Good Deeds to find love: a new take on volunteering

This post is the latest in our (very) occasional series of guest articles. Hannah Whitehead is our contributor this time. I met with Hannah in early September, intrigued by her organisation, Good Deed Dating, I invited Hannah to explain the concept for the readers of the Rob Jackson Consulting Ltd blog and that's just what she does here.

Enjoy.

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As volunteer managers, we are all on the lookout for exciting and innovative ways to engage new audiences in our volunteering opportunities.  It’s a constant battle between getting the core work achieved and providing people with one off, commitment-free opportunities.

The challenge

What people want is an easy way to volunteer.  We all know that.  We’re not talking about the incredible volunteers who keep us all going on a day to day basis; those stalwarts who have volunteered every Tuesday morning since 1994. 

We’re talking about those people who would never volunteer.  The word doesn’t even enter their vocabulary.  They don’t want to commit, they don’t want to fill out endless forms, and they think opportunities are going to be boring or only available while they’re at work. 

And here’s the problem for volunteer managers: none of that suits our needs.  Not only do we have to make time and space to run these special activities, we also have to recruit the volunteers.

So what does that mean?  You end up with a team of volunteers who are dependable and reliable, yes.  But where are your new members and supporters going to come from next year, and the year after that? 

We need to find exciting ways to pull in that next generation of supporters. We have to start listening to those people who don’t volunteer.  Why aren’t they volunteering?  Just because they don’t do it now, doesn’t mean that they wouldn’t.  We just need to give them the incentive and an easy way to dip their toe in.

It was exactly these challenges that I was facing as a volunteer manager, which spurred me on to create a social enterprise that would not only support charities to access that tricky non-comital audience, but more importantly, engage them on a level that would speak to their needs and interests. 

Enter Good Deed Dating

Good Deed Dating works with charities in London to co-ordinate volunteering events for single people.  We combine good deeds with great dates; providing single Londoners with the chance to meet someone who shares their values whilst they do something positive with their spare time. 

Our website provides information on our brand and our story.  It also showcases the work of our charity partners with their own profile pages.  Our customers can purchase their subscription and set up their account details.  The main element of our website is our events page which lists all the upcoming Good Deed Dates, where people can purchase tickets.

But how did it all happen? 

One morning last year I was reading an article entitled “Forget Tinder, Volunteer Instead”, scoffing to myself, “of course volunteering is an amazing way to meet people, everyone knows that”.  When it dawned on me that although those of us who work in the third sector know that volunteering holds the power to introduce likeminded people to each other, the rest of the world might not think that way.  Volunteering is still seen as a selfless act where you give and you don’t get.  When in fact, we all know that volunteering should always be a mutually beneficial process where you gain as much as you give.  All I needed to do was to re-brand volunteering as something appealing and relevant to single people.

For starters, don’t call it “volunteering”, call it “a good deed”.  Stop talking about “volunteers”, our customers are called “Deeders”.  Make it all about meeting people, doing something fun and getting out there.  What you end up with is the good deed being seen as a by-product of the date.  Imagine that, volunteers who want something out of their experience.

The result is a group of people engaged in your charity, who would never have been involved otherwise, and you, the charity, have three or four hours of golden time to convince them that your cause is the one they should support.  This is your opportunity to engage the next generation of your supporters, on their level and at their pace.

Following a significant amount of market research and several focus groups, the idea of Good Deed Dating became a reality.  We launched our website in June 2016 and have been blown away by the response.  People love the idea.  We’ve found that over 70% of our Deeders wouldn’t have considered themselves a volunteer before their first date.  And when asked whether their experience of a Good Deed Date has encouraged them to continue their involvement with the charity hosting their event, over 85% said yes.

Our success so far has led to significant seed investment recently and the expansion of the team at GDD HQ.  We will soon be looking to diversify our offer, developing new products and services.  We are looking forward to running events for LGBT groups very soon too.  There is so much potential for our events to expand to include charities outside London or even the UK.

Moving forward:

For me it’s all about looking at volunteering from a different angle and modernising the way we engage people.  What else can you offer?  What are they going to get out of it?  That feel-good factor just isn’t enough anymore! 

Think about the millions of people out there who don’t volunteer.  Let’s aim for them!

Hannah Whitehead, Founder and CEO of Good Deed Dating

We are always happy to hear from charities who are keen to get involved with Good Deed Dating.  Check out our website: www.gooddeeddating.co.uk to find out more, or get in touch to chat about how we might be able to work together.  Email us: hello@gooddeeddating.co.uk.

Three key steps to developing meaningful volunteer roles

“Attempting to recruit volunteers without first having developed worthwhile positions to offer them is equivalent to attempting to sell a product to people who have no need for it.  It can be done, but the buyer may well become unhappy later.  And when volunteers are unhappy, they don’t stay around long.” Steve McCurley, Rick Lynch and Rob Jackson, The Complete Volunteer Management Handbook (2012)

Developing roles for volunteers is one of the aspects of working with volunteers that those leading and managing them sometimes spend the least amount of time on. Despite the fact that we know we pay with volunteers with meaning, not money, many of us can skimp on the investment of time needed to craft really meaningful and motivating roles that will deliver a great volunteer experience. Instead, under pressure to get volunteers recruited and put to work, we develop roles geared around lists of uninspiring sounding tasks, often using a similar format to a paid role’s job description.

This is why the Rob Jackson Consulting Ltd course on Developing Meaningful Roles for Volunteers continues to be popular. The course gives participants a chance to step back, explore volunteer role design afresh and actually work on creating a new role to help them in their work.

Here are three quick insights that might help you improve your volunteer roles.

1. When talking to colleagues in order to identify new ways volunteers can help them in their work, do not ask, “What do you think volunteers can / could / should do to help?”. As soon as you ask this question people censor their responses based on their past experiences or prejudices about volunteers. So if your colleague thinks volunteers will be unreliable they will not suggest a role where reliability is important. Instead, work with colleagues to identify what their work actually involves, ideally in as much detail as possible. Then work with them to suggest ways volunteers could contribute their skills, talents and experience to get that work done.

2. Games are fun activities people enjoy playing. People like spending time and effort playing and getting good at games. There are four elements present in all games that we should make sure are also present in our volunteer roles so that people will like spending their time and effort doing the volunteer work. First, ownership - does the volunteer feel they own their role and the work within it? Second, responsibility for results - is the volunteer held responsible for actually achieving something in the course of their volunteering (remember, people want to make a difference). Third, authority to think - is the volunteer controlled and micro-managed or are they actually allowed to use their own brains to figure out the best way to get the role done, perhaps bringing new ideas and insights to the work? Fourth, keeping score - does the volunteer know how they are doing and whether they are making progress towards that difference they (and you) want to make?

3. Don’t use the typical task-oriented paid staff job description format for volunteer roles. Why? Here’s a quick question for you - when did you last pull out your job description, look at it and get really excited by what it contain, so much so that you can’t wait to get to work tomorrow? If you’re like most people, you probably haven’t looked at your job description since you were recruited or had your last annual appraisal. Why then do we think that format will inspire volunteers, people who we need to remain passionate about our work so we can re-recruit them everyday whilst meeting their motivational paycheque? Instead, think about constructing volunteer role descriptions around the results you want volunteers to achieve, giving space for people to develop their own ideas about how to do things rather than just doing a list of uninspiring tasks.

