The question every Volunteer Manager dreads (and a new way to answer it)

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I’ve been involved in volunteer management for a little over 22 years now. Whilst I love being a part of this amazing field I still hate one thing about it, that awful feeling you get when you have to answer the question we all dread “so what do you do for a living?”. If you respond by saying “I’m a Volunteer Manager” you might get one of the following results:

• “Do you get paid to do that”
• “Oh, I was once / am a volunteer…” followed by a long story about their volunteering which I’ve had manifest as them telling me all about how much more they know about volunteer management than I do because they are a volunteer (thereby assuming I have never volunteered)
• “Is that a real job?”
• “No, what do you do for a living, not what do you do as a volunteer”
• A blank stare
• The person asking the question looks at you and then moves to the next person who they suspect might do something more interesting or that they might actually understand

Frankly, sometimes, whether we are a Volunteer Manager or a consultant, it’s just easier to say something like, “I’m in HR” and deflect the question as best we can. After all, if we can’t even agree between us what we should be called then why spend the energy trying to explain that to someone else?
Just recently I was reading a blog post about social media marketing and how those who do that job can explain ti to others. What struck me was this line:

“It’s tempting to come up with one “silver bullet” explanation and use it with every person who says, “So, tell me what you do.” But you’ll be more successful if you account for each person’s background and reasons for asking.”

What a great idea! Instead of speaking trying to get someone to grasp what we do by explaining the detail of our day-to-day working lives, why not ask them a question in return, perhaps something like, “Well, have you ever volunteered?”. That way we can start to unpick their understanding of volunteering (or non-profits more broadly) and find a way to explain Volunteer Management in terms that they will understand rather than our own generalised or over detailed standard explanation.
I’d love for you to try this and let me know how it goes by leaving a comment below.

How volunteer management can make you sick

Working as a leader and manager of volunteers can be an all consuming role. We get involved in the lives of our volunteers as well as the politics of our organisations as we constantly try to push water uphill in our efforts to get support and buy in to the volunteer programme. Our work can be exhausting, emotionally and physically. It can leave us wondering why we do it and feeling ill at the thought of another day.

Cheerful huh?

Sometimes we need a reminder of why this is one of the greatest jobs in the world. That's why I want
to look at why volunteer management can make us sick.

Successful
Working with volunteers can be highly rewarding. If we step out from behind the bureaucracy and paperwork that has come to define what we do, we can reconnect with the core essence of our role - dealing with people. As someone put it recent, working with volunteers is a contact sport.

Through the opportunities and support we provide we can see people changed. We can see confidence grow, personalities flourish, employment found, friendships made, lives turned around. And that's just the people who volunteer. There's all those who benefit from the work of volunteers too, often some of the most disadvantaged people at the edges of society.

nfpSynergy titled their recent report into volunteering in the 21st century The New Alchemy. Here's why:

"Volunteering takes that most universal of human resources, time. And it takes that universal resource, so often squandered, and makes it transformational of people’s lives. It takes a universal base asset and turns it into the human gold of changed lives."

For all those years alchemists toiled away to turn lead into gold and none succeeded. We have the privilege of seeing that success every day.


Inspirational
Getting people to give up their time and work for a good cause for no financial reward isn't easy. If it was, everyone would be doing it everywhere. Put simply, being a leader and manager of volunteers hones your skills at inspiring others. We get good at getting people to be there because they want to be, not because they have to be.

James Kouzes and Barry Posner summed this up well in the introduction to their excellent book The Leadership Challenge. The book is aimed at leaders in big business but this quote sums up why we Volunteer Managers are the very essence of inspirational leadership:

"To get a feel for the true essence of leadership, assume that everyone who works with you is a volunteer. Assume that your employees are there because they want to be, not because they have to be. In fact, they really are volunteers - especially those you depend upon the most. The best people are always in demand and they can choose where they lend their talents and gifts. They remain because they volunteer to stay."

That quote still inspires me today, but probably not as much as you inspire your volunteers every day.


Creative
Ok, hands up how many of you have a multi-million budget for your volunteer programme? I thought so.

Managers of volunteers have to be some of the most creative people in an organisation. Consider just three examples:

1. We have to take the limited resources we have and turn them into the gold our organisation needs. 
2. We have to compete against marketing and advertising budgets many orders of magnitude beyond what we have if we are to get people to give us a small piece of their time instead of anything else they could be doing - spending time with family & friends, going to the movies, watching the match etc..
3. We have to find new ways for people to contribute what little time they have available, in flexible ways, to help meet our organisations mission.

The ability to be creative and innovative is increasingly important in our modern world where the pace of change grows ever faster and new ideas come along like busses after a long wait. Leaders and managers of volunteers have such creativity in spades. We are often heads and shoulders above our colleagues who, when faced with rapidly shifting sands, fall back on old, outdated ways of doing things to try and succeed e.g. fundraising our way through a downturn until the good old days - that they have deluded themselves will return - come back.

