Volunteer management - VM - M - 1.04 - motivation, know staff

One of the very common questions that recruiters and human resources people are taught to ask in interviews is what I call the "what do you want to be when you grow up" question.  Usually this is phrased as "where do you see yourself in five (or ten or twenty) years."  The reason that recruiters are taught to ask this question is to see if someone has a career plan.

Most of the time, and particularly in my field of work, it's a pretty stupid question.

Now, there are some people, like Chris Hadfield, who had a career plan.  They followed it, and they got to where they wanted to go.  Chris Hadfield wanted to be an astronaut.  There is a pretty common career path to follow if you want to be an astronaut.  However, very few people actually get to *be* astronauts.  And I'm absolutely certain there are quite a number of people who, like Chris Hadfield, wanted to be an astronaut, and followed the plan, and never did, actually, get into space.

My field is information technology.  Information technology changes.  New types of technology are discovered, or created.  Software is developing all the time.  Hardware, possibly in its basics, still mostly follows the von Neumann architecture, as it has for the past seventy years.  However, we are now coming into a major change in technology with regard to quantum computing, and so, once again, not only the software, and the means of developing software, but the actual hardware platforms are going to radically change.

In information technology, constant change is here to stay.

When I started to work with computers, I didn't even know that there was a thing called information security.  And I have worked for a great many technology companies over the course of my career.  Even within information security, I have specialized in different domains at different times.  I didn't plan it.  I had no idea, for the most part, specifically where my career was going to go.  For the past 40 years, I could have described myself as a systems analyst.  But the systems, and the type of analysis that I did on them, changed constantly.  I suppose that my career plan could best be described as I see the next problem, and I solve it.  While it has worked for me, it isn't exactly a plan that allows you to give details of what you are going to do in even five years, let alone twenty.

If I am honest (which I do not feel obliged to be with anyone foolish enough to ask this idiotic type of question) I have never had a career plan.  Not in the way that the recruiters seem to see it.

Okay, this is a very long-winded way of leading into the fact that you have to know your volunteers.  Yes, as Pfeffer said in "The Human Equation," you have to know your people; both your customers, and your employees; in any business enterprise.  You have to know the strengths, and the aspirations, of your employees.  You probably don't have to guide them, but you may get better results out of them if you direct the area that they might next want to work in, and ensure that that particular field is something that they are good at, and interested in.

But it is much, *much* more important in volunteer management.

In business management, your employees are there because they want a job.  They want to get paid.  They want to be in a business, where they can make contacts, for other types of work, and other types of jobs, if they aren't particularly satisfied with the one that they are working in now.

That is not the case with volunteers.  You are not paying them.  They don't need a job, if they are willing to work for you, for nothing.  They don't need the money.  They don't necessarily need another job.  (If you are a fortunate enough to have young volunteers, who are looking for contacts to get into the job market, then well and good.  But realize that those particular volunteers, are, basically, looking to get a job which is going to ensure that they don't have time to work for you.)

Some of your volunteers may have too much time on their hands, and are looking for something to do to fill their hours.  However, in the first place, in our fast-paced modern society, those people are extremely rare.  In the second place, if that is why they are volunteering for you, they could easily turn around and volunteer for somebody else who *does* pay attention to them.

All of which is by way of saying that you need, really *really* need, to get you to know your volunteers.  Get to know why they are working for your particular organization.  Is it a really desperate desire to address the need that your organization fulfills?  Are they interested in the need that you're organization is devoted to, or are they primarily there for the camaraderie and fellowship of their colleagues who are also working to address that objective?  Are they just filling in time?  Are they particularly interested in the task that you have them doing?  Are they interested in having a regular time of volunteering, every week at the same day and time?  Are they interested in doing a variety of jobs, and learning something new all the time?  Are they interested in one particular task, and only one particular task, regardless of the needs of the organization?  Do they get along with their volunteer colleagues?  Is there something that they would rather be doing, and are you just the closest thing to what they actually want to do?

You need to know the answer to all of these questions, and more, to ensure that you can motivate them to help with the tasks that the organization needs to have done.