So, over to you. What are your top tips for developing meaningful volunteer roles? Please leave a comment below and share your insights with us and with your colleagues in the field.

If you’d like to know more about this topic and get further details on the Rob Jackson Consulting Ltd course on Developing Meaningful Roles for Volunteers please contact Rob direct by email or call +44 (0)7557 419 074.

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

Hi, this post has been submitted for a blog carnival being held for International Volunteer Managers Day 2017. If you've found your way here via that initiative then welcome. However, be aware that this is our old blog site. New content is posted to Wordpress and Medium so check those pages out if you like what you read here.

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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.

Seven productivity tools and resources I recommend

This November I am speaking at the AVSM annual conference where I have volunteered to run a workshop on time management and productivity for Volunteer Managers. It’s a theme I’ve wanted to train on for a while and the AVSM conference gives me a chance to finally develop and trial a workshop which I intend to add to my list of available training topics.

Coincidentally American colleague Liza Dyer and I have been discussing productivity recently via a Slack group for leaders and managers of volunteers. That led me to this brilliant video on TED where Yves Morieux draws some great parallels between 4x400m relay racing and the culture organisations create around productivity (it’s about 17mins long but well worth your time to watch in full).

My interest in productivity came as a result of starting up Rob Jackson Consulting Ltd five years ago. I realised that I would need to adapt my work practices as I was now running my own business rather than working in a large team. No longer did I have IT or Communications or Finance support, it was all my job now. I was also becoming frustrated with suggested time management practices like blocking your diary out to work on projects. Such approaches didn’t seem to reflect the variable and fast paced nature of changing requirements and schedules, leading to time being wasted re-scheduling rather than doing work.

So for this blog I thought I’d outline seven of the resources and tools I really rate (and use!) to aid me with my own productivity. There are others of course - I only briefly mention my calendar tool of choice and I don’t mention at all some key resources like Evernote. This is because I have chosen to focus on the resources and tools that I think have made or the biggest positive difference to the way I work (or have the potential too).

NB - Please note that a Mac, iPhone and iPad user I therefore use these tools on those platforms and devices.

How To Be a Productivity Ninja Written by Graham Allcott, a former colleague when he was CEO of Student Volunteering England, this excellent and readable book gives sound theory and very practical advice on becoming more productive. Sharing many similarities with David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) approach, yet presented in a more accessible format, Graham advocates steps like adopting a ‘second brain’ to store all those tasks we try and keep in our heads. He also challenges our tendencies to procrastination and distraction. I particularly found helpful the steps to identify when my attention levels were highest during a day and then schedule the most complex work accordingly.

Things This is my ‘second brain’ system. Almost every task I have to do, personally or professionally, goes into Things. Tasks are sorted by project and can be allocated to specifics dates but, as per the GTD and Productivity Ninja approaches, this isn’t encouraged. Why? Because if you schedule that task for Monday then something comes up on Monday which takes priority then you have to spend (waste) time re-scheduling the task. Instead Things allows me to have a due date and then specify how many days in advance of that I want to be reminded the task needs to be done. I can even tag tasks for specfic contexts such as an errand to run or something I have to do in the office or when online or at my computer etc.. Then, every morning, I have a list of tasks to choose from which I can allocate to that day, defer to decide upon later depending on what else comes across my desk, my attention and energy levels etc.. With Things synchronising seamlessly between all my devices and having powerful search and sorting features this is an essential productivity tool for me.

Due One feature Things doesn’t support is the need for some tasks to be allocated to particular times, for example a reminder that it’s my job to pick the kids up from school today. That’s where Due comes in. I can quickly and easily schedule a task for a specific date and time, create recurring tasks and defer items if I have to postpone them. Critically Due never lets me forget that task needs doing. Whereas other reminder systems just remind me once at the set time, Due keeps reminding me over and over again (at a frequency I can specify) until I do the task. Sync isn’t quite as seamless as Things but it works fine and between the two systems I always have a list of what needs doing.

Airmail 3 As a Mac user I try and avoid Microsoft software and have not once missed using Outlook in the last five years. Instead I have relied on the standard Mac and iOs mail software. Until recently, when I switched to Airmail 3, a product that’s all about efficiency and getting that inbox to zero. Processing email is now a breeze. I can far more easily move messages between all my different accounts and folders, allocate messages to be actioned later or (in the case of newsletters and the like) to be read later. If something comes in that needs a task creating or requires a diary entry then with just a couple of clicks I can add that to Things or Fantastical (my calendar app of choice largely down to it’s natural text features and time zone management). Airmail 3 is also super fast to set up and syncs beautifully between all my devices.

Tyme 2 This is a new one for me. As a freelancer I sometimes need to record the time I spend on projects and bill this to clients. As someone keen on productivity I also want the ability to keep track of the time I spend on tasks and projects. Am I spending too much time processing email? What is the balance of my time between marketing and client delivery work? That kind of thing. My old time-tracking system no longer syncs between devices so I opted for Tyme 2 as a replacement. It’s still early days but it’s working well so far, although it did need some time to set up at first, as many of these systems do, and wasn’t instantly intuitive. I am quickly and easily recording the time I spend on different work tasks and projects and starting to gain insights into my working patterns and habits. Time will tell how truly effective this tool will be - I will be using it for my first ‘on the clock’ client next month - but early signs are very promising.

Pocket I’ve had Pocket for ages now and I love it. I couldn’t be without it. If you aren’t familiar with Pocket, it’s a tool to collect and store all those articles you want to read, sort (tag) them into categories and then read offline at a later date and time. Anything I come across that I think would be worth reading for work or for personal interests gets ‘clipped’ from my web browser into Pocket. Then when I’m on a train or just have a few minutes spare I can open Pocket on any of my devices and get reading. If I think it’s something worth sharing or keeping, I can quickly and easily share to social media and / or Evernote. I also love that once a year they send me an email saying how many words I’ve read in the last twelve months and what my favourite topics have been etc.. Best of all Pocket is entirely free and, whilst there is a paid for option, I have never felt like I’ve needed it.

Buffer If you post to social media, especially to multiple accounts (and in particular to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram or Google+) then you need Buffer in your life. I use the free version (paid options provide more in-depth analytics and access to other social networks) and Buffer enables me to quickly share articles and items of interest to my professional social networks without having to post separately on each site. I can even automatically schedule posts for each network to the times my followers are most likely to engage with my content, essential if (like me) you have followers and clients around the world and don’t fa cry being up in the middle of the night to post something in their local timezone. Buffer also produce a superb and very helpful blog packed with tips, ideas and through provoking posts about using social media and online marketing.
So there you have it, my top seven productivity tools and resources.

What are your top tools and resources for enhancing productivity? What could you not be without?

Also, to help shape my workshop, what issues would you love to see covered in training on productivity and time management for Volunteer Managers? I’d really value your input.
Over to you.

Have we got our national standards right?

For UK Volunteers’ Week, The Guardian newspaper published an article entitled “What makes some people more likely to volunteer than others?” Within that piece, which mainly looked at volunteer motivation, Justin Davis Smith (former CEO of Volunteering England) made a really vital point. To quote directly from the article:

Ultimately, “it’s about constructing a really worthwhile, meaningful opportunity for people where they can make a difference,” Davis Smith says. “Don’t do that in isolation, do that with volunteers. They can help co-produce and co-construct the experience they engage in. Make it meaningful, make it attractive, make it worthwhile.”

