The Care & Feeding of Volunteers: Recruiting, Retaining & Rewarding Volunteers

By Dr. Bill Wittich

This book will challenge you to consider applying many of the leadership strategies that are working in corporate America to your non-profit arena The Care & Feeding of Volunteers will show you to find and attract today's volunteers into your organization.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jan 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781928794035

Book preview

volunteers.

Chapter 1

No More Warm Bodies!

Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.

Stephen Jobs

Recently, while wandering through a mall, I saw a large poster on the wall. It stated:

Wanted, Volunteers

No Experience Necessary

Warm Bodies Wanted

Just Come On In!

Is this really what you want? Just warm bodies? No experience? Anyone who is interested regardless of their motives? I don’t really think so.

The first point is that advertising doesn’t really work. In fact, a recent study has shown that only about 9% of all volunteers come from an advertisement. In fact, over 90% of all volunteers come from someone asking them to volunteer.

The real danger of the warm body ad is that you might just have 100 volunteers show up excited to start! Let’s be honest, you post the ad expecting to locate those five to ten volunteers you need. What do you do with those 100 people that responded? You select the first ten and lose the other 90 volunteers. These 90 volunteers that you do not select will be unhappy campers and will probably never volunteer for you again, and in fact, will spread the negative word about how you operate. One thing we do know, is that if we ask someone to volunteer, we had better be ready to use their talents. Volunteers have little patience for someone who doesn’t use their interest in a reasonable amount of time.

The real issue is that you were really not interested in warm bodies - you were looking for experienced, knowledgeable, talented volunteers to perform specific tasks. In fact, I don’t even search for volunteers, I search for work that needs to be done. At one point I was working to start a city volunteer program, and to gather enough jobs for volunteers I sent out the typical letter calling for support from various city departments. My letter to each department manager stated the following, Do you have any work in your department that volunteers can do? This was the wrong letter! What came back from these department heads was the following. No! We have no work that volunteers are capable of performing. You see the mindset of these department heads? They were afraid of getting a group of warm bodies, untrained and incapable of performing anything but basic tasks. Even for basic tasks, volunteers require a large output of training and supervision, hardly worth the effort. I was confused and even hurt by their lack of support for the new volunteer effort our city was putting together. But after a few cups of coffee, I found out that each manager had a concern about the time and effort required to work with volunteer.

Having realized my naive efforts, I sent another letter requesting any assignments that the departments needed filled and that they might schedule over the next year, if the required resources appeared. Of course, the departments thought I was indicating dollar resources, but I meant highly qualified professional talent who could perform those jobs. For example, one department indicated a need for a web site. I contacted a local university and obtained the services of an outstanding graduate student in engineering who gave the city their web site. Not once did the department have any thoughts about the quality of work performed by this computer consultant. The department head said they would like to retain this expert if the consulting budget would allow. They had no idea that I had recruited the services of a student volunteer from the university service-learning program. The difference was clear, It was the attitude of the department heads that working with volunteers was more work than the amount of effort coming forth from the volunteers. But the real issue was the way I had approached their support. I needed to stress the fact that I had a group of fellow professionals willing to assist their program.

My approach since that time has been to assume that every person being asked to volunteer is a professional with skills and talent. That is so true, everyone in life has gathered a collection of specific skills and talents that they use as moms and dads and employees. My job is to search out these talents and put the volunteer to work making use of these talents. The right person, at the right time, with the right talents, is the key to good volunteer assignments. The key then, to the quality of the team of volunteers, is selecting the right people. John Maxwell, in his book, Developing the Leaders Around You, quotes Red Auerbach, longtime Boston Celtics president, who says, How you select people is more important than how you manage them once they are on the job. If you start with the right people, you won’t have problems later on. If you hire the wrong people, for whatever reason, you’re in serious trouble and all the revolutionary management techniques in the world won’t bail you out.

Many leadership gurus suggest that selecting the right players determines 80% of the success of any organization. But equally important to selecting the right people, is having the right expectations for your volunteers. You have all heard about the " Pygmalion Theory, that says that if we expect someone to succeed, they probably will and if we expect them to fail, they probably will. This theory has a lot to do with the self-fulfilling prophecy" idea. That is, when a person predicts that something will happen, they setup an expectation. This expectation actually changes the way the person behaves. Think back to a time in your life when you had someone, your dad or a coach, who believed in you and pushed you to excel. You did excel. Their support or, more importantly, their expectations about you, created a positive feeling in you that led to improved performance.

James Kouzez and Barry Posner, in their book, Encouraging the Heart, share a thought by Tom Melohn that says, Simply stated, people must believe that they are capable of solving the problem, of finding a new and better way. Or they won’t. They can’t if they don’t believe in themselves, in their own capabilities… This feeling in volunteers of self-expectation is key to their success in their volunteer assignments. But more important than the volunteer’s self-expectation is the support and reinforcement that the volunteer coordinator must give to each volunteer.

Chapter 2

People Really Don’t Volunteer

The most enthusiastic givers in life are the real lovers of life. They experience the soul-joy that comes from responding with the heart rather than the head.

Helen Steiner Rice

Think about it. When you were sitting in a PTA meeting and the leader asked for volunteers to head a busy committee, did everyone say YES? Or did anyone say YES? Did you immediately throw up your hand? Me neither. I always need more information before I decide. In fact, usually, unless someone directly asks us and tells us why they selected us, we don’t volunteer.

Ask - that’s the critical item. I recently saw an article in the Los Angeles Times with the headline More Teens Would Volunteer If Asked, But Many Just Aren’t Approached. It basically says that America’s teens are likely to become community volunteers, if they’re asked. But nobody is asking them. The latest Gallup Poll shows teens are four times more likely to volunteer if asked, than if they are not asked. Since people really don’t walk in and say, I want to volunteer, we need to design our training program around two things. First, how to find people to ask and then, that all important training in how to ask.

Where should we be looking for volunteers? It’s not so much where to look as it is how to look for volunteers. It’s a change in mindset. Think about visiting one of your local stores. Maybe it’s Kinko’s, your local speedy print shop. You walk in and the woman behind the counter says, Good morning, can I help you? What about her? Isn’t she a potential volunteer for your organization? Of course. But how do we convert her from a person helping us in a store to a person helping us as a volunteer?

Recruiting volunteers is a three-step process. The steps are prospect, cultivate, and ask (PCA). Prospects are potential volunteers. Where do we find potential volunteers? Well, the answer is everywhere, but your best prospects are those close to you. I call this the ONE SQUARE MILE rule. By this, I mean that the people within your one square mile are your most likely volunteers. One square