Volunteer management - VM - 0.00 - introduction and table of contents

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2025/05/volunteer-management-vm-000.html

Grief cliches (4)

Read books on grief and loss

Yes.  With some provisos.

Grief can be the weirdest thing that you have ever encountered, particularly since our society refuses to talk about it.  It can make you feel like you might be going crazy.  Getting some information on what grief is, and what you might expect, is probably a very good thing.  Yes, you can get help from grief counsellors, and grief support groups, but there are some problems.  It's hard to tell whether counsellors actually have experience with, or training in, grief, aside from those who do work with hospice societies.  Those who do work with hospice societies tend to be in high demand, so you may have a long wait time to get started.  Grief support groups are more available, but many societies running the groups have requirements that you have had at least some counselling before getting into a group, so, once again, there may be a delay in availability.

Books are immediately available.  But, like counsellors, it can be difficult to tell which books can be helpful, just because it has "grief" in the title.  As a resource for the hospice society for which I volunteer, I have started a bibliography of grief books (as well as bibliographies for caregiving and end-of-life care).  All of the titles listed in the bibliographies have full reviews linked to them, so that you can get details of what the books might be good for.

Eat healthy

Yeah, it's a good idea.  But possibly easier said than done.

Yes, any major disturbance in your life, and grief is definitely a disturbance, requires that you have the best physical resources that you can.  This includes health, this includes sleep, and this includes a healthy diet.  Yes, diet and exercise is generally helpful in pretty much any situation.  So, yes, eat healthy is not exactly bad advice.

However, simply saying eat healthy may not be terribly helpful to a lot of people.  We are, after all, talking about grief here.  And, specifically for men, you may never have had to consider what a healthy diet is.  If you are grieving because you have lost your wife, you may have lost the person who has cooked for you, for possibly the majority of your life.  So, how are you supposed to even know what a healthy diet is?

And, as someone who does know how to cook, and who did the majority of the cooking during the time of our marriage, I can tell you that eating healthy, and preparing healthy meals, is harder than it sounds.  If you are grieving, very likely you are at least partially depressed, and you are probably having difficulty just getting through the day.  In the initial stages of grief, you are using pretty much all of the energy and resources that you have, just grieving, and surviving the grief.  You don't have time to think about meals.  You don't have the energy to consider, in detail, how to eat, and what kind of a diet is best for you.  And, certainly, you want to take the easiest path to having a meal.

The easiest path, unfortunately, isn't particularly healthy.

Our society provides us with quick and easy meals, that aren't particularly healthy.  Overly processed food is readily available, and it tends to be fairly cheap, partly because it also tends to have a long shelf life, and therefore it's easy to manage it once you buy it and get it home.  You can simply open a box, or a bag, or a package, and start eating.  A lot of the stuff doesn't need to be refrigerated, and, even after you open a bag, it can stay on the shelf after you have satisfied your immediate hunger, until the next time you are hungry.

But, while it is easy, and relatively inexpensive, and easy to manage, in terms of being available when you are hungry, it's not a healthy diet.

It tends to be high in starch, and sugar, and salt, and the types of fats that aren't particularly good for you.

Healthy foods tend to be vegetables.  They also tend to be fresh.  Even when they are prepared, in some way, that gives them a longer shelf life, they, those materials, because they are nutritious, tend to grow things that are bad for you, like mold.  These types of foods, that are good for you, tend to go bad, over time.  They tend to have to be refrigerated.  You have to remember when you bought them.  You have to keep checking them, to see how old they are.  You also have to keep checking them to see if they are growing mold, or smelling bad.

They also tend to be more expensive.  Because they tend to go bad, they have a shelf life, and because they have a shelf life, they have greater requirements for being freshly harvested, prepared, and shipped to market.  And all of that costs money.  So food that is healthy for you tends to be more expensive than food that isn't particularly good for you.

And food that is good for you tends to have to be prepared.  You need to have a variety of foods to have a healthy diet.  Even if you are eating vegetables, and a lot of vegetables can be eaten raw, they still have to be peeled, and scraped, or scrubbed, and cut up into bite sized pieces.  So food that is healthy for you tends to be a lot more trouble to prepare.

