Volunteer Work Design

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.

 

Colleen Kelly suggests that volunteer management has taken the road more travelled – the easier road – because when we began the process of formalizing volunteer involvement we did so mainly from the point of view of organizations recruiting volunteers to “fill positions” largely defined by paid staff. “I feel that this is one of our most pressing current challenges: developing a people-centred process, rather than a position-centred one – the road not yet taken.”

Based on an experimental project at Volunteer Vancouver, Kelly presents the concept of deploying entrepreneurial volunteers (EV) as “Scopers” to assist organizations in determining innovative ways to utilize highly- or specially-skilled prospective volunteers. She notes there are two approaches:

• Working with the ED: We can begin a process of working with organizations to determine the very specific tasks that highly-skilled volunteers can do for the organization.

• Working with the EV : We can teach the entrepreneurial volunteer how to go through a process of finding – and getting – the right volunteer position.
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The Glenbow Museum in Calgary, Alberta, Canada has a dedicated volunteer corps that until recently was comprised mainly of adults who had been serving the Museum for 20 to 30 years. Little thought had been given to succession planning, although the volunteers were clearly aging and not very diverse, yet some of these older volunteers are eager to train and teach others to take over.

The Glenbow made a conscious decision to focus recruitment efforts on youth, especially students from junior high to university. These young people have brought new enthusiasm to the volunteer program and offer hope for maintaining volunteer commitment into the future. This article examines what was learned about the special needs of young volunteers, particularly in how to communicate our recruitment appeals and how to support their efforts.

Somewhere, in an organization quite like yours, a staff member is in the countdown for the annual fundraiser... With the countdown underway, the lead staff member is juggling a thousand balls: confirming logistics for the entertainment; finalizing attendance figures with the caterer; being available to answer all kinds of last-minute questions…

There is one additional relationship that this staff member is juggling, along with the other 999 balls: the relationship with the event co-leader. This co-leader, a volunteer for the organization, is a person of tremendous dedication and passion for the organization and its mission. What complicates the relationship and adds to the juggling challenge is that this co-leader is also a board member.

The staff event leader is juggling this relationship because this year’s co-leader at times expects her suggestions and opinions on the event to be the final word... It’s hard to predict which it will be on a given day. Will the “co-leader” show up? Or will the “board member” show up? It has certainly made the event planning a lot more complicated than the staff member had expected.

Does any of this strike a familiar chord with events in your organization? If so, you’re hardly alone. Confusion and conflict over authority and roles are common occurrences in organizations that involve volunteers.

World Leisure, an international organization devoted to the scientific study and promotion of leisure, has as part of its structure several commissions devoted to matters consistent with this mission. One of these – the Volunteerism Commission – was founded to organize and encourage research in all countries on all aspects of volunteering that relate to leisure and, to the extent they are deemed useful there, to disseminate to the applied sector the world over relevant research findings in this area. The socio-economic context of leisure and volunteering is explored and a case made for viewing volunteering as leisure activity. The structure and programs of the Volunteerism Commission are then examined. A selected bibliography of theory and research in this area is presented as part of the reference list.