed to be primarily responsible for:
responding to someone that emails or calls and says they want to volunteer.
meeting with / interviewing someone for the first time that wants to volunteer, getting all the necessary paperwork from the new applicant, etc.
orienting/training someone that will volunteer and what that orienting or training consists of (watching a certain video? going over the employee policy manual? getting a tour of facilities?)
inputting all of the volunteers’ information into a central database.
letting volunteers know about organization events or activities they would be welcomed to join or that they may be asked about from the public they work with.
following up with volunteers to see how their experience is going.
trouble-shooting on behalf of volunteers.
firing a volunteer.
recognizing and rewarding volunteers.
tracking volunteer contributions and reporting such to the organization.
interviewing volunteers that leave, to see why and to address issues.
Now that you have your list, then, at your next staff meeting, ask your staff these same questions. And learn two things:
If you are right.
If the staff that have these responsibilities knew they had these responsibilities.
Don’t be surprised if, in fact, you are wrong about who is responsible for what, nor surprised that there are staff with these responsibilities that didn’t know it. Reflect on these discrepancies and think about how you are going to support staff that didn’t know it was their responsibility to manage a piece of working with volunteers.
And then, finally, ask for a progress report on each of these tasks. And don’t be surprised to hear, again and again, “We’re behind on that. We’ve had other priorities. Sorry.” Because unless you have a dedicated manager of volunteers, someone whose sole responsibility is to support and engage volunteers, it’s very likely all those other people who are supposed to have at least a piece of volunteer engagement as a part of their roles – the marketing director, the fundraising manager, the thrift store manager, etc. – aren’t doing it regularly. And with that, you’ll finally understand why your organization doesn’t have all the volunteers it needs and why volunteers don’t stay.
And maybe then you’ll stop saying, “Well, people just don’t want to volunteer anymore!”
When most people think of the Afghan evacuation, they think of August of 2021, when crowds surged around Kabul’s airport, desperate and doomed Afghans clung to the sides of planes taking off, and a suicide bomber murdered scores of Afghans and 11 U.S. Marines, one soldier, and one Navy Corpsman. And they think the evacuation is over. But the evacuation of Afghans never ended. And neither has the volunteering by people all over the world trying to get vulnerable people out.
Jeff Phaneuf of No One Left Behind, the largest volunteer organization working to assist Afghans who served the USA as interpreters, has noted that when the organization surveyed its 16,000 contacts in August 2022, it found 180 clear instances of Afghans killed while waiting on a visa, with a 80 further possible murders they’re looking into. No One Left Behind estimates that there are close to 200,000 people still in Afghanistan eligible for visas from the USA set aside for Afghans and their family members who are at risk because of work they did for the USA. That doesn’t count the women’s rights activists other groups are working on. Those Afghans who do make it out often exist in an indeterminate legal space because of the inaction of governments to give them permanent status. Many of the people in Afghanistan that volunteers abroad are trying to help are literally starving: in August 2022, when No One Left Behind asked Afghans applying to leave about the conditions they lived under, only 5.5% reported being able to feed their families.
This Time article profiles the work of people, most of them volunteers, who are still in contact with Afghans in Afghanistan and are continuing to try to get people, especially women, out of Afghanistan and to a safe country with official asylum status, and focuses on their macabre mascot, Our Lady of the Manifest, “She’s who we pray to, to get people on flights” – and how she’s helping volunteers facing mounting fatigue, frustration, depression and stress as they feel a growing helplessness to assist Afghans.
The article notes what everyone faces in trying to get at-risk Afghans out of Afghanistan:
You can get every necessary document in order, push your case through the sluggish and unresponsive refugee system, get every name of the family you’re working with on a flight manifest, and somewhere between that Afghan family’s home and the airport they can run into the “18-year-old with a gun” problem—a young Afghan running a Taliban checkpoint who doesn’t have much respect for international agreements or paperwork and who might be in a bad mood, or struck by how a woman is dressed, or acting, or who just doesn’t like the idea of a family who wants to flee the country. Everything can fall apart in a moment.
As the author of the article notes, “Sometimes, Our Lady feels a little less like an inside joke with these volunteers trying to get Afghans out, and more like a companion on a painful road.”
