If I had to wager a guess, I’d bet that when most people hear the word Volunteer they are likely to think of direct service –  like building a house for a deserving family, or serving meals  at a soup kitchen, or cutting trails or dragging debris out of a river on Earth Day.

Programs that promote volunteerism or community service jobs tend to focus on these shorter term, immediate reward type of assignments.

But every day I encounter small organizations that desperately could use a different type of volunteer, like someone to:

• show up each day to answer the phone or file papers,

• see that important communications tasks are completed, like getting the newsletter out the door (or into email) on a regular schedule, keeping the mailing list up-to-date, managing the twitter feeds, or sending thank you notes to donors,

• organize the monthly open house to introduce prospective donors to their organization,

• help with cash flow analysis or long-term revenue projections, or

• plan and implement those monthly programs from start to finish.

They especially could use someone willing to serve as their volunteer coordinator, a volunteer who understands that some of the best service they could give would be to help recruit self-managing volunteers for these other important, but not so obvious, assignments.

Did I forget to mention serving on the Board?

The Samaritans have telephone befrienders, those highly trained volunteers who staff their 24 hour suicide prevention hotlines.

Museums and zoos recruit docents, those volunteers who agree to specialized training and a long term commitment so they can lead tours or provide information to visitors. Docent sounds so much more important than a mere volunteer, don’t you think?

I think it’s time for some serious brainstorming to come up with a slew of new words to describe fundraising, financial, operations and project manager volunteers.

All ideas welcome.

Among other things, I was struck by the data on where volunteers spend their time. According to statistics gathered by the US Census Bureau for the Bureau of Labor Statistics and reported here:

Main Activities of Volunteers (2005-2007)

Fundraise                                          29.7% (RI)                       27.9% (US)
Collect/Distribute Food                 19.5%   (RI)                      24.5% (US)
Professional/Management           16.6%    (RI)                      17.4% (US)
Tutor/Teach                                       15.7%   (RI)                       20.5% (US)

At first glance I was somewhat surprised that fundraising was at the top of the volunteer activity list given the number of complaints I hear from organizations about their inability to recruit volunteers to help them raise funds.  (Don’t the choices of volunteer activities seem pretty limited.)

But when activities are matched against the top places where volunteers serve — overwhelmingly education and religious groups — the numbers made much more sense.

If you think about the legions of parents who raise money for their kids’ schools, or run events and raise money for their religious congregations, it’s not too surprising that fundraising might come out on top.

Unfortunately, what the study doesn’t tell us is the relationship of the volunteering to the amount of funds raised. Now that would be a number worth gathering.

• Does each nonprofit have an obligation to our whole sector to create satisfying experiences that regenerate volunteers?

• Are poor volunteer practices not only driving people away from the offending organization but also souring volunteers against any volunteer service in the future?

These are some of the questions provoked by an intriguing article in the article “It Ain’t Natural: Toward a New (Natural) Resource Conceptualization for Volunteer Management” in the August 2009 edition of Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly .

While the title screams academia, the ideas raised by the authors  Jeffrey L. Brudney of Cleveland State University and Lucas C. P. M. Meijs of Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University, deserve serious discussion and wide exposure within our sector.

Citing a a study done by the Corporation for National and Community Service, Brudney and Meijs warn that “a staggering one in three Americans evidently dropped out of volunteering between 2005 and 2006.” They note that other studies document similar problems in other countries.

The authors suggest that nonprofits in general are too preoccupied with recruiting volunteers and don’t pay enough attention to retaining them.

I’m sure you’ve heard someone lament (and maybe even have said it yourself): “we can’t find enough good volunteers.”

What if, the authors suggest, instead of treating “volunteer energy” as a resource with an inexhaustible supply, we  perceived volunteers as a resource that could actually run out?

How would our behavior need to change?

I find this concept incredibly intriguing, especially because it fits very nicely into my”we’re all in this together” framework of civil society.

Imagine that you are a first time volunteer. You’ve been thinking about doing something good for your community so you’ve found your way to a volunteer job through family, friend or volunteer center.  You’re excited, but a little unsure of your role and how you might contribute.

It’s likely that it may take quite a while before you hear from the organization at all. Or, they contact you quickly but they don’t really have any volunteer needs right now. No one takes the time to find out what skills you have or what else you might have to offer.

