Episode #070: How to Organize a Volunteer Services Department of One
Welcome to the Volunteer Nation Podcast, bringing you practical tips and big ideas on how to build, grow, and scale volunteer talent. I’m your host, Tobi Johnson, and if you rely on volunteers to fuel your charity cause, membership, or movement, I made this podcast just for you.
Well, hey everybody, it’s Tobi Johnson here for another episode of Volunteer Nation. And today I want to talk about how to organize a volunteer services department of one. If you are a nonprofit executive, volunteer coordinator, volunteer services director, or anybody else who is trying to figure out how to make this work in their organization when they simply don’t have large teams to deploy to engage volunteers, then this episode is for you.
We are going to get into it about some productivity tips, but also whether or not this makes sense or is it a team sport, is voluntary engagement a team sport? Is it a solo job? What is it? And how can you make sure it’s done effectively and efficiently? So let’s get started. We know that volunteer managers, coordinators, directors, et cetera, in that role, they wear many hats often, and I have many in our volunteer pro community and in our courses that are asking how can I do more with less? But I want to ask how can we do more with more? So part of my conversation is about more focus, more people, more support. Those are three areas that we need more of in order to really make this happen.
We know that the vast majority of volunteer coordinators work alone. They consider themselves a volunteer services department of one. And I’ll link to that volunteer Management progress report. You can look through the years of our reports, download them for free, and really see the characteristics that volunteer managers are facing in jobs, what their jobs look like, what are their challenges, et cetera. So if you’re interested in that, make sure you check out that report. It’ll help you understand how your organization compares to others as well. So it’s a great place to look and I’ll link to that in the show notes. But I’m coming today from a perspective of a lifetime nonprofit worker.
Almost my entire career before I started my consulting practice and training and coaching was working in both private charities and public sector, both federal and state level organizations that involved volunteers and were doing good in the community. And in those organizations, I was known as a highly productive person. My boss once told me, you are the most productive person I’ve ever met. And I went, that’s interesting. So I knew there was some kind of mojo. I had some kind of understanding about getting things done and it wasn’t about working a lot of overtime. I really kept my weekends to myself. I was playing soccer, I was going skiing, I was spending time with family and friends.
And I had a pretty busy social life before I started my consulting practice, and I still do. But when I was a nonprofit worker, it wasn’t about dying on the sword for my cause to be that department of one or that solo person who’s getting things done. That’s not the model that’s going to have sustainability, especially now after the pandemic. I mean, people are tired and burned out. So what we can’t do is say, oh, you’re just going to have to work harder and work more hours. That is not the answer for managing and organizing a volunteer services department of one. So I just want to put that out there. The other thing is, after I worked in nonprofits, I started my career as a solopreneur, and for over a decade, I’ve been juggling competing priorities.
Now I’ve brought on team members to help me out, but still, there’s a fair amount that I juggle on my own. And again, the answer has not been to work an extravagant number of hours and to grind it out. Although I work quickly, I wouldn’t say I’m part of hustle culture. I don’t believe in that. I don’t think that that’s going to help us in the long run. So again, from my own experience, the answer isn’t to just do more, do more hours, but the answer is to do more with less, have less resources, but keep putting in more hours. So you’re suffering from a deficit, but we can do more with more by having more focus, more people, more support for what we do. And I want to test an assumption, because this came up a lot when we started doing research.
We’ve done our volunteer management progress report now for eight years, and I started to ask after a few years into looking at the data, I started to ask and test the assumption. We all hear the saying, volunteer managers wear many hats. And I want to test that assumption and say, well, should volunteer managers wear many hats? Is it something that should be part of the job? Is it something we should accept as part of the job? Because our nonprofit simply doesn’t have enough people. Now, I would say that compared to other paid staff jobs, the volunteer coordinator, manager, director, whatever community engagement, professional, whatever you call that title that engages volunteers, whether they be employees or community.