This is hard, and it takes effort.

And then there's even more effort in figuring out what mix of foods, all of which require different preparation methods, you should be eating in order to have a healthy diet.

So, yes, eating healthy is a good idea.  But just saying to people "eat healthy" isn't particularly helpful.

Take a road trip

In general this would seem to come under the category of a distraction.  And, as I have pointed out, a distraction, and anything that might be pleasurable, is probably good.

It's also something new.  Going on a trip generally gives you something new to see, or encounter, or experience.  And anything new, and learning anything new, is probably a good idea.  You are faced with an entirely new situation, and your life has changed from what it was.  Learning something new helps you in the process of learning a new life.  It's practice for building a new life, and so it's helpful in that regard.

But simply, randomly, going on a road trip, or taking a vacation, or even going to visit friends or family, can be really difficult.  After Gloria died, a lot of people suggested that I take various types of trips.  A relative who really liked going on cruise ships suggested that I go on a cruise.  I'd never gone on a cruise in my life, either with Gloria, or before I met her.  I (still) have no idea of what to do or expect on a cruise.  Other friends kept on inviting me to come and stay with them.  Yes, I'm sure that going to see them, in their home, which I hadn't been to, would have provided some new sensations.  But it also means that I have to move, I have to plan the trip, I have to do the actual traveling, and then I'm stuck in their situation, and their schedule of life, and I'm already facing a major change in my *own* life.  I don't look forward to putting in an awful lot of effort, and then being stuck for several days following someone else's rules and ideas of how you should live.  I am already in a situation where the way I thought life should work isn't working.

One cousin did come to visit.  And then suggested that they wanted to go on a road trip to somewhere nearby.  It's definitely a tourist destination, and, in fact, even though it was only a couple of hours drive, I hadn't gone there.  They invited me to come along.  That way I didn't have to do anything.  I just had to sit in the car for the ride.  They did the driving, and it was only going to be a day trip, so it wasn't any major commitment of time.  I enjoyed it.  It was very nice of them.

So, yes, some type of trip could be helpful.  As a distraction, or simply for the novelty of it, and the practice in encountering new situations and adapting to them.

But, as with so many other items on this list, it's easy to say, and not so easy to do.

And, once again, it would be very nice for somebody to do this for you, but it's harder than it sounds to do it for yourself.

Learn a new skill

Yes, this is a good idea.

As I say, you are facing a change in your life.  Probably a very major change in your life.  Doing anything new helps with what psychologists call neuroplasticity.  This is the ability of your brain to adapt to know skills, new situations, new requirements; pretty much anything new in your life.  Building neuroplasticity by learning something new is a good idea.  It will help you adapt to your new life situation.

(And, once again, it might be easier to say than to do.  So, don't beat yourself up if you can't do it right away.)

Focus on what’s left, not what’s lost

Okay, in general, possibly a good thing.  Being positive (or, more importantly, not constantly dwelling on the negative), is, overall, a good thing.  If you can do it.

But this is just *way* too close to toxic positivity for me to recommend it to anyone who is actually grieving.

Grief topics: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2025/06/grief-table-of-contents-and-resources.html

Volunteer management - VM - G - 2.02 - governance - policy

All of you will have policies for your volunteers.  You probably have policy manuals for your volunteers.  (Probably buried somewhere in a desk.)  You will have policy and procedures manuals.  Disregarded behind the mops.

This tends to be the attitude towards policy.  It's something that you are supposed to have.  Managers tend to like policies more than the volunteers do.  According to the managers, policy is a way that you can get back at the volunteers, or possibly discipline them, or make their life difficult if they aren't doing what you want.  According to the volunteers, policies are pointless exercises imposed on them for no particular reason, probably made up by someone who has absolutely no idea what goes on in the organization.

Policies are important.  Policies are, in fact, vital.  It's just that the policies that are really used by the organization tend not to be the policies that are actually written down in the policy manual.

The policies are, in fact, the rules governing the organization.  They should, and all too often do not, derive from the mission statement of the organization.  The policies should outline what you must do, what you should do, and what you can't do.  That is the way the policies should be written.

