Login | Subscribe | Stay Engaged | About | Partnerships | Contact
Volunteer Work Design
SurveyMonkey Changed My Life: A Volunteer Manager’s Perspective
Volunteer manager Laura Hamilton knew there had to be a better way to manage and schedule volunteers at George House Trust, the largest HIV Social Care Charity in the North West of England. So when her organization began to review rota management software packages to help manage volunteer rotations, she stumbled upon a solution that surprised her: SurveyMonkey, an online tool for collecting data for volunteer surveys. "Whilst exploring how it worked," Hamilton writes, "it struck me that with a bit of tweaking, we could set up a form which, rather than collecting feedback or evaluation data, would allow people to tell us their availability and sign up for shifts." In this e-Volunteerism feature, Hamilton reviews her experience with SurveyMonkey as a rota tool, and explains why "it really has changed my life!"
Effective Youth Engagement in Generation Y: Lessons from the Field
Despite all the theory and research about Generation Y — those individuals typically born between 1977 and 1997 — there still appears to be a considerable amount of confusion as to how volunteer managers can effectively engage this generation. Could this confusion stem from not clearly understanding the key factors that shape the lives and thinking of Gen Y? Author Catherine Williams thinks so. In this feature article, Williams reviews how effective engagement with today’s young adults involves moving beyond the hype associated with this generation and developing a deeper understanding of what shapes the lives of our younger generations. By sharing the stories of a few Gen Y individuals (also called Millennials), Williams presents some important lessons about why young people are not engaging in traditional volunteer roles. She also looks at the implications for volunteer management practices, and explores some of the changes that volunteer managers may need to consider in order to make volunteering relevant to this generation.
What Are Volunteers Good At?
“What kinds of work should volunteers do?” Volunteer program managers tend to run into this discussion in a number of different ways, often centering on the issue of whether volunteers can do some positions/work or whether only paid staff can do the work. And the usual context for this conversation is whether there are legal or other restrictions that prevent volunteers from doing some jobs.
In this Points of View, Steve and Susan consider a somewhat different topic, one that’s worth both further discussion and research: “What are volunteers good at?” Or, to put it another way, “Is there work that unpaid volunteers do better than paid staff?”
And, of course, we also consider the reverse of that question: ”Is there work that paid staff do better than volunteers?”
Training for Organization Leaders: Capitalize on Volunteer Resources During Tough Economic Times
In these incredibly difficult economic times, there is perhaps one silver lining: volunteer resources. For those organizations wise enough to seize it, the economic crisis can be viewed as an opportunity to take advantage of the skills and ambitions that today’s volunteers have to offer. This Training Design can be used to guide volunteer leaders in exploring the challenges and opportunities of volunteer management during economic distress. Participants in the training learn six strategies to capitalize on volunteer resources during tough times. The result? A win-win for both organizations and volunteers.
Drop-in Volunteers and the Benefits of Flexibility
We’ve worked diligently to raise the standards of volunteer management. But we shouldn’t lose sight of some of the things that make volunteering different from paid employment, and help capture the volunteer spirit. In the past decade or so, we’ve tackled two types of volunteering that differ significantly from the regularly scheduled volunteer, namely, the “spontaneous” volunteer and those who volunteer single “days of service.” In this Points of View, we want to examine yet another effective and wonderful volunteering variation: the “drop-in” volunteer. We review why drop-in programs work best if they minimize the time between when volunteers show up and when they actually begin work. And we review how agencies can provide such spontaneous opportunities while keeping the agency and its clients safe.
Exploring Volunteer Space: The Recruiting of a Nation
This issue of Research to Practice takes a look at something that isn’t a typical research report and was written almost 30 years ago. Exploring Volunteer Space: The Recruiting of a Nation was Ivan Scheier’s greatest work – an exploration both of his own mind and of the universe of volunteering. In this report, Ivan outlines much of what volunteering can be and a great deal of what would happen in volunteering in the future. While Exploring Volunteer Space is a highly conceptual work, it has great and continuing relevance to practitioners who think about the development of their volunteer programs.