I don’t know of any other job that has that wide of a span of responsibility and tasks. So if you think about it, there’s marketing, there’s people management, there’s training, there’s data, there’s strategy, there’s all of that. And for most jobs in our sector, nobody has to know that many different things. So part of my tips today, part of my advice for organizing a volunteer services department of one, is to start to really question whether or not the many hats model is a model that actually works. I have come to believe that it can’t be done.
The job cannot be done well if there are too many other jobs on the plate. Volunteer engagement becomes the last priority, I think partly because it’s the most difficult. Frankly, it is a hard job. It’s hard to get people off the couch and into your organization and get them helping out. It’s a joyful process. We love our volunteers, we love working with them. But that initial part of getting out in the community and getting people involved is challenging and even more so now and we’re hearing it from organizations. So if you are going to spend the time necessary and I know I’m working with a group of boost camp students and shout out to my boost campers, they’re spending eight weeks with me going through a process of developing a volunteer recruitment strategy, pipeline, tools, process.
We’re doing this in eight weeks, y’all, so it takes time. This is not something you just wave your magic wand and walk out in the community with a bullhorn and people follow you around. It doesn’t happen that way. It’s a lot of work and so it takes focus. And so if you’re thinking just recruitment alone is a big job, whether you’re recruiting 100 volunteers, 500 volunteers, 3000 volunteers, it’s still a lot of work. So I really want to push back on how do you organize a volunteer services department of one? Maybe the first thing is to make sure they’re focused on volunteer services right and that they’re not doing a lot of and responsible for a lot of other things. And I get that there are a lot of requirements in nonprofits, but I also get that you’re never going to scale without someone who can dedicate their time to this multifaceted work because it’s just really hard. Now there are some ways to address this and kind of spread the task amongst a team.
So I’m going to talk about different ways to do that today as well. So let’s get into this. So how do you organize a volunteer services department of one? So here’s my first tip. First of all, get clear on your goals. I mean crystal clear. How many volunteers, in what roles, with what talents, for what time frames, in what departments and to serve. This is probably the most important part to serve. Which organizational goals? All volunteer work should roll up to your organization’s overall goals.
If it doesn’t, then why are you doing it? If we only have so much time, then we’ve got to focus absolutely on things that are going to impact the nonprofit’s bottom line or impact in the community. So it’s really important every year to conduct some strategic planning to separate your nice to haves from your need to have tasks and you can’t do everything. So you’ve got to jealously guard your span of responsibility. And if you’re a supervisor or an executive who’s thinking about how do I organize a volunteer services department of one?
Even if they’re embedded in another department, your HR department, your development department, your comms department, your program department, wherever it is. Often volunteer managers feel like a department of one, even when they’re working within another department. So that person, if you’re an executive or a supervisor, has responsibility to support that person. Just help them really get clear on what are the most important goals. And then when random tasks come their way, they will have rationale for saying no thank you right now, but I can put that in my parking lot.
And if I complete all the tasks that are rolling up to our organization’s goals, be happy to take a look at those boundaries. So, okay, that’s my first tip. Second tip for organizing a volunteer services department of one is be realistic about what one person can achieve with the current setup. And I’ve prefaced this with this conversation already about what is the span of responsibilities for this role. But you have to be honest about what realistically can be achieved by when. And there is a time to make a case for more people or more training for systems that can get you there faster. So if time is of the essence and this is so critical that this work get done by the volunteer manager, sometimes you’ve got to think about, you have to be realistic that you know what, this isn’t going to happen unless we add some fuel to the fire. And that fuel to the fire can be other temporary help.
It can be collaborations with other departments, which I’ll talk about in a minute. It can also be additional training and tools. And that’s what we do at volunteer pro. One side of my business is volunteer pro, and we have our volunteer management fundamentals course. And when our students go through the course, they are learning and implementing systems that we’ve done all the work to create the templates, and we’ve done all the work to create the process, sort of the system. We call it our volunteer strategy success path. So there’s no guessing about what needs to be done, when and in what is the process, and what are the pieces that need to be in place. And folks can pretty quickly get things started in terms of program development or get things improved.