Sure, we don't have all the answers but we could be a key part of the solution. Stand tall and be confident in your creative talents.


Knowledgeable
In her seminal book, From The Top Down, Susan Ellis talks about leaders of volunteers being the only people in an organisation, other than the CEO, who have an overview of almost everything that the agency does. We have to because we probably support the engagement of volunteers across the whole organisation (or does it just feel like that some days?).

In another of her excellent books, The (Help!) I-Don't-Have-Enough-Time Guide to Volunteer Management, Susan (and co-author Katherine Noyes Campbell) list out in detail the scope of the role of a Volunteer Manager. It runs to multiple pages and illustrates clearly how we have to be Jacks (and Jills) of all trades and masters of many (if not all) too.

For anyone in a volunteer management role we should never underestimate how much skill, ability and knowledge we amass in our work. That's not to say we should be arrogant know-it-alls but we should revel in having and growing a breadth and depth of knowledge about working in the nonprofit world that few others will ever gain over many years of experience.


So there you have it, volunteer management can make you sick.

You can see success every day.

You can be inspirational to others.

You can be a creative genius.

You can be a hugely knowledgable asset to your organisation.

Next time you feel ground down by what you do, think on those four things and I hope you will regain some of your motivation and drive.

Five things I'd like to say about calculating the economic value of volunteering

Since incorporating Volunteering England into their work, NCVO have started producing some good blogs on volunteering. These are mainly written by their Executive Director of Volunteering & Development, Justin Davis Smith (former Volunteering England CEO) but good material from other authors appears too.

Just a few weeks ago a new blog post appeared entitled "Five things you need to know about calculating the economic value of volunteering". This post summarised a paper from Jakub Dostál and Marek Vyskočil of Masaryk University’s Department of public economy and administration which won the prize for best paper in the New Researcher’s Session at the Voluntary Sector and Volunteering Research Conference 2014.

In the post there are five tips for "confronting economic calculations in your work or in someone else’s". As I read the article I started to feel downhearted yet again at the lack of awareness of the dangers of perpetuating the myth of economic value of volunteering and the absence of vision or ambition to do any better.

I'm not going to attempt a full analysis of the pitfalls of attributing notional wage 'values' to the work of volunteers. My American colleague Jayne Cravens has written an excellent commentary on the problems of valuing volunteers in economic terms. I've also written an analysis of the well intentioned by flawed efforts by the International Labor (sic) Organisation (ILO) to capture economic measures of volunteering globally in their Manual on the Measurement of Volunteer Work. If you are interested in exploring this topic in more depth then both those sources are good starting points.

What I do want to do is provide five responses to the five things the NCVO blog (author unknown) tells us we need to know about measuring the economic value of volunteering.


1 - Remember it's an estimate
Yes it is, but everyone from the ILO down seems so wedded to it that almost no energy is being invested in coming up with something better. Economic value is measured because it's easy, not because it's the best thing to measure. That speaks volumes about the actual value placed on the contribution of volunteer to society when so little effort is willing to be spent trying to get more accurate.


2 - Estimates rely significantly on the type of replacement wage
I absolutely agree with the author here. They flag up why economic measures of volunteering are not only an estimate but a poor one at that. The ILO manual does try to standardise this but in practice that's an approach that is far more complex and involved than people are usually willing to be. Remember, this is an area where we can't even be bothered to develop a decent measure, just the easiest estimate.


3 - There are still good reasons for using the concept of replacement wages
No there aren't!

First of all, economic measures focus on wage replacement methodologies (i.e. attributing a notional wage value to the work done by volunteers) don't actually measure an output or on outcome. Rather, they attribute a financial amount to an input, namely the time that volunteers give. In my view they therefore fail to calculate any kind of meaningful value to the work of volunteers. Rather they ascribe an economic amount to something we'd never pay for anyway. Even if we did accept that there was some kind of value in these measures, it is calculated on the same terms as paid work, from which we know volunteering is distinctive.

In an age where demonstrating actual value - the contribution made to society, the difference made by giving time - is increasingly critical, whether in effectively recognising volunteers for the work they do or for securing income from funders, we have got to get better at evidencing this for volunteering. Replacement wage calculations do not do this and need replacing with something much better.

Second, the author argues that we should use economic measures because there are existing "statistical systems and surveys". That's following the same line of reasoning as before - we'll measure it because it's easy not because it's the right thing to do. They try to justify this by saying that in the absence of any other methodologies we should go with what we've got lest we end up with something of lower quality, done without academic support.

Frankly, this is someone saying, "Look, this is what we are prepared to measure. If you don't like it then we think you couldn't possibly come up with something yourselves and because academics wouldn't be involved if you did it wouldn't be any good".