Unfortunately, even for the managers, the actual writing down of the policy is given short shrift, and the policies are not well thought out.  If you are new to volunteer management, you should pull the policy manual out, and go through it with a very heavy red pen.  If you have the opportunity to be the first manager in a volunteer organization, you should be giving significant thought to writing down your policies.  Write down, as I have noted, what has to be done, what should be done, and what can't be done.  And be very careful when you are thinking about them.

Absolutely crucial to crafting your policies is: never create a policy with which the volunteers cannot comply.

Your policies should be, as I have noted, the rules for work and behavior in the organization.  This should give your volunteers guidance on what they are to do, and what they aren't to do.  The policies, therefore, have to be possible.  If you write down a policy which the volunteers either cannot accomplish, or cannot comply with, or a policy that actually impedes them performing the actual objectives of the organization, you are doing something that is worse than useless.  It is one thing to write up a policy which doesn't give guidance, or failing to write a policy that gives guidance.  If you fail to write a policy, that means that the volunteers don't get the help that they should really be expecting from you in performing their tasks and objectives.  But if you write a policy that they can't comply with, that means that, in the normal operation and work for the organization, they are continually breaking that policy.  The reason that that policy is worse than useless is that it requires the volunteers to break policy.  If they are required to break one policy, they start to build an attitude that the policies are of no importance.  Not only are they useless, but they actually get in the way of pursuing the objectives of the organization.  Therefore, in the volunteer's minds, the policies become pointless.  If you have to break one policy, you are much more likely to break other policies, because policy becomes what people all too often seem to assume that they are; not something to help, but something that actually gets in the way of doing your job.

So don't do that.  Never create a policy with which the volunteers cannot comply.

And this should guide your creation of any and all policies.  When you craft a policy, make sure that the volunteers can always comply with it.  Make sure that the volunteers are never going to be put in the situation of deciding whether or not to comply with the policy.  The policy should be there for a reason, and it should be there to protect the organization, to further the tasks and objectives of the organization , to protect the safety of your volunteers, or to protect other assets of the organization.  But, when writing down the policy, make sure that the way that the policy is written doesn't unnecessarily interfere with the actual tasks and objectives that the volunteers are going to be pursuing.

I have had a fair amount of practice in writing policies and procedures.  And it's not easy.  It can get pretty complicated, when you have something that you know should be forbidden or prevented, but, if you fail to word the policy properly, you can write yourself into a corner, and set up a situation where the workers in the organization can't do their jobs, and still work within the restriction that the policy creates.  You may have to think of a lot of different scenarios, and try to think of reasons that someone might want to break your policy, as it is written, which means that you need to rewrite the policy, protecting the real reason for the prohibition, but allowing real work to continue.

I well recall one situation where a policy, in the organization that I was a part of, came down stating that we were not to use software in our office, and in our organization, that had not been paid for.  This is, one would think, a relatively good idea.  We do not want people bringing in pirated software, and possibly getting us into legal trouble.  Depending on the type of organization that we're working in, we may want not want to have unauthorized software in our organization, because of the danger of insecure software operating within our systems.  However, my position in the organization one of my tasks was to review software, in order to determine suitable software to purchase.

So, how was I supposed to obtain review software?  Normally, software companies were only too happy to provide us free software for review.  After all, I was working for a very large entity, and they knew that, if I was happy with the software, they were going to get enormous numbers of orders for that software.  But, if we were not to use software that had not been purchased, I couldn't ask for free review software anymore.

The project of reviewing software had no budget.  And, given the size of the entity I was working for, and the various other policies in regard to budgeting and purchasing, the ability to temporarily purchase software, for review, and then return the software having done the review, would have required an absolutely enormous budget, even with the fact that the software was being returned, and the purchase price refunded back.  The purchasing policies for this particular enterprise were not intended to cover this kind of activity, and, in fact, the fact that purchases were not final would, because of other policies, have a negative effect on my office's overall budget.  It was a real mess.  And, basically, we had to stop the review project.  Which probably didn't do the enterprise any good.