These volunteers work mostly in isolation. Even with online communities and interacting with others remotely, volunteers can feel very unsupported and alone, especially when friends and family are more than ready to move on and stop talking about this. I know, because I am such volunteer: I wrote about my efforts two years ago as a part of Digital Dunkirk: online volunteers scrambling to help endangered Afghans get visas & out of Afghanistan and the mental and emotional toll I could see it taking on others and myself. There’s no organization supporting me or guiding me in this role – myself and other volunteers are all pretty much making it up as we go along, because the guidelines and information about getting people out of Afghanistan and into an asylum program are ever changing. Most of us, including myself, have no training in interacting with people witnessing and experiencing violence, who have no safe haven from those acts – but we are interacting with Afghans, via WhatsApp, Telegram and Signal – that live in this daily reality and want our help. In addition, many of these volunteers, myself including, know that there are people – former colleagues, real people, with names and stories, who are in the photos we have of our time there – who qualify, on paper, to come to the USA, but are still languishing in a country run by terrorists 18 months later. As Laura Deitz of Task Force Nyx notes in the article, “I probably can’t underscore the toll that this mentally and emotionally takes on anyone who’s trying to help.”
For the online volunteers trying to help, no certificate, no statistic on the monetary value of the time they contributed, no t-shirt, is going to serve as appropriate recognition for what they’ve done. There’s just one way we’re going to feel good about our virtual volunteering: getting people out of Afghanistan.
And I shall say it again, as I did two years ago:
Of course, the stress and frustration of online volunteers in this effort is nothing compared to the Afghans we’re trying to help. In addition to being terrified of the knock at the door that means the Taliban is there, to search the home, to take away boys and young men to fight, to take away girls for rape (there’s no such thing as “child marriage” – please stop saying that), to find files and data that could prove someone in the family worked with the USA, the UK, Australia, or some European country, Afghans are also running out of money and food.
I confess to having a very macabre sense of humor at times, and to gravitating to other humanitarian workers as colleagues and friends who also have such. It’s how I can face the absolute unnecessary absurdity of humanitarian work, whether internationally or just trying to help in my own community. This article provides a good profile of people who I think are like me – we don’t mean to offend. We’re just trying to stay sane.
I may print out a photo of Our Lady of the Manifest and put it on my wall.
If you have read this blog and are in the USA, I beg you to please write your US Congressional representative and both of your US Senators, as well as to the President of the USA, and ask them to please fulfill our commitment to our allies in Afghanistan, and to please put in the staffing and systems necessary to evacuate our allies and their families from Afgahnistan. They believed us – believe me – when we said they could and should pursue their education and careers, and they did so with the belief that we woud have their backs. We owe them this. And if you are in a country that worked in Afghanistan, whether militarily or in humanitarian interventions – Australia, the UK, Spain, Germany, Turkey, Japan, India, where ever – please do the same in your country regarding contacting your federally-elected officials.
Any organization that involves volunteers needs to have safety policies and procedures to protect both volunteers and those that they serve, and if the volunteers interact with vulnerable people or could be in one-to-one situations with ANYONE, there needs to be even more extensive safety policies and procedures.
What do safety policies look like?
Screening steps for volunteers could be the volunteer applicants:
providing real names (not just nicknames or screen names), residential addresses (not just a PO Box), phone number, etc.
providing the name of the volunteer’s current employer and previous two employers, or the name of where they are currently enrolled in school and how many hours they are taking.
answering the questions “why do you want to volunteer?” and “What do you hope to experience as a volunteer” and “tell me about a time you interacted with a person in crisis.”
providing professional and academic reference checks (employers, teachers)
providing personal reference checks (friends, family)
undergoing a criminal background check
undergoing a credit check
being in a probation period and extra observation at first
going through required training
Supervision for volunteers could be:
Volunteers required to use an email the organization has set up and know that ALL emails are archived and could be reviewed at any time.
Volunteers required to work in pairs or paired with a staff person.
Staff that created the volunteering role meeting with the volunteer once a month or once a quarter AND meeting with other volunteers and clients about that volunteer’s performance.
Policies for volunteers could be:
Never being alone, one-on-one, with another volunteer, a paid staff person or a client.
Never using any electronic communications avenues other than a specific email or online platform (no texting among volunteers, for instance).
A prohibition on a volunteer giving personal contact info to any client.
A mandatory reporting by the volunteer if a client gives that volunteer personal contact info or tries to contact that volunteer outside of agreed-to communications avenues (WhatsApp, TikTok, etc.)
Mandatory reporting to management of suspicions of inappropriate behavior relating to sex by volunteers and clients.
etc.