4 - Ask for more: don’t forget future research
Here, the article's author accepts that there may be a better measure out there and that we should always ask for more. In fact, they say the academic world should ask for more but given the attitudes we've seen thus far I'd argue that it is the volunteering movement that should ask for more. For more interest in this topic by academics. For more vision and ambition that just settling for what's easy to measure. For more respect for the intelligence of leaders and managers of volunteers rather than assuming superiority over us.

They also argue that what we have now is better than we've had in the past. I'd make two observations here.

First, what we have now is not that different than we had 15-20 years ago. Progress on measuring the true value of volunteering is glacial. We may well ask for more but if we carry on as we are we're looking at decades passing before we get anything better.

Second, is what we have now actually better than not having economic measures for volunteering? Do statements like "Volunteers are worth £500m to the NHS" help? Do they instead suggest to ill-informed decision makers that they could cut budgets and get volunteers in for free instead? Big Society anyone? I'm sure many could do without these problems which we encounter because flawed economic measures of volunteering are so common.


5 - Not everything that counts can be counted
Here, the author acknowledges that other methods of calculating true value such as SROI exist. Again though, they state that these, "measure the social impact of volunteering, but it is extremely difficult to cover all the many types of benefits". So they conclude their article with an admission that its hard, so we'll stick what what we've got. Easy is better than meaningful. Again! Sigh.


What do you think?

Are there better ways to measure the value of the contribution volunteers make to society? What are they and how do they work?

What's been your experience (good and bad) of using economic measures of volunteering?

Is there anything else you'd like to say?

Four ideas for educating new staff about volunteers

One of the regular training gigs I have is to run a half-day 'working with volunteers' seminar for people who are thinking of working in the non-profit sector.  The seminar is part of a course NCVO are contracted to run for people transitioning from a career in the armed forces to civilian life. Over a week it promotes working for civil society organisations as a positive career option and explores some of the key issues organisations and individuals face.

When I was invited to run this seminar for the first time I asked myself 'How often does a chance like this come along?  A chance to positively influence how people outside our sector view volunteers before they take the step of working for a charity?'.  The answer was, to my mind, 'very rarely' and came to me about as quickly as it took for me to say 'yes' to the invitation.

I’m very aware that few of us will get such a chance.  We are more likely to only get an opportunity to influence new paid staff after they have started work for our agencies, sometimes long after they start. Let's face it, meeting with the leader and manager of volunteers comes way down the corporate induction checklist.

So how can we make the most of the opportunity we do have an how can we get more of these opportunities?

Here are four ideas:

1/ And now for something completely different

Give new starters something out of the ordinary that will make them sit up and take notice of the volunteer programme.

In one agency I worked at, new starters were never short of paper at the end of the corporate induction course.  When it came to volunteering, we gave them an audio CD, produced to a professional standard by volunteers, that features real volunteers talking about what they do, why they do it, what they get out of it and why someone else should do it  - in under 10 minutes! It was accessible to all (I worked for a sight loss charity), easy to access, quick to listen to and stood out from the small forest of manuals and processes people were supposed to read at their leisure (but probably never did).

2/ Get a slot on the induction programme for new staff

Ask for a slot on your organisations induction programme. Sell it by setting out the impact of the work your volunteers do and the added value they provide to your organisation. If volunteers are that important why not ensure all new staff have at least a basic knowledge of how you engage volunteers?

Once you have your foot in the door, get new starters to think about their own volunteer work, what it means to those agencies and draw parallels with the importance of volunteers to your organisation.  This will help to root their understanding of your volunteer programme within the context of their own experience rather than just bamboozle them with statistics.

3/ Choose your words carefully

Don’t mislead people with the information you give but don’t use language that will turn people off before you have a chance to get started. Steer clear of anything that might worry new starters about volunteers replacing staff. For example, “our volunteers do all this and only cost us 10% of what it costs to employ people”.  Also be careful about saying how highly motivated and dedicated your volunteers are. It may be true but it often implies that paid staff aren’t motivated and dedicated to the cause.


4/ Do your homework

When middle and senior managers start with an organisation they normally have a series of one-to-one induction meetings arranged with other key managers.  Make sure you are one of them.  Avoid using this meeting to find out what the new manager does - do your homework first and instead spend the time helping them see how volunteers could make a real difference to achieving their objectives.


What ideas do you have?

What has worked for you?

How else could you influence new people so they become supporters of your volunteer programme?

Please comment in the space below. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Warning! The volunteers are coming

Earlier this week friend and colleague Lynn Blackadder shared with me the latest issue of National Museums Directors' Council newsletter. Within the newsletter there was a heading reading,"Volunteers may run libraries, parks and museums warns local government chief". Underneath it was the following text:

Writing for the Daily Telegraph the Chairman of the Local Government Association Sir Merrick Cockell warns that it will be impossible for local councils to keep paying for all the services they currently offer as cuts increase.  He writes “with half of local government’s savings still having to be found before April 2016, and more cuts promised thereafter, it will no longer be possible to keep slicing away at budgets without services suffering or, in some cases, disappearing completely.” 

