I have said that volunteer management is somewhat distinct from business management. Probably the most important distinction is that of motivation. In terms of business management, most managers seem to take the attitude (which may or may not be correct) that motivation consists in either providing, or threatening, the workers paycheque. You can't do that when you are managing a volunteer labor force. You aren't paying them.
There are a variety of motivations for volunteers to do volunteer work. Thus, the question of motivation, and therefore the overall question of management, can become extremely complex. However, most volunteers are volunteering because they see a job that needs to be done, and are willing to do it. Therefore, the motivation of volunteers lies primarily in assuring, and reassuring, the volunteers that the work that they are doing is important, and that you, yourself, as their manager, are pursuing the same goal.
Sometimes volunteers, and managers, can see the same objective, but may not be pursuing it in the same way. This is an added complication to the managing of volunteers, but we will leave this for the moment, and address it later.
The first thing that I want to say to volunteer managers is: be honest. With yourself.
As I said, volunteers are motivated by seeing a need, or he needed task, and the belief that they are filling a need, or performing an important task which, otherwise, would go unfulfilled.
There are two areas that you need to address in this regard. One is to reinforce the idea that the work that the volunteers are performing is, in fact, important. There are two ways to address this, which are implemented in quite different ways. The first is the simple assertion that their work is important. But the stock repetition of the bald phrase, "your work is important," is not sufficient. If it keeps on being repeated, word for word, without any kind of support, it loses meaning. Once it loses meaning, so does their work. That's a bad thing.
You need to support the view that the work is important by doing research. Different kinds of research. Provide different kinds of evidence that their work is important. Show the number of hours that the volunteers have put into a given task, in total, over a given period. Find out the number of people who have been directly, and positively, affected. Wherever possible, provide an anecdote of some individual (yes, be careful not to identify the individual, but make sure that the story is real) who has been helped, and how they have been helped. Wherever possible, provide, or copy, to the members of your volunteer corps, any cards and letters from those who have been helped, thanking them for their help. Find any statistics that you can that demonstrate that the work of the volunteers are doing it's benefiting the community. Do not use the same statistics over and over again. Constantly search for new ones. (Undoubtedly you will be reporting to a board, or some higher authority, within the volunteer charity or organization. These statistics and metrics are useful not only for providing to your volunteer corps, but also to introduce any statement or report that you make to the board.)
The price of motivating a volunteer corps is constant vigilance, er, rather, constant research. This is probably not the most urgent task you have, but it probably is the most important. Carve out a chunk of time in your week. You know the times during your week when people are least likely to be interrupting you with other demands. Block off a section, possibly four hours per week, to do this kind of research. Research your own statistics. Research your own mail, and email. Research the letters to the editor, or any kinds of mention in your local newspaper, or on the local radio station. Research by talking to your opposite numbers in similar enterprises in other towns in your area. Or even not in your area. Write an article for any newsletter provided by some umbrella group of which your charity is a member, on this topic of researching ways to find indications of importance, and submit that article, asking for those in your position in other organizations to contact you with ideas about what they have found, and what they do. (Feel free to steal liberally from this article.) In fact, submit the article to any organization that deals with volunteers, whether or not they are related to your cause. Motivating and managing volunteers may rely on the cause, but the statistics and motivations are independent.
The second way to reassure volunteers that their work is important, is to thank them. Not just verbally. We have already covered that. Do that at every opportunity. And in as many different varied ways as you can. No, what I'm talking about here is the perks. Make sure that you do things for your volunteers. In one sense it doesn't matter how small is the thing that you do for the volunteers. I remember an anecdote in the book "In Search of Excellence," where an engineer found a solution to a problem that had been bedeviling the company for years. As it happened, when he made the final breakthrough, it was late in the evening, and pretty much everyone had gone home. But his manager was still there, and the engineer reported that he had found the solution. The manager realized that rewarding this, in however small a fashion, and in whatever weird way, was more important right now then having an enormous presentation ceremony possibly months down the line. So he ransacked his office to find something he could give to the engineer. The only thing he was able to find was a banana, left over from his lunch, in his desk. He gave the engineer the banana.
It does matter what you do. In the same way that simply repeating the phrase, "your work is important," eventually loses all meaning, continuing to give out the same recognition "attaboy" certificate, or enamel pin, or coffee mug, also loses eventually loses all meaning. Once again, try to be creative. On a regular basis, in the same way of finding statistics, metrics, and ways to say thank you and prove to the staff that their work is important, find and search for different things to give to your volunteers. They don't have to be expensive. They don't have to be valuable. They don't even have to be particularly useful. But they have to be ready to hand whenever somebody does something right.
And then there are the other perks. Do you provide coffee for your volunteer staff? This might be an open coffee pot in the office. It might be a coffee shop's gift certificate, or some such thing, that you can provide, on random occasions, to everyone who is going on a shift of volunteer work. It can be a bowling night. It can be a Christmas banquet. Go to the stores in your community, and make your case for the benefits to the businesses of the work that your volunteers do in the community. Get some gifts that you can hand out at the regular volunteer meeting, or at the summer picnic. Make sure that your volunteers are thanked materially. Yes, you are going to have to go, cap in hand, to the board for budgetary amounts in order to do this. Remind them that, according to business research, whatever they pay the volunteers, it would have cost them four or five times as much to hire someone to do that work. It's not exactly pay, but make sure that your volunteers get some material benefit.
And, of course, you will have noticed that all of this requires you to do work. To spend time talking to other organizations, or businesses in your town, or other volunteer organizations, or volunteer umbrella organizations. It takes time to go and speak to people. It takes time to call them on the phone. It takes time to send email messages, and then bug the recipients to respond. Yes, it takes time. And you're busy. Nobody who works in a volunteer organization is *not* supremely busy. It comes with the territory. It has to be done.
And it comes back to the instruction I started out with: be honest. With yourself.
Do you really believe in the cause of the organization? Do you really believe that there is an important need that is not being met? Do you really believe that this need is so important that it has to be addressed, even if it has to be addressed by the chowderheads that are under your command?
Now, of course, everyone knows the joke about the important thing being sincerity, and that, once you can fake sincerity, you've got it made. And I've worked for people who have felt that they were smarter than all the volunteers (after all, the fact that *they* were getting paid, and the volunteers weren't, proved it), and they could just keep saying "your work is important" and nobody would ever catch on. But remember, somebody else said that you can fool all of the people some of the time, and you can fool some of the people all of the time, but, if you rely on fooling a bunch of volunteers, eventually the only ones in the corps will be the ones too thick to do the job.
So ask yourself, and be honest: do I believe in this task?
If so, you will do this work.
If not, you are in the wrong business. Quit.
Volunteer management - VM - 0.00 - introduction and table of contents
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