So, be very careful about the unintended consequences of your policies.  You may have to discuss projected policies, and the specifics, and wording, of the proposed policy, in order to make sure that it doesn't create a problem for someone, or some activities, within your organization.  Policy is important.  It provides the direction, for the objectives and tasks for your organization.  Policy needs to be followed.  So make sure that you don't create policies that your people cannot follow.

Volunteer management - VM - 0.00 - introduction and table of contents

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2025/05/volunteer-management-vm-000.html

Lines ...

Well, I got all excited what with them tearing down the telephone pole, right beside a nice, torn up road that they still haven't paved yet, and could easily install some conduit to bury the lines that run right through the second best view in Port Alberni, but they just put up a new pole ...

Grief cliches (3)

Help others

I would, pretty much unreservedly, recommend this one.

I have always done volunteer work.  I have always had a number of different reasons, and benefits, for people to do volunteer work.  Not only does it help the community, and specifically those in need, but it also helps the volunteer.

In terms of grief, it definitely helps to get some kind of distraction. A very good distraction is stopping thinking about *your* problems, and think about somebody *else's* problems.  Specifically, trying to help somebody else with their problems.  So, yes, help others.  Volunteer.  There are all kinds of opportunities to volunteer, and find out any way you can.

Sleep

Okay, this one is particularly stupid. 

Grief is not a thing, but a syndrome.  It is a collection of characteristics and symptoms.  The symptoms will vary from person to person.  Everyone grieves in their own way, as we keep on trying to tell people.  There isn't any twelve-step plan, or five stage process, or timeline as to how long before you stop grieving.  (You actually never do stop grieving.)

But there are symptoms and characteristics that are fairly common to most people who are grieving.  And number one, the one that affects the most people, in the most cases, is sleep disturbance.  This can be sleeping too much, in which case telling you to sleep is pretty stupid, or it may be the fact that you cannot get enough sleep, in which case telling people to sleep is pretty stupid.

Take time for short term distractions

Yes, once again, I would think that this is a pretty good one. Grief consumes you.  Everybody thinks it shouldn't, but it does.  Now you do have to do a certain amount of grief work.  How much, and what type, depends on you, and can't be predicted or prescribed.  But you do have to grieve, a certain amount, and at certain times.  And that's okay, and in fact it's kind of required.

But pretty much any distraction that you can get, to keep from the grief consuming you completely, is a good thing.  Anything that you can enjoy, that will distract you, go for it.  Okay, maybe there are some provisos.  Sometimes your grief, and the cognitive impairment that comes along with you, can make it really difficult to know what's good for you, and what, in fact, you actually do want.  So, there are some distractions that can be damaging.

And, very often, you will find that the things that you used to enjoy, that gave you pleasure, that you used as distractions prior to your bereavement, just don't work anymore.  I used to watch a lot of movies with Gloria.  We really enjoyed them.  After she died, I found that movies, and TV shows, were incredibly annoying.  I still watch pretty much most of the movies that I watch in a setting, on the DVD player, that plays them about a third faster than they're supposed to be run.  As a matter of fact, an awful lot of movies I play at with the subtitles on, and at the level one fast forward setting, which still allows me to read the subtitles.  That runs the movies about in about half the time that they are supposed to run.  I'm getting better, and things that I record on the TV I can generally accommodate at regular speed, since the settings on recording things off the TV don't allow me to do that fast forward stuff that I do with DVDs.  But I don't get the same level of enjoyment and distraction out of movies as I used to.

I have read all my life, and enjoyed reading.  I read pretty much everything, and an awful lot of different things for enjoyment.  When Gloria died, I stopped reading.  Not entirely.  I still read a ton of stuff for research and learning.  But I have to be really careful, these days, in terms of what I read for pleasure.  Reading doesn't distract me anymore.  It's very weird, because I read for my whole life, before I met Gloria, and while I was married to Gloria.  So having this distraction not be available to me, or having to be really careful about what books I choose to read for pleasure and distraction, is really kind of bizarre.

So, yes, distract yourself. If you can.