“We now need to be asking whether people are prepared to take a direct role in providing other services like the running of local museums, sports classes, the upkeep of parks and green spaces and the management of allotment sites.” The Telegraph reports that the LGA estimates that local councils will have to find a further £10bn savings from their budgets, on top of the £10bn cuts already made. Telegraph (Sir Merrick’s article), Telegraph (commentary)

In the last few years, whilst the purse strings have been rapidly tightened following the global financial crash, the debate about volunteers making a greater contribution to the delivery public services has been focused almost exclusively on the risks of these volunteers going paid staff out of work. In public fora, leaders and managers of volunteers have remained largely silent on the issue except for occasional support for the position that volunteers shouldn't do the work that paid staff once did - as if the argument were that simple. In fact Lynn and I tried to address this complexity in a piece for The Guardian back in 2011.

Rarely has anyone spoken about the upside to volunteer involvement in public services. The more positive aspects of the (in many ways rightly) much maligned Big Society agenda that focused on local people having more of a say in how services are delivered & taking more ownership of those local services have seemingly been forgotten.

This leads me to think that if we'd had an intelligent, open and informed discussion about volunteer involvement in public services a few years ago we perhaps wouldn't have to resort to the interesting language you may not have noticed in the headline to the article quoted above  - "Volunteers may run libraries, parks and museums warns local government chief".

Why is this something to warn us about? Are volunteers such scary people that we should be in fear of them when visiting the local museum in future?  Or is it a warning that 'the volunteers are coming, be in fear for your jobs'? Or perhaps its a warning to the public, the old 'volunteer or lose it (the library, park, leisure centre etc.)' recruitment tactic.

Either way I can't help but feel we've got a situation of our own making here. With either total silence or well intentioned arguments against job substitution from the volunteer management community, we have perhaps missed a huge chance to speak up and educate. We have perhaps missed a golden opportunity to say how volunteers - either on their own or working alongside paid staff - need not be a threat but an opportunity to transform public services for the better.

The good news is that opportunity need not be entirely a missed one. We can still speak up and be heard. In our own organisations, in online forums, in comments to news articles, on social media, at conference and events, we can take a more positive line on how volunteers can add real value to public services.

Interestingly, the Association of Volunteer Managers (AVM) is developing a code of conduct for its members (and if you work with volunteers here in the UK you should be a member of AVM) which, if adopted, would require them to "advocate on behalf of volunteers at all times". In other words, we would be compelled to take a positive stance for volunteers in the delivery of public services as a matter of professional conduct.

So my question to you is whether you are ready to do this? Are you prepared to counter the warnings about volunteer involvement and champion the value they can add and good they can bring? Indeed, have you done this before and got tips to share? If not, what kind of information and support do you think you'd need to be confident in fighting the corner of the volunteer?

Please share your responses below.



If you'd like to read some of my blogs on job substitution (or, as I prefer, job displacement & replacement) please see  my previous posts on this issue and my column for Third Sector online too.  I've also stuck my head above the parapet and commented on stories about more volunteers working in libraries. 

We should all remember, remember to sing the praises of volunteer managers

5^th November is International Volunteer Managers Day, an annual day that recognises the contribution of volunteer managers around the globe.

I’ll admit it, when I first heard about it I thought “not another international day of something-or-other. Aren’t there enough of those already?” I was challenged to think about it more deeply though when Rob Jackson spoke up in favour of the day and invited me to write this blog post.

The bigger picture

I first turned my thoughts to other “days”. The ones that immediately came to mind were International Women’s Day, Nurses’ Day, and World Aids Day. 

These three seem to sum up what most “days of” are about:

• shining a light on a marginalised group
• bringing our attention to a group of people providing an important service
• or shouting about an important cause that needs its profile raising.

But how can volunteer managers compare with that?

Are volunteer managers a marginalised group? Are we providing a service? Do we need our profile raising? In my opinion, the answer to all three is a resounding yes.

In need of recognition

Last week I met a volunteer manager who had had to fight to have her job graded on the same level as those who managed staff, because she “only” managed volunteers. This is backed up by evidence elsewhere which shows that volunteer managers often aren’t on the same grade as those who manage paid staff. As a result, volunteer managers often miss out on a place at the table for important discussions and decisions. In this sense, we are marginalised.

What about providing a service? As the website of International Volunteer Managers Day says, volunteering can’t survive in a vacuum. Volunteer managers are not the extra bit on the side. We’re essential. We enable volunteering to happen by developing positive volunteer roles, providing day to day support, and ensuring volunteers have a positive experience. In short, we enable volunteers to volunteer. I’d say that’s a pretty good service.

As for profile raising, if you say to many people that you work for a charity they will immediately assume you’re a fundraiser. People just don’t think of supporting volunteers as a role. What’s more, in this age of cuts and austerity, a lot of people unfortunately see volunteering as a cost-cutting exercise and believe it is free. They don’t see the costs involved in supporting volunteers or the value of supporting volunteers well. The profile of volunteer management needs raising.