That got me thinking. Do the national standards we have for working with volunteers encourage such an approach? Do they emphasise the importance of developing great volunteer roles and experiences? Do they promote co-production with volunteers? Do they ultimately make volunteering with out organisations meaningful, attractive and worthwhile?

Lots of countries have some form of national standards, either for the practice of volunteer leadership and management or for the organisational readiness to engage volunteers. For example:

• Australia
• UK
• New Zealand
• USA
• Romania
• Canada

This is of course just a sample and I’ve only picked one from each territory. The UK also has national competencies for volunteer management as well as the organisation Investing In Volunteers standard, and New Zealand has organisational best practice guidelines as well as competencies for Volunteer Managers. I’m sure there are more and please do let me know if there are any I’ve missed (you can leave a comment below).

Any effort to raise the standard of volunteer management and create a more pro-volunteering culture in volunteer involving organisations is a good thing. Yet what all of these have in common is an emphasis on processes, risk management and the like - the bureaucratic side of working with volunteers. Less prevalent is a consistent focus on our ability to work well with people, the skills and competencies that make someone a great leader of people, able to co-produce influence, negotiate and, well, lead.

Sure, some of the standards above contain elements of this people & leadership focus. But not all. And often this is given less prominence to the process stuff.

Now I understand that good processes should support meaningful and worthwhile volunteering opportunities. They should keep people safe and provide a context and structure to volunteering that enhances it’s value to the volunteer, the organisation and the beneficiary. But note that I said good processes, not simple processes.

All too often I come across people working with volunteers for whom the processes they work within (whether established by them or by the wider organisation) are a barrier to giving people great volunteer opportunities. Two examples:

• Putting people off before they even start by requiring everyone to complete a long and detailed application form before they can start. In some instances this may be appropriate but do we need to do this for those just giving us the occasional hour of their time now and again?
• An approach to risk that is about avoiding it all together rather than managing it. So family volunteering is dismissed because children could get hurt without any consideration that parents who volunteer with children continue to look our for their welfare just like at any other time and so the risk to an organisation is probably much lower than if they just involved the children without the parents.

As one volunteer I met once said, “Volunteer management has become about what volunteers can’t do, not what they can do”.

If our national standards consistently focus on processes do we reinforce this culture of volunteer management being a process business not a people one? Should they place a heavier and more consistent emphasis on people and leadership skills to balance or even counteract the danger of becoming a ‘computer says no’ profession?

I come back to Justin’s challenge that we must make volunteering meaningful, attractive and worthwhile. Take a look at your national standards for volunteer management. Does they emphasise the right things to rise to this challenge, or do they focus on things that will get in the way?

What do you think? Leave your comments below so we can discuss these questions further.

Reflections on a conference

I recently attended the excellent Strategic People Conference in London. Organised by Agenda Consulting who run the regular Volunteer Counts benchmarking study, the conference brought together HR and Volunteering Managers for a day of workshops and keynote addresses that inspired and challenged in equal measure.

In this blog post I want to share four reactions to the day. I also invite you to comment and add your thoughts, in particular from any readers who were at the conference.

1/ The number of Volunteer Managers in attendance

I was pleasantly surprised to see so many people at the event who were leading volunteering at a wide range of organisations. In fact, during the afternoon workshops, the session on volunteering was in the main plenary room because there were so many of the conference attendees who wanted to be at the session (it was delivered in a very enjoyable way by Dan O’Driscoll from Oxfam).

For a conference mainly sold as being about Human Resources Management it was great to see so many Volunteer Managers in attendance on the day. It goes to show that, done well, a ‘mainstream’ sector conference can be done well and provide good content for those in the volunteering movement rather than simply bolting on unsatisfactory workshops to a programme more geared towards other management disciplines.

2/ What this may mean for HR / volunteering synergies

The presence of so many Volunteer Managers at an HR conference did give me pause to think that perhaps this is a sign of ever closer integration between HR and Volunteer Management in some organisations. Such integration is often dismissed out of hand as bad for volunteer management yet, if done well, it can work. Some organisations even go as far as to put an experienced volunteering person in charge of the overall people function, reinforcing Steve McCurley’s accurate assessment that:

“We shouldn’t treat our volunteers like our paid staff, we should treat our paid staff like our volunteers”.

Yet it is also important to note that volunteering and human resources don’t always play well together. Here’s what Susan Ellis and I have to say on the issue in the UK Edition of the book, From The Top Down:

It is useful to consider the connection between the volunteer manager and the agency’s head of human resources or personnel (after all, volunteers are both human and a resource!). There are both similarities and differences between these two functions. Structurally, as already noted, both recruit and place workers into your organisation. Both require policies and guidelines to clarify expectations of paid and volunteer personnel. But think carefully if you are leaning toward placing the volunteer office within the human resources department. Here are some cautions:

• No matter how good the intentions, volunteers will always be given lower priority than employees - perhaps little attention at all.
• Human resources staff take job descriptions designed by others in the organisation and try to fill those slots with the best people who are then completely delegated to each department or team. The volunteer manager, on the other hand, ought to be more proactively suggesting ways volunteers can support the work to be done, be much more creative in finding people with expertise or the potential to become an expert, and find placements for people who unexpectedly offer useful talents (the human resources folks can’t hire anyone without an allocated salary).
• The volunteer manager may also be much more involved in a range of day-to-day organisational activities and supervise some volunteers directly.

As one final illustration of how HR and volunteer management can differ, I often note that not many HR departments have responsibility for people aged 5 or 95, focusing as they do on people of working age (16–70). Yet such extremes of age are often commonplace for Volunteer Managers and throw up a different set of challenges from those faced by HR colleagues.

3/ The language used around volunteering

Two things frustrated me about the language that was sometimes used in regard to volunteering on the day.

First, the phrase ‘use volunteers’ was heard on a number of occasions from a variety of people. This is a real bugbear of mine and I outlined my thoughts about it in a blog post in 2011. Some people think I can be a bit over the top with this one, that policing the word ‘use’ is not the most important issue the Volunteer Management profession faces. And I agree, it isn’t, but language is important and repeated and frequent talk of ‘using volunteers’ puts them on a par with disposable assets like staplers and office furniture. As the Twitter hashtag for this issue says, [#weusethingsnotpeople](https://twitter.com/hashtag/weusethingsnotpeople).

Second, on a couple of occasions when presenters were discussing time given by professionals using their skills to assist an organisation they used the term ‘probono’. On one level I have no issue with this. Probono is a long established term. However, probono is volunteering, so why don’t we call it that? It seems that whenever some people talk about what they see as more meaningful volunteering they refuse to use the v-word as if that’s only suitable for envelope stuffing and tea making roles.

The more we allow and endorse a different language for certain kinds of volunteering the more we allow the often inaccurate stereotypes of ‘volunteering’ being nice but non-essential work that makes little or no meaningful contribution to an organisation’s mission.

Oh, and don’t get me started on the appalling term, skilled volunteering.

4/ Our obsession with processes and risk avoidance

In the morning I attended a fascinating workshop all about a Hospice community volunteer initiative. The scheme has volunteers out in the community, supporting those affected by illness, doing a wide variety of tasks some of which could be quite challenging. The presenters were keen to stress that the scheme ran in a very light touch way, recruiting and screening for the right people as volunteers and trusting them to make intelligent decisions about the wide array of situations they might face.

