Volunteer Work Design

In the 1970s, many in volunteer management were concerned with making the field more professional by adopting and adapting personnel practices from private business.  Ivan Scheier believed this was not only wrong-headed but almost the opposite of what we should be doing.  Instead, Ivan preferred and promoted a way to develop roles for volunteers that he called “The People Approach.”  In this article, Rick Lynch explores the application of Ivan's People Approach to designing roles for volunteers in the present-day world.

Many organizations now look specifically at the ways volunteers connect with them and how they can create new opportunities to involve volunteers of any age. This feature story explores a relatively new way to create more pathways to volunteering – “flexible volunteering.”   Flexible volunteering offers individuals a variety of different and relatively simple ways to contribute their services. Janica Fisher of Humanity In Practice (H!P) in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, explains why flexible volunteering is the secret to engaging more volunteers, and how it can be used to create meaningful ways to support an agency at the convenience of the volunteers.

When Elizabeth Ellis was Volunteer Development Manager for the Girl Scouts of Minnesota and Wisconsin River Valleys, she managed, promoted and expanded their “Talent Match” database. This database listed the specific skills, preferred service locations, age group preferences and availability of individuals specifically recruited for this database. Both staff and adult volunteer Girl Scout leaders utilized this resource through a password-protected search to match their unique needs to volunteer interests and availability.

In this feature story, Ellis reviews the multiple benefits of creating a similar "talent" database for organizations, and explores the potential of “banking on volunteer talents” and time. She also reviews the multiple benefits of developing a similar "skills bank," and shares a model for how to make it work. Says Ellis, “Being on the front lines of volunteer recruitment, I had the opportunity to experience the growing interest of potential volunteers using this model, as well as experience first-hand the impact of this end user-friendly matching technique."

People are the competitive advantage of the voluntary sector. And yet we seem to concentrate very little time on how to work with this amazing resource. This Training Design presents a workshop that introduces five important tools to help organizations fully engage specifically skilled volunteers.

In December 2005, an assault on three volunteer surf lifesavers led to violence and what are now known as 'the Cronulla riots.'  In the aftermath of these events, a number of parties (including the Australian Government, Sutherland Shire Council, Surf Life Saving Australia, Surf Life Saving NSW, and various other groups) representing Muslims proposed a program which would attempt to bring harmony back to the Cronulla beaches. Ultimately, this program has seen almost 20 young people of mainly Lebanese Muslim background undergo the arduous training to become volunteer surf lifesavers. But is this mere tokenism or a genuine attempt by those involved to make a difference?

A few years ago, we reprinted an excerpt from a long out-of-print book written by Ivan H. Scheier in 1980 called Exploring Volunteer Space.  We noted then that this volume contained ideas far ahead of its time – which is exactly what we’d come to expect from Ivan, one of the true pioneers of our field.  We also promised to periodically reprint other sections and so we offer here the chapter entitled, “From Observation to Action.”  You’ll find it thought-provoking, as Ivan explores “a relatively neglected area of volunteer space”:  “a form of indirect participation in which what you see is what you give.”

With the world’s largest sporting event, the FIFA World Cup, recently winding up in Germany, we at e-Volunteerism decided it was time to turn our attention to the nuances involved in volunteering and volunteer management practices within the context of hosting major events.

Major events utilize the support of thousands of volunteers which, by sheer weight of numbers, creates management complexities not experienced by volunteer managers working in more conventional kinds of volunteering.   Some of these issues, which we discuss in this Roundtable, include:

• Infrastructure and planning required for handling such a vast workforce
• Transference of volunteers, skills and knowledge across nations
• Pressures of working to complex and finite time lines
• Importance of reward and recognition of major event volunteers
• Utilization of volunteers themselves in the management and training of other volunteer team members

This Keyboard Roundtable offers a variety of opinions from volunteerism leaders around the world, involved in coordinating volunteer effort across a wide range of major events. We invite you to learn about this unique style of volunteer involvement from their experiences.

Nonprofit organizations are required to identify funding streams and raise a significant amount of financial resources to provide services to clientele, operate facilities, and to pay staff.  At the same time, organizations conduct capital campaigns to raise a large amount of money for endowments or to build or renovate a facility.  This article describes a capital campaign that the Ohio 4-H Youth Development organization undertook, a first in the history of the program.  The authors describe the challenges, opportunities, and lessons learned by this quasi-nonprofit organization that is a part of an institution of higher education and has funding partners at the county, state, and federal level.

The article is written from the perspective of paid staff members regarding their experience working with volunteers in a different capacity than what the organization and many of its paid staff have traditionally experienced. The original goal of raising $12 million was met and 97% of the revised goal of $14.2 million has been reached. 

Recruiting volunteers to be the leaders or presidents of their organizations can be a daunting task.  Once there, these leaders take on the role with varying levels of effectiveness.  Given their brief leadership reigns and the unusual circumstances bringing them to the position in the first place, it’s no wonder their success can be haphazard.  Though they may have minimal leadership experience, they are expected to be passionate promoters of their cause, highly visible organizational members, fundraisers extraordinaire, brilliant organizers, and empathetic and encouraging managers.  The volunteers who take on leadership of these organizations must be skilled in working not only with volunteers, but also with paid staff and the general community as well.  This article highlights the need for recognizing the various populations with whom a non-paid leader will interact and offers some advice on making the most of those relationships.

Building collaborative relationships with highly-skilled volunteers can gain huge dividends for your organization and for the volunteers who participate. Based on her research for the upcoming book, The Art and Science of Engaging Baby Boomer Volunteers, Jill Friedman Fixler shares how creating work assignments that engage highly-skilled volunteers effectively provides a win/win situation for you and the volunteer.

Using five case studies of real organization experiences, this article explores what “highly-skilled” means and why such volunteers are increasing, what makes working with highly-skilled volunteers special or different from working with other types of volunteers, and where to find highly-skilled volunteers.