A lot of times people may have an existing program and then they need to improve it. So sometimes it helps to invest in a guide so you’re not hunting and pecking around whether it’s on the internet or with friends or whatever and testing things out. Trial and error. Trial and error is not efficient. It’s not trial and error is not an efficient way to go about business. So that’s my second tip. My third tip for organizing a volunteer services department of one is for the volunteer manager to perform a task audit. So a task audit is basically where you write down everything you do, your hours and your tasks over a week’s period.
And you try to pick a time period where it’s a pretty normal time period. Not when you’re off to a conference or not where you’re pitching in for a special event, but a sort of general, common time period, track hours and tasks over a week, and then sit back and go through them and see the percentage of time you’re spending on what and then ask, does this align with our goals? Going back to tip number one, does this align with the goals we’re trying to reach at our organization? Visa vis Volunteers. And ask yourself this hard question are you wasting time on the trivial 80% versus spending time on the essential 20% of what can move the needle forward? So if you can do a task audit, it will be very clear.
And if you’re a supervisor, this is a great thing to collaborate on with your staff, and you need to present it in a way that this isn’t about me spying on you. This is about me understanding your workload and what’s impacting you and so that we can align your work with the most impact and maybe take some things off your plate so you can stay focused. If you’re a volunteer manager, this is a great thing to bring to your boss and say, like, look, I understand that these are the priorities for our organization. However, I’m being asked to do all of these other things that don’t seem to align with our greater goals. It’s a great conversation to have, and I think as a team, you can really figure this out and it can be very helpful information.
It’s not, again, about performance evaluation. It’s about aligning work with goals. It’s a little bit dissolved alignment activity, not a performance evaluation activity. I hope you get the difference there. Okay, fourth reason. Fourth tip for volunteer services, department of one, how to organize it. Block your time. Now, if you’re a volunteer manager, you want to figure out and this has been so helpful to me as a solopreneur, is to just block out my ideal week.
I set aside time for deep work. Mondays are my deep work days. I do not schedule meetings on Mondays. It’s very rare where I would say I would take a call or do training or do a meeting on Monday because Monday is my deep work day. It’s my day to develop slides and develop curriculum. It’s my day to do anything that’s creative or takes some focus writing my book. Actually, I set up ideal weeks where I was writing every day. But as I go forward and get into the editing process for my book, it’ll be coming out next year.
I’m just about done with I need to have my self edits done by the end of the year or not the end of the year, end of the month. And therefore the only way to make that happen is to have days where I have nothing else going on but editing. So that’s the only way to do it. I have certain days of the week that I take meetings, and other days I do not. There’s certain days of the week I do trainings, other days I don’t. So blocking your time out like this can allow you to not do a lot of task switching. Task switching is extremely inefficient. You have to stop.
You have to reorganize your brain. You have to pull out files on your computer, whatever, go to a different office, whatever it is, try to block your time with similar type tasks as well. I have found this to be extremely helpful. The fifth tip I have for you for how to organize a volunteer services department of one, to be as efficient as possible is to megabatch your time. And I teach our students and our members about this. I encourage people to do it is set up your ideal year. So when you think about the year ahead, when are you going to have your volunteer recruitment campaigns? Instead of doing volunteer recruitment 3365 days a year, figure out what times of year it will be the most impactful, and spend your energy and time on that. And then spend other times of the year doing other things.
Maybe it’s volunteer appreciation, maybe it’s program development, et cetera. And so I like to map up your entire year in advance. I think it gets everybody on the same page. It also takes everybody. You’re not constantly recruiting. It’s a seasonal type of thing. You’re sowing you’re growing, you’re harvesting, and you’re plowing, and you can set things up in that kind of cycle to use a gardening metaphor. You guys know I’m a master gardener, right? That’s how I volunteer.
