The Strange History and Future Direction of Our Field's Professional Associations

When e-Volunteerism started a decade ago, one of our target audiences was leadership of our field’s professional associations of volunteer program managers.  For several years we even ran a special Keyboard Roundtable feature on issues facing DOVIAs (the generic “Directors of Volunteers In Agencies” name for local professional societies). Since 2000, we’ve watched local, state/provincial, national and even international associations launch, thrive, wither, revive, or stagnate – in dozens of countries. Our conclusion? There is still no consistency of purpose or success among these various groups, though the need for professional exchange remains as critical as ever.

In this Points of View, we examine the history and context of professional societies in general, and of those in volunteerism in particular. And then we consider how needs have changed and what we might do collectively in the future.

History and Context

It is hardly a modern phenomenon that people want to know, talk to, learn from and collaborate with others in their professional field. In medieval Europe, practitioners of skilled trades had their guilds which, among other things, formalized a system of training future generations through apprenticeships and sometimes even university education. Someone became a “master” in a chosen craft both through hands-on experience and by acceptance from peers in the guild. Over time, this process evolved into more modern “accreditation” and “licensure” procedures. It didn’t matter if the trade was white collar or blue collar, or whether the group called itself a professional society, a trade association or a labor union. They all shared some common denominators of purpose because they:

• Defined the practices of their field.
• Created standards of competence and excellence.
• Educated and validated newcomers to the field.
• Provided opportunities for practitioners to meet one another and exchange ideas.
• Represented the trade or profession to the public.
• Increased the capacity of practitioners to improve service (and build a career ladder for rising through the ranks in the field).
• Negotiated for the collective, whether to influence legislation or develop purchasing clout.

Attempts to form associations for volunteer management follow this same pattern. 

However, some important factors have negatively affected professional societies in our field, and help explain some of the struggles we’re still facing. Consider the following:

• The majority of volunteer leaders do not carry this responsibility as a full-time job. A 2003 survey in Canada by Environics (unfortunately no longer available online) found that 34 percent of those who manage volunteer programs spent less than 10 percent of their time on these duties; about 20 percent spent between 11 and 25 percent of their time on volunteer management. Many of these self-identify with another profession altogether.  So they may be active in a professional society, but of social workers, fundraisers, librarians, occupational therapists, whatever. These volunteer program managers want help in “how to” do their work with volunteers, but they are not pursuing a career in our field for the long term. Volunteerism associations, therefore, have always juggled the needs and wants of these part-timers with those of focused and forward-looking colleagues.
• Even people in full-time volunteer management jobs do not necessarily see this as a “career” field. This is reflected in the incredible turnover rate among volunteer managers, with about 25 percent per year changing positions, often out of the field of volunteer management altogether. The Environics study found that 53 percent of volunteer managers had been in their current position for three years or less. There are no clear promotion paths in volunteer management, and chronic low pay forces many to move to different jobs simply to advance in status and income. Professional societies need a mix of veterans and newcomers to pass on experience and to succeed at long-range projects. Ironically, this lack of long-term commitment to the field, and constant turnover in members, also works against one important professional development option: rising to leadership in the professional society itself. In other professions, the peer recognition of election or nomination to a leadership role – starting locally and ultimately advancing to nationally and even internationally – conveys honor and stature. In volunteerism societies, we often struggle to fill boards and committees.
• Professions train their members through university courses, which gives them an ongoing pool of future members. In contrast, volunteer management is rarely an academic curriculum and so we have no easily-identifiable pool of people who study to be better volunteer program leaders. We also do not have a faculty of professors who are devoted to furthering knowledge in the field (only researchers in a range of disciplines who occasionally look at random volunteer-related topics). In addition, many of the other professions with links to volunteer utilization (social work, nonprofit management, library science, environmental studies, etc.) commonly fail to devote much or any attention to management of volunteers in their curricula.
• The more established a profession, the more likely (at least at the national level) it will have a corps of paid staff to do the daily administrative work of association management – leaving its members free to volunteer on substantive activities that center on the growth of the profession. With only a few notable exceptions, volunteerism associations need their members to do it all – attend national award ceremonies, balance the books, organize  conferences and put stamps on mass mailings.
• We are hard to find. Because we do not share a consistent job title, we can’t be identified as a target audience for anything. Have you ever tried to rent a mailing list for our field? None exist. Ironically, even national organizations often do not maintain a list of which staff members in their local affiliates or chapters are designated to lead volunteers! If we can’t find each other, we can’t communicate with each other, and we can’t invite colleagues to attend conferences or join professional societies.  No national association in the U.S. has ever topped 2,500 members and very few state associations have gone beyond 500 (associations in other countries are even smaller). Yet a conservative estimate of people responsible for volunteer engagement in the U.S. is over 300,000! Clearly, we are invisible even to each other.