Again, these are just EXAMPLES. And what safety requirements a volunteer beach cleanup group is going to have is NOT going to be the same as what a mentoring program for young people will have.
But whatever you have at your organization, whatever you require, should be detailed on your organization’s web site – NO EXCEPTIONS. And if they are not, it has to be assumed you don’t have them. And if you are recruiting volunteers to work with vulnerable groups or one-on-one with anyone, your post is going to be deleted here unless you have info on your web site on the steps you employ to keep volunteers and those they were safe.
If you have benefited from this blog or other parts of my web site or my YouTube videos and would like to support the time that went into researching information, developing material, preparing articles, updating pages, etc. (I receive no funding for this work), here is how you can help.
Volunteer engagement is not going to expand, nor be worthwhile, at any nonprofit unless senior management does more than pay it lip service.
Nonprofit executive directors: you cannot keep treating volunteer engagement strategies from the point of view of “Wouldn’t it be nice if…” You can’t keep crossing your fingers and hope it somehow happens or that problems somehow work themselves out. Because none of that is going to happen on its own. You can’t just encourage volunteer engagement – it’s time for you to REQUIRE it.
Executive directors must MANDATE certain activities regarding volunteer engagement at their organizations, with some or all staff, or it won’t happen – or it won’t be successful and may, in fact, create frustration, disappointments, public relations problems, even safety and safeguarding problems.
What mandates regarding volunteer engagement look like:
Nonprofit executive directors include requirements for volunteer engagement in certain paid job roles – meaning certain staff have to include a goal of involving volunteers in their work. And when performance review time comes around, executive directors must look at how well each manager has – or has not – involved volunteers in their programs, and take necessary corrective action.
Nonprofits must provide regular training for all staff expected to work with volunteers and must provide time for staff to take part in workshops and to read about different aspects of volunteer engagement (screening, recruitment for diversity, safeguarding, etc.). And those expected to work with volunteers should have official opportunities to provide feedback to judge how well the executive director is supporting these capacity-building activities.
Nonprofits must have a systemic, well-thought-out process, IN WRITING, for onboarding volunteers, training volunteers, supporting volunteers, getting feedback from volunteers, and tracking information about volunteer engagement, as well as a way to generate performance reports on all of the aforementioned.
Executive directors must address volunteer engagement problems directly and as immediately as possible, like managers not following the official process to onboard volunteers, or managers not responding to questions or requests from volunteers in a timely manner – and that includes reviewing the performance of managers who are volunteers themselves.
I can feel the aversion from some readers. MANDATE volunteer engagement?! That’s not nice! It’s so harsh! Gee – we require staff to follow accounting procedures, we require staff to follow human resources policies, we measure staff performance on how well they communicate their work with management and other staff, how well they get along with other staff and clients, etc. and take corrective action when they come up short… Why have requirements for other business processes but NOT for volunteer engagement?
I’m not saying every staff member at a nonprofit has to involve volunteers. It’s not appropriate nor realistic for every staff member to involve volunteers. But if you, the executive director, do not mandate volunteer engagement in the job roles of those staff members you DO want to involve volunteers, and if you don’t support staff members in engaging and supporting those volunteers, volunteer engagement isn’t going to happen – or it’s going to be substandard and may, in fact, create something more than just frustration at your program.
If you are a nonprofit executive director and you need to learn more so that you can be a better manager of volunteer engagement at your organizaton, start with reading From the Top Down: The Executive Role in Successful Volunteer Involvement. I consider it mandatory material for any nonprofit executive director. It’s worth every minute you spend reading it.
And if you think engaging volunteers is easy and that your staff should be magically better at it, consider that your board of directors is made up entirely of volunteers. How much support do YOU need to work with your board members, even to just manage a meeting? Why do you think your staff needs less time and support for working with volunteers than you do with the board? No mandates work without providing appropriate support.
If you have benefited from this blog, my other blogs, or other parts of my web site and would like to support the time that went into researching information, developing material, preparing articles, updating pages, etc. (I receive no funding for this work), here is how you can help.
We’ve celebrated another trip around the sun, and that means it’s time to look at what were my most popular blogs of 2022 – and to try to figure out why. It’s an exercise I do not so much for YOU, my readers, but for me. It’s the kind of self-analysis every nonprofit, NGO, government agency, or consultant for such should do.
There are eight blogs here that had enough readers (clicks) to qualify for being “popular”, in my opinion. And here they are.