Whilst the scheme was interesting, what I found fascinating was the reaction from many of the other Volunteer Managers in the room. It seemed that the default setting of many Volunteer Managers was not to respond by saying something like,

“Oh, that’s interesting, how could I make that work in my organisation?”

Instead the response was,

“We can’t possible do that due to Health & Safety, risk, because paid staff should do those tasks not volunteers etc.”.

Has our profession has become so obsessed by systems and processes, rules and regulations that we fail to spot any potential in new ideas? More worryingly, do we fail to spot the potential in volunteers? As one person who gave evidence to the Volunteer Rights Inquiry said - “Volunteer management has become about what volunteers can’t do, not what they can do”.

Obviously the rules and regulations, systems and processes are there for a reason and I don’t advocate scrapping them all. But when they dominate, when they stop us doing things that could benefit clients because of some often ill-defined and seldom realised risk, when they hold us back from even considering something new, then those processes become a serious barrier to our work. We are surely about enabling the community to make a difference, not telling them how they can’t make a difference because, to misquote Little Britain, “process says no”.

So there you have it, my four observations on the Strategic People Conference. If you were there then please add your own comments below. If you weren’t there but want to add your thoughts then please feel very welcome to do so.

Over to you.

Why how we think about volunteer diversity might need to change

Certain groups of people are under-represented in formal volunteering. We all know that right?

Quite rightly we are often called to open up our organisations to these under-represented groups. We are challenged to broaden the diversity of our volunteer teams and to tackle any practical barriers to the engagement of a wide pool of volunteers. Barriers like expenses so people aren’t financially disadvantaged through giving their time, or adaptations to premises or ways of working that can remove physical barriers to some people getting involved.

Let me be clear. There is nothing wrong with this at all. Diversity is good. We should strive for it in our volunteer teams. But I worry that by doing so we may be inadvertently disregarding the great volunteer work people in these under-represented groups already do.

Take disabled people as an example. They are generally under-represented in formal, ‘mainstream’ volunteering. The associated assumption made all too often is that disabled people therefore do not volunteer. This is wrong. They do. A lot. They are involved in advocacy, self-help support networks, campaigns for disability rights and lots more. What they do flies under the radar of many people because it doesn’t sit comfortably with the (for want of a better phrase) establishment’s neat definitions of volunteering.

Consider another example. The UK’s Labour government of the early noughties had a goal of one million more people volunteering. That goal could have been met when roughly that number of people marched through London in 2003 to protest (as volunteers) against the imminent invasion of Iraq. But that wasn’t the kind of volunteering that the government wanted to see, so it didn’t get counted.

To me, this kind of discrimination is far more subtle, far more common and far more insidious than not providing ramps into a building or only making opportunities available at times that suit certain types of people.

Often without realising it we effectively say to these so called under-represented groups, “what you already do isn’t valid so come and do what we want you to do instead”.

So yes, let’s see what we can do to remove the very real barriers to diverse involvement of volunteers in our organisations. But let’s also take a moment to reflect and see if there are less obvious barriers created by our personal and / or organisational beliefs about volunteering. They are perhaps the barriers we need to challenge first.

Three questions to ask about your learning plans for 2016

In this guest post for the start of 2016 our friend and colleague Sue Jones shares her thoughts about learning and development for Volunteer Managers. Sue challenges some assumptions we might make about learning and poses some questions to help us reflect on how we can make the most of our learning opportunities throughout 2016.

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Now we are back into the swing of a new year, it’s not unusual for us to focus on some of those thoughts and ideas we may have been musing over regarding changes we might want to make, courses we want to take and how we might embark on 2016 in a way that enables us to feel revitalised and focused.

One step we might be considering is to embark on a learning programme, or to at least be thinking about what workshops or conferences we might want to attend this year. Thankfully, the field of Volunteer Management has come a long way from the days of limited training options and few opportunities to learn and connect to others. There are in fact, lots of ways to access learning and development, including online, which is definitely something to be celebrated. Unfortunately though, this doesn’t necessarily translate into participation for everyone, or that we will receive the type of learning intervention that we really need.

Some of the biggest issues I see around learning relate to the assumptions we make, collectively and individually about what it is, and how to go about it.

For example:

1. Learning is simply about acquiring knowledge.
2. Learning means training, and training means attending courses in a classroom, often requiring travel to London or another major city.
3. Learning is expensive and takes up valuable time which we cannot afford.
4. Learning is just about getting a certificate to prove you can do a job.
5. Learning is something that should be paid for or provided by the organisation and I know they won’t.

These are just some of the messages I regularly hear from individuals and organisations when discussing learning and development opportunities. And there’s a tone of negativity and resignation, which if followed, can be damaging.

It’s important for us all to recognise that learning is not a luxury add-on, only to be afforded and enjoyed during the good times. It’s actually essential to our growth and development as individuals and organisations; and we have a duty to our volunteers, our client groups and communities to remain invested in ourselves and our work, so we can deliver the best at all times.

Throughout my years of designing and delivering training and working with Volunteer Managers and organisations, the most successful and satisfied individuals I have worked with are those who have taken a lead on their own learning and development. And, the most successful and thriving organisations understand the true value and impact of supporting their workforce to learn. I would argue that we need to take this approach more than ever before and to challenge our assumptions about learning because they are in fact holding us back.

So, ask yourself three questions:

1. What do I really think about the role of learning?
2. How important is it for me today, this week, this year? 
3. And, what assumptions might I be making about what learning needs to look like and what my manager or organisation thinks about it?

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If you’re interested in finding out more about learning opportunities in volunteer management, check out our website for information on the training available from Rob Jackson Consulting Ltd.

Sue and I also tutor an online introduction to volunteer management course. This takes six weeks and is great value compared to traditional classroom based training. The next course starts on Monday 15th February and you can book your place now on the course website.

Volunteers - let's be 'aving you

At the start of November I noticed a small flurry of blog posts and media mentions focusing on volunteering in policing.
The first that got my attention was on the BBC New website, “Volunteer Army may swell police ranks”. This reported on the recent Home Office consultation “Reforming the Powers of Police Staff and Volunteers” which, in a volunteering context, seeks to:

“…enhance the role of volunteers. We are consulting on ending the anomaly whereby volunteers can either have all of the powers of the constable, as a Special; or have none of the powers, as a police support volunteer. We will instead allow volunteers to mirror the roles played by police staff, for example as Community Support Officers.”

The BBC article tells the story of Alan Hunt, a volunteer with Dorset police who monitors CCTV between 730pm and 4am every Friday and Saturday night. Mr Hunt, who has been in the role for five years, radios officers to attend any disturbances caught on the cameras.
It also mentions a volunteer with the National Crime Agency (the UK’s equivalent of the FBI), who uses his skills as a security adviser with and insurance firm to help give a different perspective on projects to the regular NCA officers.

Another article I noticed from my home county of Lincolnshire explored the role of students in a new volunteering scheme with the county’s police force. In this scheme, the police and the University of Lincoln have partnered to to give students the opportunity to volunteer as Volunteer Police Community Support Officers or Police Campus Drop-In Centre volunteer.
Police and Crime Commissioner Alan Hardwick is quoted as saying that this initiative is not about getting unpaid volunteers to do the work of paid officers:

“There are no officers who would come and sit in the drop-in centre so the idea that the volunteers are doing their work is totally wrong. The volunteers will be able to engage with students far better – the students are their peers and part of that community."

