Volunteer Work Design

To be effective and to thrive in upcoming years, volunteer programs must learn to engage Millennials, that slice of population also referred to as “Generation Y” and generally born somewhere between the mid-1970s to the early 2000s. As this generation assumes its role in the workplace and begins to build families, it is essential that volunteer managers tap into the energy, technological expertise and passion for community involvement that Millennials have to offer.

This Training Design focuses on qualities of the Millennial generation, both inside and outside the workplace. The objective is to discuss motivations and work styles of this generation in order to enhance communication skills and encourage effective recruitment, supervision and retention of these volunteers. The authors – three AmeriCorps VISTA members assigned to the Minnesota Association for Volunteer Administration (MAVA) – developed and implemented the training for volunteer managers, Millennial individuals and other MAVA members interested in professional development in this area.

If your organization still hasn’t fully embraced the Internet to support and involve staff and volunteers, this Training Design is the key to bridging your organization’s digital divide. Jayne Cravens, who directed the Virtual Volunteering Project and helped pioneer the concept of involving volunteers via the Internet, has created a development plan that successfully introduces five crucial Internet tools, helps explain their importance to your organization, and provides tips to help your staff and volunteers finally embrace online technology. This Training Design is also a wonderful resource for those who are somewhat Internet savvy but might need a refresher course on how to use online forums, social networking sites, audio and video programs and automatic alerts. Cravens’ “Personal Online Skill Development Plan” will help shrink the digital divide for everyone.

In work-oriented societies, it can be confusing when people do something for no remuneration when that ‘something’ appears to be neither part of their livelihood nor part of their leisure. In simplest terms, the question asked by the average person in such societies is: Why work if there is no money to be made or, at the very least, nothing to be paid in kind?

In this article, Robert A. Stebbins, a noted author and college professor who specializes in the sociology of work and leisure, argues that volunteers’ activities are leisure, and that volunteers do sometimes receive money, goods or services for their efforts. Granted, these benefits can seem inconsistent with the altruistic, selfless character of volunteering that is widely held to be its very essence. The goal of this article is to examine the subtleties that revolve around being paid in money or in kind to perform a volunteer role, and to examine when this happens, what form it takes and why it occurs.

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!"