The key to retaining volunteers. Another blog that got a LOT of retweets. It’s worth noting that Twitter has always been the most popular driver of people to my blogs – way more than Facebook or LinkedIn. That’s why I can’t quit it… yet.
Either be committed to quality or quit involving volunteers. A blog I worked on for months and based on SO many conversations with nonprofits, schools and community programs that recruit volunteers, as well as my own experience trying to volunteer.
A couple of months, I’ve been blogging every other week, rather than every week. I’ve had a lot of other projects going on that need my energy and time, and cutting back on blogging let me do those other projects too. But for the first four months of 2023 at least, I’ll be back to blogging every week for a while, because those other projects have given me OH so much more to say! Let’s see how long that lasts.
Happy 2023! Hope yours is off to a great start.
If you have benefited from any of my blogs or other parts of my web site and would like to support the time that went into researching information, developing material, preparing articles, updating pages, etc. (I receive no funding for this work), here is how you can help.
Also, I have exactly 18 copies of The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook. And when they are gone, they are gone – as in, you will have to pay a LOT more by ordering them from Amazon. If you want to learn how to leverage online tools to communicate with and support volunteers, whether those volunteers are mostly online (virtual volunteering) or they provide service mostly onsite at your organization, and to dig deep into the factors for success in supporting online volunteers and keeping virtual volunteering a worthwhile endeavor for everyone involved, you will not find a more detailed guide anywhere than The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook. It’s based on many years of experience, from a variety of organizations. It’s available both as a traditional print publication and as a digital book.
At the end of 2022, I will no longer update the news section nor the research section of the Virtual Volunteering Wiki.
The wiki has been an unfunded project since it was launched a decade ago, in association with the publication of The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook. It’s a project that I have struggled to keep up-to-date because my paid workhas to be my priority. I had intended to stop updating it back in 2020, but the start of the COVID pandemic in the USA in 2020 meant a surge in news and, months later, a surge in research, so I spent many, many hours – all without funding – reading through the news and research summaries and updating as appropriate.
But the surge in news and research regarding virtual volunteering has died down significantly. Therefore, I’ve decided that the end of 2022 is a good time to stop updating those two sections. The reasons:
Virtual volunteering is no longer new, innovative nor experimental. Virtual volunteering is mainstream. When this wiki was launched, there were already thousands of nonprofits, NGOs, charities, community groups and government agencies involving online volunteers, but there was a need to prove it. There was also an ongoing need to show the varied ways organizations involve online volunteers. But now, virtual volunteering is a commonplace term and new but not-so-unique initiatives are launched at least weekly. It’s the opposite problem regarding research: there are so many research articles related to virtual volunteering now, because of the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s impossible to keep up with them in my spare time – again, my paid work has to take priority.
I don’t have the time nor the funding to continue. Without funding, I can’t afford to subscribe to news outlets so I can read all of the stories, and since I have no funding to continue the wiki or research virtual volunteering, I pursue other professional pursuits where I can get funding (so I can pay for things like my mortgage, my motorcycle insurance, my health care costs, etc.).
I’ve been trying to find a university to host the wiki and incorporate its updating into a class curriculum for years, but have never had any interest at all. And so I’ve given up.
The wiki will stay online as long as my own web site stays online, and I may update other less time-intensive sections if a particularly outstanding resource comes my way.
Volunteering is promoted as something that will give volunteers significant personal fulfillment, that will make them feel like they’ve made a real difference, that will make volunteers feel like superheros, and on and on. And many people expect their volunteering experience to make them feel like they have changed a person’s life forever, or that it will be so impressive that it will get them a full scholarship for university and into the university they most want to attend, or that it will cure any mental or emotional issue they are facing.
Here’s a tweet that’s a good example of how a lot of people and organizations talk about volunteering:
How volunteering can help you?
It fixes your mental health.
It gives you a purpose.
It kills your self-doubts, anxiety.
It improves your social skills.
The reality is that volunteering can amplify mental health issues. It can exacerbate self-doubt and anxiety and even loneliness. It can contribute to uncertainty if volunteering doesn’t go well – and very often, volunteering doesn’t always go well. Volunteering can, in fact, leave you feeling like a failure.
I’ve read a litany of online comments from people who tried of volunteer and don’t have the magical, perfect healing experience so many promise. And I so I must ask: are we overselling volunteering?