To me then, it seems that volunteer managers are worthy of their own international day, but what does that really mean? And what can it achieve?

It’s up to us

Few international days produce concrete outcomes, but the successful ones do go hand in hand with improvements in the situation. That only happens because of hard work and action, all year round, and on the international day in particular.

If we are going to capitalise on this opportunity and make International Volunteer Managers Day mean something we have to do something. We may not be going to march to Downing Street to demand change, or run TV adverts shouting about our cause, but if we want the day to achieve something we have to make it happen.

Hold an event, tell your friends, blog about it, but most of all spread the word to volunteer managers, volunteers, other charity workers, and, most importantly, beyond! Not just on IVMDay (it’ll happen again on 5 November 2014), but all year round. Only that way can we raise our profile, reduce marginalisation, and be recognised for the important service we provide.

For my part, today I’ll be tweeting, posting on Facebook, and generally shouting about it to anyone who’ll listen! And I’ll keep going for the next twelve months too.

What about you?

Kirsty McDowell is a consultant, specialist in volunteer involvement and the founder of Fish Quay Consulting. You can read more of Kirsty’s musings at www.fishquayconsulting.co.uk/blog.html 

What impact have your volunteers had in 2012?

As 2012 draws to a close, our colleague and good friend Martin J Cowling of People First - Total Solutions provides some food for thought to help us all evaluate the year gone as we start to look to what 2013 may hold in store.

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The end of the years gives us a chance to reflect on a lot of things. For those who involve volunteers in delivery of services, I strongly encourage people to consider what has been the impact of this voluntary effort over the year.

I want to suggest that volunteering has three impacts:

1. It impacts the wider community
2. It impacts your organisation
3. It impacts your volunteers

So how has that manifested for you this year?

Firstly, how is your community better off as a result of your volunteers' service. Can you measure the impact?

Too often we measure the impact in hours worked or money saved. These are poor measures.

What is more meaningful is the lives impacted, the environmental improvement, the people supported, educated, encouraged, or rescued. How do you measure that? For example, in the last year our service has provided meals to 5,000 people worth £60,000. Then get personal testimonies of the impact of those meals by recipients of your service. The factual and the story help to underscore your success.


The second impact of volunteering is on the organisation the volunteers serve. People often suggest that volunteers save their agency money. Let's be clear - volunteers do not save anyone money. They allow an organisation to expand services beyond funding base. Notice the difference in language?
Volunteers also bring ideas and contacts to an organisation, They contribute financially through their donations and gifts. Have you considered measuring these impacts on your organisation?

Finally, volunteering impacts volunteers themselves. Have you asked your volunteers what volunteering has done for them? Many will describe the impact of the services they have given, the people they have touched and the difference they feel they have made. How do you celebrate these with them? How do you reassure those who have found volunteering to be not so rewarding this time around.

These questions are not too late to be considered for 2012. You may also want to start considering how you ask them for the end of 2013.

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Thank you Martin.

So, over to you.  Have you asked these questions during 2012? If so, what answers did you come up with? Did those answers help you in your work, for example in giving volunteers more meaningful recognition or perhaps arguing for better support for the volunteer programme?

You may also be interested in Susan Ellis' December 2012 Hot Topic which also looks at how volunteer managers can measure and report on the contribution volunteers make to an organisation.

If all this has got you thinking about how to evaluate your volunteer programme then might we be able to help so please do get in touch to discuss your needs.

Interview with Javed Khan, CEO of Victim Support

Earlier this year Third Sector magazine ran an interview with Javed Khan, Chief Executive of Victim Support.  The article caught my attention as Javed talked about the importance of volunteers to the organisation's work and in particular noted that this was so important to him that he made a point of making his first task every day to be to write to some of Victim Support's volunteers.

Such open and constructive engagement in an organisation's volunteer programme by the CEO is sadly quite rare - at least in terms of it being publically acknowledged - so I arranged to speak to Javed to dig a bit further into his views on volunteering.  In this blog post I want to share the highlights of my conversation with Javed in the hope that those of you reading this might find something of value that you can share with your own CEOs and senior managers so that they become more supportive of your organisation's volunteer engagement work.


In the interview you did for Third Sector you were reported as having underestimated the challenge of managing volunteers. Tell me a bit more about that.

First, having moved from the public sector  into the voluntary sector I was unprepared for the number of volunteers an organisation like Victim Support involves.  We have five times the number of volunteers as paid staff here and that is quite a shift from my experience of the public sector.

The other big change was in the way you work with volunteers to get things done.  In the public sector, working with largely paid staff, you effectively pull a lever and the staff do what is asked of them.  That simply isn't the case for volunteers.  There is much more work to be done to win their hearts and minds so that they are prepared to do what needs doing.  That means getting out there and meeting  the 7,000 volunteers face to face, not simply sitting behind a desk and issuing requests for action.