Or maybe they have a job, but in reality it is pretty undefined. You are assigned to a staff member (or another volunteer) who simply doesn’t have the time to train you and makes you feel as if you are in their way. You never really get a good idea of what you should be doing  or how to do it successfully.  And you just have this gut feeling that the job they handed you probably isn’t very important if no one can take the time to get you started.

Maybe your experience is somewhat different. Maybe you are a pretty secure self-starter who doesn’t need a lot of direction. Or maybe you arrived as part of a larger group. You can jump right into the task and successfully complete your assignment with minimal supervision. And you feel pretty good about what you’ve accomplished and are ready for the next task.  But once you’re done with that assignment, it’s as if you’ve never been there. No thanks. No call backs. End of connection.

What would you do if this described your volunteer experience over and over again? My guess is that you’d likely give up on volunteering and go do something more personally satisfying, like spending time with your family or shopping with friends.

When one organization treats a volunteer badly, they are likely to lose that volunteer. But imagine what happens when thousands of  volunteers have negative experiences at organization after organization. Eventually, it’s simply not worth volunteering any more. No reward. Been there. Done that. Over.

I love that the authors challenge us to rethink our  attitude about volunteers. They suggest that each organization has a societal obligation to keep volunteer energy flowing, to ensure the sustainability of the resource, to “attract people into volunteering and keep them volunteering over the [course of their lives].”

Volunteers are not put on this earth to be used and discarded by one organization.

Each of us are responsible to each other for the volunteers who come under our umbrella. Though our own organization may only need a volunteer for a particular assignment, our society needs that volunteer to keep volunteering over their lifetime.

In the authors’ world, a truly “regenerative” approach to volunteering produces fruitful outcomes for nonprofits and creates rewarding volunteer experiences that matter to our communities and keep volunteers volunteering. Who can’t sign on to that!

Gayle

P.S. Now, to really get your blood flowing, imagine applying this same concept to our board recruits.

These tiny organizations often need to rely on their board members to serve staff functions. That’s clearly obvious for organizations that have no staff at all… but may not be so clear once you’ve hired an executive director or one or two more staff positions.

It takes a lot of human-power to make our organizations run. One or two people, while they can do a lot, can’t do everything that needs to be done to be a thriving nonprofit. It’s pretty near impossible for one person to run quality programs, raise all the revenues, reach out to the larger community, and manage the operations and finances.

Board members in small nonprofits usually need to wear two hats… the hat they wear to govern the organization and? the hat they wear to serve a staff function… that is, to take on one of the many jobs that fall under the “staff” side of the organization and get them done.? Other non-board members can also be recruited to get the work accomplished.

How do you do this? You can start by making a comprehensive list of all that you hope to achieve this year. Then break those objectives down into the tasks that are needed to get them accomplished. Think about what skills and knowledge are essential to get this work done.

Knowing what needs to happen, recruit board members (or other volunteers) with the expectation that they will produce one of those desired outcomes.

Here’s an example. My local chapter of the Association of Fundraising Professionals runs a series of educational workshops, an annual conference on fundraising, and a huge celebration for National Philanthropy Day, among others. With just one part time administrator, the chapter relies on its board members and volunteer to get things done. When board members are recruited, they are asked at the time of recruitment to chair a committee that is charged with the responsibility of achieving one of these very large tasks. ? I myself have served as chair of the Annual Conference, the scholarship committee, and the mentoring committee (not at the same time!)

So, to make a working? board work, every board member should have a job and outcome that he or she is responsible for achieving.

We expect board members to:

• Give us time, lots of it. (Most nonprofits want attendance at a monthly board meeting, a monthly committee meeting, and whatever out-of-meeting time it takes to achieve the tasks a board member has been assigned.)
• To develop an in depth understanding of the technical issues facing this particular organization
• To understand the nonprofit’s financial structure AND to read complex (and sometimes incomprehensible) financial statements
• To understand the laws and regulations governing public charities
• To be strategic thinkers and prescient forecasters
• To connect us with community resources
• To advocate for our organization
• To attend our special events
• To attend events that others are holding to represent our organization
• To know and support staff
• To evaluate the Executive Director
• To schmooze donors
• To ask donors for gifts (and we usually want those to be large)
• To be masters of group process
• To show leadership and to speak up
• To lead others
• To understand complex parliamentary procedures such as Robert’s Rules of Order
• To expose themselves to some legal risk
• To be responsible for the futures of real people, whether clients or staff
• To hold each other accountable

That’s my quick list for a Friday afternoon. What have I forgotten?

glg