A recent post to a community for Peace Corps members – and those that wish to be such – reminded me of how not every volunteer gets the feelings so many recruitment messages promise, or how many volunteers don’t have their expectations met. This person has also seen many comments by frustrated Peace Corps members who did not get the amazing experience implied in recruitment messages:
I often come across posts online from returnees talking about how applicants need to expect to accomplish nothing or the bare minimum throughout the 2 years. Why is this? I understand there are complications regarding “making a difference” in some developing countries, but surely the majority of volunteers accomplish fairly impressive things?
And that certainly does happen: you can work as an employee for years at a nonprofit helping to address poverty in one community and never feel like you’ve really made a difference. But now, let’s stick to talking about volunteers (I’ll address the other issue in another blog).
When volunteering disappoints someone, it can lead to disillusionment with volunteering, frustration, even anger. Volunteering activities can also augment a person’s many negative feelings: as I’ve noted elsewhere, volunteering, when it’s not a good experience, can make feelings of depression or failure even worse.
A comment on a recent blog of mine seems to feel similarly about better preparing people for what volunteering really is.
I’d love to see the overarching organizations like state offices of volunteerism Americorps, Points of light, etc. Spread (the) word about (the) basics of being a volunteer. How to be a good volunteer. What to expect.
I agree: these organizations promoting volunteering, encouraging people to volunteer, need to ALSO be telling people that the commitment is REAL, that they need to take it seriously, that if they sign up they need to show up, that most rules that volunteers must follow are there for very good reasons, that training is just as important as the service itself, etc. And they need to make sure people understand that there will be moments of frustration and boredom – and that their volunteer service may be met with hostility from other volunteers, clients and community members.
Absolutely, let recruits know about the benefits of volunteering they could experience. They may, indeed, have a transformative experience. They may get skills that will help them in paid work. They may get knowledge and experience to help them in their career goals. They may see that they really have made a difference in someone’s life. But they also need to be prepared for when volunteering tasks seem boring, or not impactful, or just something to do so they look busy, or not really helping at all. They need to be frequently reminded of the “bigger picture” and how this seemingly unimportant task contributes to the large cause and impacts they may never see firsthand. That will keep volunteers engaged – and keep their expectations in check.
If you have benefited from this blog, my other blogs, or other parts of my web site and would like to support the time that went into researching information, developing material, preparing articles, updating pages, etc. (I receive no funding for this work), here is how you can help.
Articles are everywhere saying nonprofits and government programs have seen a severe drop in volunteers since the start of the pandemic. Many imply that a growing number of people don’t want to volunteer and that’s fueling the drop in volunteer numbers.
It’s absolutely true that there’s been a drop in the number of volunteers at many organizations all over the world, not just in the USA. But the implication that people, especially people under 50, don’t want to volunteer is BOLLOCKS.
This drop in volunteer numbers has been coming on for a long while, but the pandemic sped things up. So many nonprofits have been seeing their volunteers get older and older, even dying off, but new, younger volunteers not replacing those that leave. Why?
Spend a week on Reddit, especially the volunteer subreddit, and you will see young people repeatedly posting messages that they want to volunteer, but don’t know where to look, or don’t know what’s available, or don’t know how to express interest, or have been trying and not getting responses to their applications. Many don’t know how volunteering really works – they ask if volunteers get paid, or are shocked that they have to go through training for certain roles. Most seem to think nonprofits do work that anyone that just walks through the door can do, right away.
There’s also a change in what volunteers want. Many don’t just want to do work for free for you; they want to feel like they are making a difference, or they want to have an interesting experience, or they want to develop skills for their career, or they want to have fun. None of those are bad reasons to volunteer. And the pandemic has changed how people value time and personal interactions: they now have a much lower tolerance for having their time wasted. One of the things I keep hearing is that people now want experiences, not things – that includes meaningful, enjoyable volunteering.
One of the most popular blogs I have ever written is Diagnosing the causes of volunteer recruitment problems. If you have seen a drop in the number of volunteers you involve, you need to go read it. And as I say in that blog:
What worked to recruit volunteers 30 years ago doesn’t work now; if you are having trouble recruiting volunteers, it’s overdue for you to take a hard, in-depth look at both how you recruit, what your in-take process is like, and the volunteer opportunities you have available.
No more but we’ve always done it this way. STOP IT! Times have changed. AND they will keep changing. Either change how you talk about volunteers, support volunteers, engage volunteers and recruit volunteers or stop complaining!
If you have benefited from this blog, my other blogs, or other parts of my web site and would like to support the time that went into researching information, developing material, preparing articles, updating pages, etc. (I receive no funding for this work), here is how you can help.