Chief Constable of Lincolnshire Police, Neil Rhodes, adds:

“What’s different about today’s initiative is that it’s aimed at young people who will be able to act as an interface with us as volunteers policing the streets of Lincoln and at the drop-in centre.The scheme is about having a bridge between the force and the university. Sometimes it can be quite daunting to approach a police officer whereas if you can speak to one of your fellow students who can help you access our services, that should be easier.”

Sadly (but unsurprisingly) the unions seem less enthusiastic. In the BBC article Ben Priestley, Unison’s national officer for police and justice services, raises concerns about competence and accountability.

“There’s a general question about whether the general public believe that policing should be carried out by, in many cases, well-meaning amateurs. Policing is a serious business, dealing with serious crime, and our members who work as police staff are fully trained, they’re fully vetted and they’re very, very committed to the job they do. If you’re a volunteer, you’re not under the direction and control of a chief constable, as police staff and police officers are, and that’s a very real problem, and I don’t think the general public would be happy about that.”

Mr Priestly makes mistakes common to those within the union movement when it comes to volunteers [1]:

1. He confuses amateur with incompetent i.e professional means competent. I’ve blogged on this before so do take a look at that post for my thoughts.
2. He implies volunteers within the police will just be random people, plucked from the street and placed into roles with no training or support. Read the two articles I have already referenced to see that this isn’t the case, police volunteers are properly trained, vetted and supported. Volunteers, when properly recruited, managed and supported, are no less competent at what they do than paid staff.
3. He suggests volunteers, because they are unpaid, may be less committed than paid police officers. Interesting. Doing a job for no pay implies less commitment? If anything, the issue with volunteers is them being too committed!
4. He indicates that volunteers would not be ‘under the direction and control’ of a chief constable in the same way as police staff and officers. Why? Volunteers in policing roles are already under such direction and control and held to standards of conduct and behaviour. Mr Priestly is assuming that you can’t control volunteers or hold them responsible and accountable, an assumption that is simply wrong.
5. He does what all union people who speak out about volunteering do, which is to fail to recognise the the very movement and organisation he represents runs on volunteer labour. As they state on their webiste, Unison employs 1,200 staff and have 1.3 million members, relying on volunteer activists. Without them Unison would not be able to function. Or are all union volunteers untrained, unsupported individuals who can’t be managed or controlled?

My own view is that the role of volunteers in policing, indeed in any public service, is incredibly valuable and should be enhanced. Volunteers don’t simply complement and supplement the work of employees, they bring something else. For example, that could be a distinctively different credibility with the community by virtue of them being unpaid, such as the student volunteers in Lincoln that the Chief Constable highlighted in the remark quoted earlier.

Crucially, the role of volunteers should not be expanded because they are a free or cheap form of labour. That is lazy and wrongheaded thinking that harms both volunteering and the people those very public services seek to help. Where such ill-considered decision making is concerned it should be challenged and we Volunteer Managers should do more to speak up, challenge and help those making the decisions to do so in a better way.

I want to conclude with the words of Justin Davis Smith at NCVO who wraps up his excellent blog post, “We need a better vision for volunteering in policing” like this:

The modern police force was born out of volunteer involvement in the 19th Century. We have a glorious opportunity to re-shape our public services for the 21st Century by harnessing the power of volunteers alongside our paid professionals. It is not a zero sum game, but a complementary, symbiotic relationship, where volunteers and paid staff do what they each do best, operating in consort to deliver a more effective and efficient service better in tune with the community in which they operate.

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1. For more of my blogging about job substitution / displacement / replacement issues, please take a look at the relevant tagged posts.  ↩
   

Three things I want to say about controlling volunteers on social media

I’ve just read a great blog from Kevan Lee in the team at Buffer [1]. The blog explores the concept of 360 degree advocacy and the future of social media. Kevan looks at how brands can maximise their social media potential thus:

“A business feels personal not when it speaks like a person but when it reflects the persons that make up the business.”

This line really got my attention because I think it hits upon a key belief I come across regularly when the subject of volunteers and social media arises. You see, quite often when I train on social media in a volunteering context I am told that volunteers cannot be involved in an organisation’s social media work because what they say and do cannot be controlled. The fear is that volunteers will be loose cannons, firing off any old tweet or post that might cut across the carefully controlled brand the organisation wants to project.

There are a three things I want to highlight in response.

First, it isn’t just Communications / Marketing / Branding and / or Senior Management staff I hear this from. It is sometimes from Volunteer Managers too. That might be out of fear or ignorance about social media but sometimes it’s born of a real concern that volunteers won’t be able to be controlled on social media. To me such comments speak volumes about what volunteer management has become to some people, a means of organising people to control their involvement in as low a risk setting as possible rather than inspiring and enabling people to achieve the most for our mission & cause.

Oh, and why by default assume what volunteers say online about you won’t be positive? What does that tell you?

Second, to steer clear of involving volunteers in social media because of an anxiety that we cannot control them is to fundamentally misunderstand social media. As I frequently say in response to such anxieties, control disappeared on 4 February 2004, the day Mark Zuckerberg turned Facebook on. For more than eleven years we’ve had less and less control of what people say about us as more social networks have appeared and more of us join them.

The appropriate response is not to foolishly try to shut the gate a decade after the horse has bolted but to learn to work with the lack of control and manage it appropriately. People, including volunteers, are already talking about you on social media - if you do not or are prevented from engaging with this key communication tool you just won’t know what they are saying. It’s the digital equivalent of putting your head in the sand and hoping it’ll all be OK.

Third, not engaging volunteers (and indeed other supporters) in social media might mean you are failing to realise an emerging key aspect of the very purpose of social media in an organisational context. This is where Kevan Lee’s blog post comes back into focus.

You need to read the post in full to get the complete picture but this quote sums up the key issue:

“Fundamentally, they [businesses, in our contact Volunteer Involving Organisations] are not a person, they are not a human being. What they are is a collection of humans.The individuals that make up the company are what also make the company unique, approachable, relatable. And for a really long time, the best practice for social media marketing has not been about embracing these awesome people. Wow, what a big miss! With a full view of social media advocacy, I think it raises the question: What if this changed? What if we began inviting individuals to contribute to the voice of the brand?”

In other words, we’ve been getting it all wrong if we’ve been trying to control the brand / message on social media and only engage people who are prepared to toe that party line. Instead of running scared that volunteers may say something ‘wrong’, what we perhaps should be doing is finding a way for the corporate voice to be made up of all the individual voices of staff, volunteers, donors and other supporters.

For example, on Twitter, a non-profit organisation maintains a list of all it’s supporters who have Twitter accounts. It then retweets what it’s supporters say that chimes with the brand, making use of those peoples’ own unique voice rather than trying to control what they say. In fact, in a charitable context, doesn’t this make even more sense as often volunteers and other supporters have a persona connection to the cause and so speak with far more authenticity than a social media employee in the central communications team?

Put like that it sounds so obvious. Well it does to me anyway. We need to stop trying to do the impossible and control what people say about us online and instead inspire and enable people to use their voice to help our cause. Just like our approach to volunteer management needs to become less about control and fear of risk and more about empowerment and enabling opportunity.