What are your thoughts about the public sectors' attitude to volunteers, especially in these recession hit times of budget pressures and cuts?

In the current climate there hasn't really been much of a shift in public sector attitudes to volunteering.  I think the only reason that many public sector bodies are showing more interest in volunteering is because they see it as a way to save money.  That mindset may well exist in the voluntary sector but generally speaking the sector is more committed to the ethos and principles of voluntarism so involving volunteers is part of the way organisations do things, not just a way to cut costs.


You said that you make the first email you send each day is to a volunteer.  What do you use that opportunity to say to them?

I make sure they know three things.

First, that they matter.

Second, that I am listening.  Volunteers can have some great insights into the challenges and opportunities we face and I want to hear those ideas not limit input to my top management team.

Third, that I write these emails personally.  I don't get my PA to do it.  As CEO it is important for me to invest my time in engaging with our volunteers.  Having someone else do that on my behalf simply isn't appropriate.

So far I've had a very positive response from volunteers.  We can't do everything they suggest and they appreciate that because they know I am interested, I am listening and, where we can do the things they suggest, we do them.


Volunteering continues to face a bit of an image problem. With your interest in diversity, what do you think could/should be done to help diversify the volunteer base of many organisations?

Volunteering happens everywhere but it varies in type.  Those groups who are often labelled as being under-represented in volunteering are already giving time, just not in ways that the mainstream recognises.  It may also be that those people don't identify what they do as volunteering, perhaps for cultural or religious reasons.

What we need to do is to help people recognise that what they do is volunteering, perhaps through awards schemes that celebrate their contribution.  That would be a great way to thank the volunteers and to raise awareness of the breadth and diversity of volunteering and those who give their time to society.

I also think organisations could partner with others to help raise their profiles in more diverse communities.  That would enable not only great new partnerships between organisations but help to open up access to services and support that may not otherwise be available to some.


Quite often top executives don't think strategically about volunteering in the same way they may do for, say, fundraising.  What are your thoughts about this?

We've done some strategic work on volunteering at Victim Support which has resulted in a four year strategy for volunteering, the first time the organisation has had such a strategy for volunteering.  So, for example, we are looking to diversify the roles volunteers have within the organisation, with volunteers taking on some administrative tasks that might previously have been done by paid staff who are now focusing on other things.  This is partly in response to having more young people showing an interest in volunteering, perhaps as a result of studying for law or criminology, subjects clearly linked to what we do as an organisation.

We've had some push back from paid staff on this, typically suggesting that volunteers are unreliable.  That's a myth.  Some volunteers may be like that but so are some paid staff.  People are no more likely to be unreliable simply because they don't get paid, in fact the opposite may even be true - those working for no money may be more committed and reliable because of their passion for the cause.


What are the top three things you have learnt about the strategic importance of volunteers that you would want to share with other CEOs?

1. Quantify and share the added value of volunteers and not just their financial value to the organisation.
2. The CEO and senior management team do not have a monopoly on good ideas.  Often the simple solutions come from the frontline and that means volunteers as well as paid staff.
3. Values, values, values.  They are what drives this sector and what drives volunteers.  We have to work hard to clarify them, communicate them and align them with the motivations and interests of our supporters.

What advice would you give volunteer managers in volunteer involving organisations?

Well, first of all I have to say that investment in volunteer management is absolutely key.  Volunteer managers are the main face-to-face contact volunteers have with the organisation and so are key in communicating our brand, building commitment and motivating people to continue to support us.

So organisations should be investing in their volunteer management functions.

In terms of what I say to volunteer managers themselves, first of all, volunteer managers need to understand and apply the importance of winning volunteers' hearts and minds.

Next, they need to have huge respect for volunteers.  This means taking the time to speak to and meet with them, invest in their training and working hard to get appropriate systems in place to support them.

Finally, volunteer managers need to work hard to help volunteers enjoy what they do because if they enjoy their volunteering they will want to keep doing it and maybe even do more of it.

Postcard from New Zealand

I'm really excited about this blog post in which we hear from our New Zealand colleague Claire Teal about the work Volunteering New Zealand is doing to support and develop volunteer managers.  Their work is innovative and exciting and, in my view, provides a model that we other countries could (should?) replicate in their own contexts in order to raise the profile of the important role leaders and managers of volunteers play in society.

But enough of my views, over to you Claire...

>>>>>

Let me just say from the outset (with love, and humour, and all that) that development work amongst managers/leaders of volunteers is akin to herding cats. Our first response when asked about professional development is to cry out for a qualification. Pursue that a bit further and we become adamant that having a qualification will alienate volunteer managers of volunteers and/or create hierarchies between us and/or just take something away from the essence of what we do. We want a qualification, but we don’t want a qualification. Actually, we want development but we don’t want development. We are quick to rally for more recognition of our role and what we do, but equally quick to resist any attempt to change things. Doing this, we say, takes time we don’t have, takes the focus off the volunteers and, again, alienates volunteer managers of volunteers. Oh, and don’t forget our diversity…one size of development is never going to fit all, you know. Wow…what to do?