And so I’m always thinking about gardening metaphors. So megabatching your time. And if you’re thinking about strategic planning for 2024, I’m just going to put this little bug in your bonnet. Last year in December, we did a one week boot camp called Vision Week. And it was a boot camp at the end of the five days for people to have a strategic plan for volunteer engagement. And I did training, we had templates. We did coworking sessions. It was a lot of fun.
And it was so successful that I said, you know what, let’s do it this year too. So we’re going to move it up and probably do it in November. So if you want to get involved with Vision Week, just make sure you’re on our newsletter list because that’s where we’ll be talking about it most. So if you go to volpro.net at the top of the page there’s a place where you can sign up for our tip. It says Tips for Volunteer coordinators. But if you’re a leader at a nonprofit, it’ll work for you too. You’ll get great tips.
If you’re anybody who is interested in improving how your organization engages the community, this newsletter is for you. So go ahead and sign up for that. And then when we are ready to announce Vision Week enrollment, we’ll let you know. Cool. All right. And I will post that link also in the show Notes. So let’s take a quick pause for a break from my best tips on how to manage a volunteer Services Department of One. And when we get back, I have got five more tips. What about that? All right, we’ll see you soon.
If you enjoyed this week’s episode of Volunteer Nation, we invite you to check out the VolunteerPro Premium Membership. This community is the most comprehensive resource for attracting, engaging, and supporting dedicated, high impact volunteer talent for your good cause. VolunteerPro Premium Membership helps you build or renovate an effective what’s working now volunteer program with less stress and more joy so that you can ditch the overwhelm and confidently carry your vision forward. It is the only implementation of its kind that helps your organization build maturity across five phases of our proprietary system the Volunteer Strategy Success Path. If you’re interested in learning more, visit slash join. Okay, we’re back with our exploration about how we can manage a volunteer Services Department of One with more efficiency and by doing more with more. That’s what I’m about.
And so the second half of tips is all about doing more with more. The first half was a lot about productivity and efficiency and those kinds of things, but now I want to talk about doing more with more in terms of more people and more support. So I got one more productivity tip for you here, and it’s really about setting. I talked about mega batching before the break. I talked about blocking your time. I also subscribe to planning out your weekly calendar. I’m not big, although I do have to do lists sometimes on postit notes. I’m not a huge fan of the ever evolving postit note to do list because it just feels like you never get it done.
And I more of a mind. Through the years have developed this approach where I plan out my week on Friday for the following week. So I map out and sometimes even earlier in the week, if I know I have a big week the following week. And I’ll map out all my meetings, I’ll map out any trainings I’m doing, and I will also map out the days that I’m going to get certain things done based on when they’re due and based on when I need them, et cetera. And based on when I know I’ll have good energy. And so I have a calendar that pretty much tells me what my week is going to look like. Now, do things go exactly according to plan every week? No. But I feel very much more aware of what I’ve set out to do and I can start to plug in.
I would say my big failing still is biting off more than I can chew I underestimate always how long it will take me to do something. I really should triple the time. And I am a fast worker, but I think I can do more than I can sometimes. So that’s a continuous learning process. But at the end of your week, you can reflect back and say, okay, where did I do well and where am I underestimating? How much time it really takes. So the weekly calendar, it also keeps me moving towards the end of the week because I’m like, oh, I have a few more things that I was supposed to do on Wednesday. Now I’m going to do it on Friday. Let me get it done.
I use a particular planner called the Purpose Planner. I’ve tried many planners, physical planners. I also use a calendar on my computer. But I am a big fan of having a physical planner as well. And it’s a great place to write notes. It’s a great place to scratch things out, ideas, and then map out my week and my month. And the Purpose Planner, we actually have an affiliate link for Amazon. So if you purchase the Purpose Planner through our link, we’ll get a little bit of affiliate commission.