As Kevan says:

“Brands can embrace the individuality of their team and become more relatable to their audience. The team can have a positive impact on the quality and variety of content the brand shares. I’m particularly excited about how wholeness, personality, and diversity can fit into the equation here, too. For all the work we aim to do with refining and perfecting a social media strategy, perhaps this exact type of variety is the next frontier for brands to engage on a deeper level with the wonderful, creative, unique individuals that make up an audience.”

Once again, you really need to read the whole of Kevan’s blog to get a firm handle on what he is exploring. I highly recommend you do this.

Afterwards, pop back here and let me know what you think about his ides in a volunteering context. I’d love to hear your thoughts and maybe discuss these ideas further through my blog’s comments function.

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1. Buffer is a company which provides a social media scheduling tool. They also produce an excellent blog on social media issues that is both informative and highly practical.  ↩

What's in a word? Revisited

In November 2013 I wrote a blog post entitled “What’s in a word?” looking at the language we use regarding volunteering. I specifically picked out issues concerning microvolunteering and internships, the latter being especially critical.

As I said at the time:

First, by colluding with the idea that internship sounds more professional than volunteering we collude with the devaluing of volunteering, subordinating it to a lower class status below real work (i.e. paid) and internships. Second, we open up a can of worms such as that created by the recent debates on unpaid internships which - and let’s not ignore this at all - risk fundamentally undermining the concepts of volunteering many of us hold so dear.

This blog post built upon some writing I’d done earlier that year.

In June 2013, Jo Swinson MP commented in a parliamentary debate on interns that:

“…basically, if someone is offering their time of their own free will and they can come and go as they please, they are a volunteer, but if they are required to perform specific tasks and can be disciplined if duties are not performed as agreed, they are a worker.”

As I said in my blog for Third Sector a couple of months later:

“So a volunteer shouldn’t do specific tasks or be held to account if they don’t do a good job? Really? Is that actually how we want to think about volunteers: people doing meaningless work that makes no contribution of any value to society whatsoever? So much for volunteers making a difference.”

Why this brief history lesson? Because the issue of the language we use to describe volunteering has arisen once more and this time through a term that many leaders and managers of volunteers seem to have been happy to adopt: ‘skilled volunteering’.

The term ‘skilled volunteering’ has been around for a short while now and generally refers to people using their professional skills to help a good cause[1]. It is in effect what many people have usually referred to as pro bono:

“Professional work undertaken voluntarily and without payment or at a reduced fee as a public service. Unlike traditional volunteerism, it is service that uses the specific skills of professionals to provide services to those who are unable to afford them”. (Source - Wikipedia).

I’ve always had an issue with using language that omits the word volunteer to describe volunteering that requires particular skills or competence. Why draw a distinction between employees using their professional skills pro bono and someone who may be a retired professional from the same field using exactly the same skills who is only seen as a volunteer?

On the face of it then ‘skilled volunteering’ is not a bad term because at it least recognises that the people who use their considerable skills and expertise to further a good cause are indeed volunteers.

Yet for that step forwards, the term ‘skilled volunteering’ creates a huge jump backwards.

You see, as it becomes more common to refer to employee volunteers using professional skills as skilled volunteers, so we increasingly imply that all other volunteers are unskilled - nice-to-have, non-essential contributors who don’t do anything of real value in the organisation. It’s bad enough that so many people already hold this erroneous and misleading view of volunteers without introducing new terminology that perpetuates that belief further.

So, leaders and managers of volunteers please unite against the term ‘skilled volunteering’ as a means of distinguishing between different forms of giving time. All volunteering requires some skill and competence, all volunteering is ‘skilled volunteering’ in some way.

If you feel you have to use the word skilled at all when describing volunteering, then consider the compromise term of ‘skills-based volunteering’ which Corey Diamond of Realized Worth helpfully explains on their website:

skills·based·vol·un·teer·ing /skilz/bāst/välənˈtir·ēng/ verb

Any time someone uses their abilities, talents, networks and resources to get a volunteering commitment completed.

This may or may not include pro bono volunteering, which takes a skill that is used every day in your job and applies it to work to address a complex social or environmental cause.

Points of Light suggests that skills-based volunteering comes in all shapes and sizes, including[2]:

• Individual volunteers, corporate paid/unpaid volunteers, loaned executives, interns
• Projects completed in a day; short, medium or longterm projects
• Activities performed during working hours or on individual time
• Planned in advance or spontaneous projects such as disaster response
• Application of all types of skills and talents from professional experience to hobbies
• Content from nonprofit infrastructure efficiency effort to direct “in the field” projects
• Local impact to national and international

Language is important. Let’s not use it carelessly and devalue volunteering, but with thought and clarity to shine a light on the contribution of all those who give their time to good causes.

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1. Both Reach and Career Volunteer have helpful definitions of skilled volunteering on their websites.  ↩

2. Note that whilst Realized Worth do specialise in CSR and employee volunteering they do make clear that skills-based volunteering is not limited to this area of work.  ↩

Five tips for recruiting volunteers

Regular readers will know I mainly use this blog to look at topical or important issues facing the volunteering field. Every now and again I like to throw in a more practical, how to, post so here are five top tips when it comes to recruiting volunteers.

1. Target

A big mistake people make is to recruit by indicating that anyone could do the role you want volunteers for. This is sometimes called warm-body recruitment because the message put out is that anyone can volunteer, so long as they are alive.

It’s a technique that can work but is only really appropriate for roles where really the only criteria for being a good volunteer is you have a pulse. For any other roles, target, target, target.

Here are some questions to ask:

• What do you want the volunteer to do? It’s a question that’s often ignored or very little time gets spent on it. Make sure you give proper attention to the work you want volunteers to do so you can answer the next question.

• Who would be the ideal volunteer for this role? If you need a driver, then you want people who can drive and who probably have a clean licence. Maybe they also need access to a car. If the driving is to collect furniture for a charity shop then the person probably also needs to be fit and healthy to cope with the lifting. Get as a specific as possible. Avoid saying, anyone can do it. That may be the case but if you segment that broad audience into categories you will be better placed to answer the final question.

• Where are you likely to find them? Avoid the old staples like advertising in doctors’ surgeries and libraries unless you think the ideal volunteer is likely to be found there. To continue our driver example, why would you want a driver who’s at the doctors or think you’ll find drivers hanging out at the library? Where might you find fit and healthy drivers? If you need them during the day, where might they be?

2. Ask

Once you’ve got your target group identified, do not forget to actually ask them. Sounds stupid I know but research consistently shows that people who don’t volunteer feel like they haven’t been asked to give time.

Ask, ask, ask.

Keeping asking.

And when you’re done, ask some more.

Don’t just recruit a couple of times a year. I may see that recruitment call but not be available then. Three months later when I can give you some time you’re not asking and I’ve forgotten you ever did.

3. Sell

Please, no adverts for volunteers that say, “Help! We need volunteers”, or “Help! We urgently need volunteers”. That is all too common an approach and it stands out from all others forms of advertising which explain how buying a product will make us fitter, happier, healthier, more attractive etc..

Sell your volunteer opportunity like a business would sell its products. Focus on the benefits of someone volunteering, not the features. When we buy something we don’t just look at what it can do but how it will help us. Same with volunteering - show people how volunteering will meet their needs not just tell them what they will do or how desperate your are for help.

