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Preparing Your Agency
Designing a Strategy for Persuasion
Good, skilled people in the field of volunteer management are often unsuccessful because they function reactively in programs where there is little or no true commitment, understanding or support for developing and sustaining a healthy, cutting-edge volunteer program. Individuals leading volunteer programs must not only be excellent technicians but also be able to proactively influence individuals and systems to work effectively with volunteers. Betty Stallings takes you step-by-step through the process of developing your own persuasion strategy.
"Diversity Continuum: Indicators of Success"
e-Volunteerism enjoys making discoveries. Periodically we find material that was produced by an organization originally for in-house purposes only, but which is of such quality, uniqueness, or interest to warrant sharing more broadly. We will seek permission to reprint these "Tools You Can Use" to spark the creativity of our readers to adapt great ideas pioneered elsewhere.
In this issue, we present a notable tool for assessing how an organization ranks when it comes to diversity. This "Diversity Continuum" was developed last year by the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, whom we thank for permission to publish excerpts. First, we applaud PPFA for integrating standards for volunteer diversity alongside the same standards for employee diversity! Second, we think this grid does an outstanding job of delineating different levels of diversity.
"Supplementing or Supplanting?" The Mystery of "Volunteer" versus "Paid Employee" Right to Work
If there were a Ten Commandments of Volunteer Management, one of them would surely be the statement "volunteers should supplement, not supplant, paid staff." Drilled firmly into the head of every new volunteer manager is the fact that staff support is dependent upon relieving fears of replacement by hordes of unpaid volunteers and accordingly work done by volunteers should never impinge upon or threaten the jobs of paid staff.
Now, neither Steve nor Susan is opposed to paid staff keeping their jobs, so please don't interpret what follows as an attack upon full employment.
It's Never Over: Ongoing Screening of Volunteers and Paid Staff
Volunteering and volunteer work have changed dramatically in the last few years. So too have management practices in the not-for-profit sector as shrinking resources combined with increasing demands for service press administrators to search for new ways of doing business. One of the consequences of these changes has been an increase in the responsibilities assigned to volunteers and paid staff. These new responsibilities have increased the burden on organizations to manage all the paid and unpaid human resources they have mobilized.
As paid and unpaid staff members perform more sophisticated duties and as they work more directly with increasingly vulnerable populations, there is a concomitant increase in the dual burdens of responsibility and liability on the organizations that deploy them.