Grief topics: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2025/06/grief-table-of-contents-and-resources.html

Volunteer management - VM - M - 1.2 - motivation, basics

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

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2025/05/volunteer-management-vm-000.html

Volunteer management - VM - 0.02 - assets

I have mentioned managing risk.  I have also mentioned that I am a security specialist, so we talk about managing risk a lot.  And there is one thing that too many people keep on forgetting when we are talking about managing risk.  People are willing to talk about threats, and impact, and vulnerabilities, and protections, but, too often, people fail to consider what is the most important aspect of all, in terms of risk analysis and management.

The asset.

All right, that may sound a little weird when we are talking about volunteer organizations.  But we do, indeed, have assets in volunteer organizations, and we need to protect them from risk.

Okay, you may be thinking about the building that you have, or rent, and the furniture that may have been donated, and maybe the photocopier, and possibly the coffee machine.  No, the first asset that you need to think about is your volunteers.

After all, if you don't have volunteers, you don't have a volunteer organization.  You need volunteers.  You need volunteers who will do work for you, in pursuit of the cause or objective.  We will talk a bit more about that, a bit later, and motivation, and a number of other things.  But, first off, remember that they are an asset.  They are a resource.  In order to pursue the objectives of your volunteer organization, you need volunteers.  You have to recruit them, you have to motivate them to work, and you have to retain them, because, as I said before, they make up only four percent of the population and a number of other volunteer organizations would be only two delighted to poach them from you.  They are an asset.  You need to protect them.

Okay, there are other assets.  There is the aforementioned building, and possibly desks, and chairs, and computers, and possibly pieces of specialized gear.  It depends on what your organization does.  Those are all assets, but they are normal assets, and you protect them in the normal way that you protect any kind of business asset.  That doesn't change in a volunteer organization, so we don't need to go into too much detail about that.

Then near there is the reputation of your organization.  This is a major asset.  This is, after all, how you are going to get donations that you may need to fulfill your tasks and objectives.  Your organization's reputation is important, and you always need to make that quite clear to your volunteers.  Pretty much all volunteer organizations are going to tell their volunteers that they represent the organization, or possibly a parent organization, and they need to be on their best behavior, and not break any of the policies or rules, because it would look bad.  But that's a pretty weak consideration for most of your volunteers.  They probably don't care too much about the parent organization, and they may not even particularly be concerned about the volunteer organization overall.  You need to make clear to the volunteers that the reason you are asking them not to break rules, and be polite to the public, and all kinds of other associated issues to do with good behavior, is that, in pursuit of the objectives that you all share, you need to have goodwill from the public, and from donors, and possibly from other businesses or entities that you are going to ask for assistance in the tasks you need to accomplish.  The objective, that you all share, is something that the volunteers are going to care about.  Note that you need public support, donations, possibly donations in kind, possibly donations of services, and that the reputation of the organization means that you can obtain those donations or services.  That's the kind of thing that is going to matter to your volunteers.  That's how you get them to protect your reputation.

That's also the kind of argument to make in terms of protecting other aspects, like the building, or the chairs, or the organization's vehicle.  Make the argument on the basis of the objective of the organization: the cause that the volunteers are there to support.  Tell them that if they leave doors unlocked, then the desk that they need to write on, in pursuit of whatever tasks you're having them doing, are going to be gone.  Tell them that if they leave the truck parked in a bad part of town, then the windows get smashed, and then the truck can't be used for whatever the truck is needed for.  Security is everybody's job, as we say in the security field, but give them a reason with which they are going to agree when you ask them to help protect your assets.

Which brings us to our final asset: your cause.  The objective behind the volunteer organization in the first place.  This is kind of an interesting one because, in a sense, your real objective is to put yourself out of work.  Because behind any kind of charitable organization is something that is not being addressed by society at Large.  It's not something that you can get someone to make a business out of because no one has figured out how to make money out of doing this, or they would have done so already and you wouldn't need a charitable organization.  So, if your organization is, in fact, effective, then it reduces the cause for the organization to exist.  You are, constantly, trying to put yourself out of business.

Okay, that may sound a bit weird.  But it's the reality, and it's just one of the ways in which volunteer management is quite distinct from ordinary business management.

Volunteer management - VM - 0.00 - introduction and table of contents

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2025/05/volunteer-management-vm-000.html