Oh and please don’t say “Make A Difference” when recruiting. Everyone says that. Why would I make more of a difference with your volunteer programme than someone else’s? If you want to say your volunteers will make a difference then say what difference they will make and how it will be of benefit to them.

4. Respond

At this point nobody has actually become a volunteer. All you’ve done it clarify what needs doing, who would be the ideal person to do that and communicated your offer to them. Hopefully people will respond. Hopefully the ‘right’ people will respond, saving you countless hours wading through unsuitable applications.

What happens when they do?

Do they get a speedy response (including outside usual working hours) thanking them for their interest in volunteering, explaining the next steps and being clear about timeframes? Or do they hear nothing as their enquiry vanishes into an over-full inbox until someone get rounds to responding, maybe a week or two down the line? Do they get a friendly voice on the phone or might a disinterested colleague answer who doesn’t even know about the organisation’s need for volunteers?

Far too many times potential volunteers get the disinterested colleague or the wait for days for an email reply. Volunteer Managers then claim nobody wants to volunteer or it’s getting harder to recruit.

Put simply, if you are going to ask for some of people’s precious spare time make absolutely sure you have the capacity to provide great customer service[1] to them when they do get in touch. Make use of simple tools like out of office email and voicemail messages so people instantly know when you’ll reply. Check out volunteer management software that can automatically email people who apply with a welcome message - we recommend Better Impact.

5. Scale of engagement

The days of people signing up to regular, long-term volunteering on day one are pretty much gone. People don’t thrill to that kind of commitment anymore. This is often misinterpreted as the days of long-term, committed volunteering being over.

I disagree.

We can get people to make the kind of regular commitments we want but we have to be patient and plan for it. We offer a scale of engagement, with regular, committed, long-term volunteering at one end and shorter term, bite-sized, easy to access opportunities at the other. We then start them at the easy end and, as we get to know them, we try and encourage them up the scale. It may take weeks, months or even years but some of the volunteers will climb the scale to give you the committed service you desire.

By the way, this approach can also be great if your volunteers have to be DBS / criminal record checked before they start volunteering. If you have some quick, easy, time limited opportunities available they can get stuck into those whilst the result of the check is awaited.

So, there you have it, five quick tips on recruiting volunteers.

If you’d like to get better at volunteer recruitment then Rob Jackson Consulting Ltd can help. Get in touch today for more information.

Now it’s over to you. What are your top tips? Please share them below.

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1. For more thoughts on customer service and volunteer management take a look at my previous blogs on the topic. You might also want to read more of my writing on recruitment.  ↩

The volunteer is always right? Wrong!

I've recently been reviewing my training material on dealing with problem behaviour by volunteers. It's not my favourite course to run because I much prefer to work with clients to help them try and avoid problems with their volunteers.

Sadly, however, dealing with problem behaviour remains a common issue when it comes to working with volunteers. There can be all sorts of causes for this.

I've seen problem behaviour in volunteers as a result of organisations focusing so much on processes around volunteering that they fail to remember that volunteering is a people business and thus fail to treat volunteers as individuals. Instead, volunteers are viewed almost like widgets at the end of a process, faceless units of production who should keep quiet and get on with things.

I've seen problem behaviour in volunteers as a result of organisations slashing the resourcing for the volunteer programme, leaving no capacity to engage and support people effectively yet assuming that volunteers will do as they did before. They are free after all, aren't they?

I've also seen problem behaviour in volunteers as a result of staff (including volunteer managers) treating volunteers with kid gloves. I see it in agencies that will not challenge problem behaviour in case the volunteer leaves, in agencies that think they can't hold volunteers to account for what they do and in agencies that think you can never sack a volunteer. In these organisations, volunteers are often seen as always being right.

Wrong!

If we don't hold volunteers to account for what they achieve they we effectively say we don't care what volunteers do because it has no value!

If we say we can't fire volunteers (and that should always be a last resort) then we effectively say any behaviour by volunteers is acceptable.

The reason I was prompted to write this post was an article I read recently from a customer service blog I subscribe to. The article is entitled "The customer is not always right, but is always a customer". I encourage you to go and read it now but replace the word 'customer' with the word 'volunteer' and think about the article in the context of your volunteer programme, then come back to this post.

American colleague Jayne Cravens has written about why people often see no complaints from volunteer as a measure of success. In the same way I think we mainly see problem behaviour by volunteers as a bad thing and the absence of problem behaviour as a good thing. Yet as winthecustomer.com argue (and I've made minor edits to make it fit our volunteering context):

"Negative feedback is the best place to start working to make your organization or team even better. Some people just never complain, they won’t say what bothers them, even if something really does. A volunteer complaint, expressed to you or not, is an opportunity for a competitor to take your volunteer. A volunteer who is bothered by something you do or don’t do, will leave the door open for someone else to try and meet their wants and needs." 

"Be open to the complaints, the negative feedback, the upset people. Show them you care, ask them to be involved in the process of making things better. Get ideas from them on what would make their experience perfect. Then get to work on making it happen. You’ll make yourself better, your team better, your product, good, or service better. And in the process, create loyal, committed, passionate volunteers who believe in your cause because they know you truly care about them, not just the time they give."

So to summarise, volunteers are not always right. Sometimes they can be a royal pain in the butt. Yet every time you get a 'problem volunteer' situation you encounter a brilliant opportunity to learn, develop your programme and make volunteering with your organisation an even better experience.

Now isn't that a better way to look at the issue of problem behaviour by volunteers?

See also - The lessons for volunteer programmes from customer service

My thoughts on the Australian National Review of the Definition of Volunteering

The following blog post is taken from a contribution I was asked to make to Volunteering Australia's recent consultation on changing their national definition of volunteering. The original can be found on the Volunteering Australia website.

I'm sharing my contribution to Australia's review following my article for Third Sector online in March 2015 where I called for a similar review here in the UK. I think it's important we re-visit these issues more regularly than we are doing but they cut to the core of what we as a society and sector stand for in volunteering. Because, as the old adage goes, if we don't stand for something we will fall for anything.

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I commend Volunteering Australia for holding this consultation on the Australian definition of volunteering. In our ever changing world where nothing stands still for very long, to still be using a definition that is almost 20 years old is quite amazing.

Much has changed in just the last few years and the time is right to take a fresh look at an issue often viewed as obscure, irrelevant to all but the most conceptually minded people and more philosophical than practical. I couldn’t disagree with such views more: there is nothing as practical as a good theory!

In determining a new definition of volunteering I think a fundamental question needs to be asked: What do we want this definition to do for us? What is it’s purpose? Who will benefit from it? OK, that’s three questions but you get my point.

For example, if we want to come up with a standard way of measuring volunteering across multiple organisations then we develop a nice, easy definition that constrains volunteering within measurable bounds. The International Labor Organisation has sought to do this with its’ efforts to standardise the financial measurement of volunteering around the globe.

Unfortunately, in such an approach we reduce volunteering to less than it’s whole. Problems subsequently arise. If we see volunteering in such small terms we miss out on the richness of the larger scope and diversity of voluntary activity.

Much of the debate in the excellent issues paper which accompanies Volunteering Australia’s current consultation focuses on the advantages to the establishment of a new definition. By that I mean that many views are put forward about how bodies such as government, Volunteer Resource Centres, State peak bodies, Volunteer Involving Organisations, Volunteer Managers and others would benefit from a new definition.