All of this shows that our struggles to form viable associations are rooted in issues inherent to our field. But there is no future for our profession, as a profession, unless we succeed at organizing ourselves to benefit our practitioners and to have an impact on the larger world.

What Has Changed. . .or Ought to

One of the constant questions association leaders face is this: “What do our members need and want?” 

When Steve and Susan started in the field in the early 1970s, there were plenty of volunteers but no books on volunteer management, no training opportunities and only a scattered few volunteer centers. Susan often reminds people that Philadelphia has one of the oldest professional societies (today called Delaware Valley Association of Volunteer Administrators or DVAVA); when she joined in 1971, meetings consisted of about 15 people sitting in a circle and, one by one, sharing what they had done that month.  “Show and tell” was the entire meeting agenda until she and two friends ran the first-ever association workshop on student volunteers.

Happily, we’re way past that point now. Yet most volunteer management associations are still focused on the same training and information-sharing methods that were utilized 20 years ago.  Local DOVIAs, state and provincial associations, and even national societies have generally not adapted to the changing world of our field. While most have discovered the Web, they aren’t exactly sure what to do with their Web sites and too many have “cobwebs” of never-changing information.

At one time, the cost of printing and mailing any type of outreach was prohibitive to a low-budget organization. If nothing else, the Internet has totally leveled the playing field for any size organization to spread the word about itself and its programs. Money is not the problem; imagination is.

Here are some of our reflections and ideas. Once we started thinking outside the box, new possibilities opened up. We’ll hope this will happen to you, too, and that you’ll add some ideas of your own in response.

We could go on, but you get the idea. The old models for professional associations are being deconstructed and rebuilt, and volunteer managers are no exception to the need for making an adjustment in how they operate. Our job to develop viable professional associations is harder than most, which means we need to be both quicker and more innovative. The good news is that this is easier than you think, since there are some very good models out there.

A complete list of volunteer manager association Web sites is posted at Energize,  http://www.energizeinc.com/prof-2.html#professional. Some of our favorite volunteer manager association Web sites are:

• UK Association of Volunteer Managers, http://www.volunteermanagers.org.uk/
• Canadian Association of Volunteer Resources, http://www.cavrcanada.org/
• Minnesota Association for Volunteer Administration, http://www.mavanetwork.org/
• New York Association for Volunteer Administration, http://www.nyava.org/

In building our professional associations, we need to remember that the same principles that are relevant in creating a good volunteer program apply to fostering a professional association. Some of them are:

• There can never be too much communication, and it needs to come from all directions. People don’t want to be “talked to” – they want a conversation.
• Relationships matter. Creating friendships operates as the glue that keeps people coming back.
• Time is scarce, and people need to see what they are getting and giving in return.
• Participation builds participation. The best associations are beehives of activity. The simplest signs of health in an association can be measured by the percentage of members who are actively involved.

But most importantly – and true in all of volunteer management – we need to remember that we are not just in this by ourselves. There are others just like us from whom we can learn. And those who will come after us will benefit if we make the effort to build the professional associations that will nurture and support them.