In New Zealand, our answer to that question has literally been to put a line in the sand and say we either need to accept that change will happen as a result of those demands, or stop demanding. We knew, through two conferences (2009 and 2011), some major research assignments canvassing over 800 New Zealand managers/leaders of volunteers and a whole lot of talking that there were some clear priorities for action here. Those clear priorities just needed to be outworked in a way that respected and reflected both the huge diversity of roles and the differing levels of desire for increased opportunities and recognition present in our field. The work we’re doing at Volunteering New Zealand around this is still very new, but the response we’ve received so far from managers/leaders of volunteers, wider organisations, and stakeholder groups as a whole across the country indicates that we’re on the right track.

So, what has our approach been?:

1. To focus on the total inseparability of individual development for managers/leaders of volunteers from development of the groups and organisations they work within.
   
2. To respond directly to what New Zealand managers/leaders of volunteers have said they want, without making anything compulsory or forcing it on those who aren't interested (but at the same time trying to bust the whole ‘volunteer managers of volunteers will get left behind’ myth. Who says these people don’t want to take charge of their own professional development?! Then why do we always assume they don’t?).
   
3. To collaborate as much as possible, by doing all work through national working groups, by getting on the road and facilitating workshops for managers/leaders of volunteers around the country, and by seeking feedback every step of the way.

As I said, our work is still new, but in three years we’ve covered a lot of ground.

Many managers/leaders of volunteers seem to at the idea of a qualification because they see it as one clear leverage point from which to demand the status and recognition they deserve. Maybe one day our work here will progress to a qualification, but right now we’ve pulled back from the qualification debate to focus on the questions managers/leaders of volunteers are actually asking about their professional development. Things like:

"As a manager of volunteers, how do I find out what training and study opportunities I should be looking for to help me develop the skills I want to develop? Are there even opportunities out there?"

To use their words, New Zealand managers/leaders of volunteers want a learning pathway that they can use for their own, individual professional development. A pathway suggests movement, and to show movement, you need something to act as a marker or baseline. To create markers, we've been working on a set of competencies for all New Zealand managers/leaders of volunteers. They are high-level, not task-focused, and they map out four key areas of skills/values/attributes that managers/leaders of volunteers demonstrate in their work. Our goal is to work these competencies into a self-assessment tool that will make it easier to find the best-suited-to-you learning and development options that already exist, including assessment/recognition of prior learning. This will result in managers/leaders of volunteers being able to make informed choices about their own professional development from the day they enter the field through to the most advanced level.

The competencies are still under feedback and consultation in New Zealand, and so there is a high chance what you see below will change. However, here’s a quick sneak preview of a little bit, so you can see how we’ve structured them:

	Base Knowledge	Base Knowledge Applied	Adaptive Leadership	Strategic Leadership
Competency 3: Leadership Within Organisations Managers of volunteers demonstrate organisational vision and values, and influence people to achieve them (both paid and volunteer staff)	You know the organisation’s vision and values	You apply the organisation’s vision and values to your own and other’s roles and tasks	You seek input from the team into current and future activities, and how best to align these to the organisation’s vision, values and strategic direction	You engage with others from both within the organisation and across the community to get their input into strategic direction and ideas for collaboration

Developing ourselves as managers/leaders of volunteers is one thing, but what about the groups and organisations we operate within?

Again, our method has been to draw another line in the sand and say hey, it doesn’t actually matter if organisations are big or informal, or if the manager/leader of volunteers is paid or a volunteer themselves. If you are serious about effectively involving volunteers, then you need to be serious about recognising, resourcing and supporting both these volunteers and the person providing the skilled leadership they need.

To speak into this, we are developing best practice guidelines for organisations. These aren't guidelines for how to manage volunteers well. They are tips and strategies for groups and organisations to use to ensure everything to do with volunteers (manager/leader of volunteers and volunteers, and all they do) is recognised, resourced and supported as a vital part of the organisation. Obviously, implementing these guidelines effectively means engaging across organisations much more widely than ‘just’ with the manager/leader of volunteers. It requires buy-in from Chief Executives and Boards, Senior Management, and so on. As an incentive, we are creating a category of Volunteering New Zealand Champion Organisation; organisations to hold this title will be those who can demonstrate commitment from a whole-of-organisation foundation to the principles of the best practice guidelines.

As I said earlier, we see a total inseparability of organisational development from individual development. We can have the most highly professionally developed managers/leaders of volunteers in the world, but if our organisations still don’t get what we do, then what have we really achieved?

This is very much a once-over-lightly look at what we volunteer management advocates are up to in New Zealand. I know (and many times, am reminded the hard way) that this is a contentious topic. There is no set template for what management/leadership of volunteers looks like in New Zealand or anywhere else in the world, and it’s hard to introduce change and development into the ‘field’ without many people assuming you want to create one. Trying to grow and develop management of volunteers means balancing the managers/leaders of volunteers who do want to see the field develop and those who might not be as interested in this, or are concerned about its implications. It also means encouraging both ends of the continuum and everyone in between that the stand-point we all hold is okay!