Widening the definition of volunteering widens the constituency existing infrastructure bodies can claim, increasing their influence and strengthening their argument for better support.

Widening the definition of volunteering can widen the influence Volunteer Managers have, as noted above, and can position the profession more positively within Australian society.

Do we want the new Australian definition of volunteering to suit the definers (my concept of establishment) or the nation as a whole? The issues paper acknowledges that, “the current definitions does not reflect how significant numbers of Australians give their time, nor is it well aligned to the Australian community’s view of how they ‘volunteer’ ”.

So my question is, should the purpose of new definition be to help Australians see that the way they give time already is in fact volunteering?

I admit I am a fan of this approach. In helping others to see that their time giving is volunteering we raise awareness of the diversity and breadth of volunteering.

If more people see themselves as volunteers more people take an interest in volunteering issues – more people ask their politicians about volunteering, engage in dialogue with others using the v-word and in doing so change our associations with the concept volunteering to fit 21st century society.

The establishment will surely benefit from this although such benefits may take longer to realise as the new definition has to permeate into Australian culture and across society.

So what could such a definition be? I always plumb for the one articulated by the late American volunteerism thinker, writer and leader, Ivan Scheier:

“Volunteering is doing more than you have to, because you want to, in a cause you consider good”.

Ivan’s definition is a masterpiece of brevity, openness and clarity all in one sentence. It does not need a further set of principles to explain (a concept I’ve always found odd, surely a definition should be definitive?) and allows me to define if what I do is volunteering or not. It is not bound by sectoral boundaries. It includes the concept of free will, as the individual defines it. It doesn’t subjugate volunteering as a second class activity after paid work as many others do.

Of course, Ivan’s definition isn’t perfect. No definition will be. But it is elegant in its simplicity.

I commend it to you Australia for your consideration.

What I think about the latest Tory proposal on volunteering

Last Friday (10 April 2015) David Cameron announced that if the Conservatives win the UK General Election on 7th May 2015 they would introduce a new legal right for employees in the public sector and large private firms to have three days a year of paid leave in order to volunteer.

Recognising the benefits of employee volunteering, many groups were quick to endorse the proposals.

CIPD (the professional body for Human Resources) welcomed the idea as did the Confederation of British Industry.

Amusingly, the trade union movement - who are usually so quick to criticise volunteers as the enemy of paid workers - quickly backtracked on their initial cautious welcome when it became apparent volunteering for a union would not be considered under the scheme.

Many in the Voluntary and Community Sector have also warmly welcomed Cameron’s proposal.

NCVO’s Chief Executive Sir Stuart Etherington blogged on why it would be good for business whilst Kristen Stephenson helpfully outlined why employee volunteering can be a good thing more broadly.

The Charities Aid Foundation also gave their endorsement as did the sector Chief Executives body ACEVO, whose Director of Policy, Asheem Singh, was quoted in Civil Society saying:

“This is exciting news – it recognises the crucial role of charities in building a better society. The workplace is a new frontier for social action, and this new legal right will help support a new generation of socially responsible citizens.”

However, at an event on Monday some senior fundraisers (not volunteer managers, fundraisers!) called into question the viability of the Conservative proposal whilst both CSV and Timebank have made the point that it needs properly thinking though and resourcing if it is to work.

The Association of Volunteer Managers have said nothing.

So what do I think?

Let’s start with the positive. To an extent I agree that anything which promotes and encourages volunteering is to be welcomed. However, I have two big caveats to this.

First, the solution is not always more volunteers. As I said when I blogged on the Labour Party’s proposals for volunteering back in 2014:

“We are concerned Labour are falling into the common trap of assuming that more volunteers is a measure of success. Any professional leader and manager of volunteers would be quite clear that if an organisation’s mission can be fulfilled effectively with ten volunteers then to recruit 100 to do the same task is wasteful and inefficient.”

Second, initiatives to increase the supply of volunteers completely fail to recognise that the demand needs to be there for these people. Meaningful opportunities need creating to accommodate all these additional time givers and ensure they have a great experiences as volunteers. A shortcut to disaster would be to engage loads of new people, manage them badly, give them a terrible experience and send them on their way. Do you imaging many (any?) of them would be keen to volunteer again? Moreover, as the Boston Globe highlighted recently, employee volunteering can be more of a burden than a help to many good causes.

So, if that’s the positive (!), what about the negative?

First, the Conservative proposals are yet another example of a political party policy initiative on volunteering that looks good but fails to acknowledge that investment is needed to make it happen. Volunteering is freely given but not cost free. As I just noted, if all these additional volunteers are going to come forward opportunities need creating, organisational cultures need to be changed to be more open towards volunteers and resource (time, money, will to act etc.) needs finding to organise it all and maximise the potential impact.

One of the most worrying aspects of the Tory announcement is the failure of most of the main sector bodies to even acknowledge that for the idea to work something needs to change. Whether that something is the attitude of leaders in the sector to properly understand and support volunteering, or it is funding for more volunteer management resource, or both, nobody except Timebank or CSV appears to have even raised this issue. Worse, the professional association for volunteer managers has been totally silent.

Second, and related, is the issue of infrastructure. It has long been accepted that good employee volunteering happens when a competent broker gets involved. This broker negotiates the needs of the good cause with the aims of the employer and matches the two up to best mutual benefit. 

Sadly, the last government’s austerity agenda slashed funding for national and local volunteering infrastructure to the point where the capacity to deliver something like Cameron’s new proposals barely exists compared to five years ago. Not only have the organisations closed or significantly downsized but much of the knowledge and expertise built up over many years has left the roles that were made redundant. 

Perhaps there is no better illustration of the short-sightedness of dismantling the sector's support infrastructure whilst expecting volunteering to flourish.

Third, and finally, what is acceptable volunteering? Set aside the old debate about whether paid time off for volunteering is actually volunteering (and I think it is - is paid time off for holiday not holiday?) but the position on union volunteering makes it clear that the Conservatives view some volunteering as more valid than other ways of giving time. This is not a new issue but one that rarely gets thought through. 

Consider these two previous examples:

1. The Local Government Association (LGA) proposing that people get a discount on their Council Tax if they volunteer, an idea that seems to have stalled when it became apparent how much record keeping and administration is required to assess and approve what it valid volunteering and how much time people give to those causes.
2. The last Labour government’s wizard wheeze to speed up citizenship applications for those immigrants who volunteer, an idea which collapsed for the exact same reason as the LGA’s idea.

So what will constitute valid volunteering under Cameron’s grand new volunteering plan? Who will assess and approve this? Who will record how much of those three days gets used? What will happen to people’s legal right to time off to volunteer for other causes? These questions are all unanswered and until they are addressed I cannot endorse the idea at all.

Of course these proposals may only see the light of day if we get a Conservative government on May 8th. Given the closeness of this election that seems an unlikely outcome. I can see the idea being dropped as quickly as possible in any coalition negotiations. 

So maybe we shouldn’t worry too much about the Tories and their new idea, but we definitely should worry at the response - or lack thereof - of the majority of sector bodies. This is the first chance in a post-Volunteering England age to see how our national infrastructure representatives speak up for the realities of volunteer management. I think it's pretty clear that with a couple of notable exceptions (CSV and Timebank) they failed the test. 

Let’s hope they do better with whatever government we do get.

They couldn’t do much worse could they?