At the end of the day, we are all in it for the same reason - because we believe in the power of volunteering and we want to ensure the best possible experience for volunteers we work with.

About Claire:

Claire is a passionate advocate for the important role Managers and Leaders of Volunteers play in the design and delivery of effective volunteer programmes. She brings nearly two decades of experience working in the Community and Voluntary Sector in both paid and volunteer capacities to her role as Programme Manager at Volunteering New Zealand.

Previously she worked as Service Manager at the Central City Branch of the Wellington Citizens Advice Bureau, leading the volunteer team and taking a key role in the development of several collaborative community projects. Prior to this, she held roles as a statutory social worker and in community engagement in primary health care.

Claire is currently Deputy Chair of Volunteer Wellington, on the Leadership Team of Women in Leadership Aotearoa, and on the International Volunteer Managers Day Committee. In 2011, she was an invited international faculty member at the Australasian Advanced Retreat for Managers of Volunteers. This year, she is a participant in the Leadership New Zealand Leadership Programme.

Email: claire@volunteeringnz.org.nz

Value, cost and volunteer management

I was recently reminded of a blog post my good friend Martin J Cowling wrote last year about his experiences of running training when the host organisation has offered the session for free.  In a nutshell, Martin argues that training offered for free results in more people not turning up, more people leaving early and more people not really engaging in the training.

A couple of days later I  read an article on "How e-learning can help charities provide staff training on a budget".  I've got nothing at all against e-learning but the sense conveyed by the headline is that this is a good option when belts are being tightened.  In other words, e-learning is cheaper than 'conventional' training (whatever that is!).


In both cases the issue of value seems not to factor.  e-learning may be cheaper, but is it good value?  A free course with Martin would be a really good deal (he is a superb trainer) but if you don't engage in the session because it's free then it isn't going to deliver any value to you.

All too often we hear colleagues and/or management say that they can't justify that training course, database, item of equipment etc. because of the cost?  So a cheaper option is found or nothing happens at all.  But is any consideration given to the value each option would return?  A training course may cost (let's say) £200 more than a cheaper option but it is so much better that the improved performance of the trained person recoups that cost in no time.

At this point some of you may be thinking "that's all well and good, but we have a lot less money than in the past and simply can't afford a more expensive option".  I understand that mindset completely.  However,  when times are financially tough the argument for basing decisions on value more than cost are even more important.

With, less money than before there is surely even more of an imperative that it gets spent on things that will return real value to the organisation?  For example, spreading a much reduced training budget thinly on a wider range of cheap options isn't necessarily going to bring a great return, just lots of people going on average training.  Instead, send a smaller number of staff whose roles are key to the sustainability and growth of the organisation on some more expensive, high quality training.  That approach may well deliver better value.

Of course, not everything that is expensive is good value or quality.  I attended a wine tasting once where the most expensive wine on offer was the worst tasting.  A bottle of that was neither cheap nor good value.  By contrast, a bottle half the price was superb value, delivering much nicer wine.

The point I am trying to make is that we need to stop just asking how much something costs but really consider what value it will deliver too.  We can then factor both aspects into the decision, not just the cost.

This isn't just a consideration when we are buying training, consultancy, office equipment or whatever.  It is also a key issue when we think about the importance of volunteer management in our fiscally challenged organisations.

Sadly it is all to true that, when the income drops, one of the first things to go is the volunteer manager.  That is a decision frequently made on the basis of cutting costs without any appreciation of the value of that function.  But do we quantify and communicate that value effectively so our leaders look beyond the bottom line and consider what else they will be losing if the cut the volunteer management function?

In 2009 and 2011 The Minnesota Association for Volunteer Administration released reports exploring the status of volunteerism and volunteer programmes in a changing financial environment.  The studies showed that organisations who cut the funding for their volunteer programmes struggled much more than those who maintained or even increased their support for volunteering.

I think we need research like this here in the UK.  Research that validates the importance of organisations investing in volunteering and volunteer management in tough economic times because of the value they will derive, rather than cutting support because of the money it costs.

In its absence we need volunteer managers who can provide programmatic evidence and articulate this effectively to their leaders.  Evidence that doesn't just put across the (often flawed) financial value of volunteering but that demonstrates wider value as well as the potential value to be gained from maintaining (or even increasing) investment in volunteering when donated funds are harder to come by but donated hours may not be so scarce.

What do you think?

Does such research exist other than in Minnesota?  Please share links if you can so others can access it.

Have you been actively demonstrating the value of your volunteer programme to your organisation's leadership?  How did you do it?  What lessons can you share with others?  Did it work?

Please share examples below so others can learn from your success (or failure - go on, be brave!).