So if you do that, thank you so much in advance for the cup of coffee or maybe half a cup of coffee, but I’ll post in the show notes a link to this. Check it out. If you’re in the market for a physical planner, you’re not happy with the one you’re using. I love this one. It has self care areas where you can track self care, like hydration meals. There’s all kinds of things, personal goals, professional goals. And it’s very neat and
I’ve used other planners where I have one day per page, but that doesn’t give me an at a glance of the whole week. Anyway, that tip. Tip number six is to set your weekly calendar every single week, map it out. If the only thing it does is help you feel more in control and less anxious about your week ahead, then that’s a good thing. That is an excellent thing. All right, let’s get into the doing more with more. So tip number seven for organizing a volunteer services department of one is to ensure that person or that department is not working in a silo, is not working completely on their own. It really is better to collaborate across departments because in the end, there are actually other people who are more suited to take on some of the tasks that are related to volunteer engagement.
So, for example, volunteer recruitment, much more suited to nurture and build a pipeline of followers. And to nurture their interest in volunteering is much better done by your Markoms, your marketing and communications department. Why? Because they have tools that the volunteer coordinator does not have often like email marketing systems, like access to all of your brand assets, like an understanding of the organization’s entire editorial calendar. So there’s things that they are better suited to do. Certainly the volunteer manager can do these things. And we train our volunteer pro, students and members on how to do digital marketing. But if that person is doing a million other things, then maybe that’s something you should share responsibilities with. The Markom’s department similarly, for example, it or people who are doing your impact reporting, why can’t they be doing impact reporting for the volunteer program as well? Whoever is suited to slice and dice data, not everybody’s a numbers person, but some people love spreadsheets and love databases.
And those people should be the people, the people that do that for the rest of your organization, maybe they should do it for the work of volunteer services as well. So that’s another example. Partnering with coworkers a little bit more closely rather than really trying to take it on all at once. So if you’re a supervisor of a volunteer manager, why not recommend this from time to time? And if you’re a volunteer manager, savior syndrome isn’t getting anywhere, anybody anywhere. We cannot just try to do it all ourselves. We’ve got to lean on other people who have maybe more expertise, a greater zone of genius around that, or more tools around a specific task area. Okay, eight. Tip eight on how to organize or better organize your volunteer services department of one.
Again, whether they’re in their own department of one or they’re embedded in another department doesn’t matter. Let’s talk about expanding your team. I think volunteer managers need to walk the talk. And what I mean by that is bringing in volunteers to help with volunteer services. So whether it’s an advisory team, an admin team, volunteer welcome team, a volunteer training team, a speakers bureau, whatever it is, there are an admin person that’s doing maybe doing your number crunching, or maybe you’re bringing in skilled volunteers to set up a marketing and recruitment plan for you. So you need to expand your team. And if you’re in a volunteer services department of one and you have no volunteers helping you, you got to walk the talk and start leading other people. You got to lead others and show others the way in your organization if you’re expecting other people to bring on volunteers.
So then your volunteer services department of one becomes a volunteer services department of many. And isn’t that great? So of course you want to find the right volunteers for the right roles with the right skills. And if you check out Catchafire.org and I’ll post a link to their website in our show notes, you can find skilled volunteers that may even have more skills than you. Or if you’re supervising somebody, you may encourage them, your volunteer coordinator, that there may be people out there that can help you get there faster because they do this for a living. So expand your team is tip number eight. Tip number nine is about personal boundaries and professional boundaries. We need to not only set boundaries, we need to communicate them with others and maintain them. The hardest thing isn’t setting boundaries, the hardest thing is maintaining them over time.
So you want to ask if you’re the volunteer coordinator, who has access to your time, energy and attention, can people text you on your personal phone on the weekend? For example, when are you on Slack and email and answering those emails? Can people interrupt you at any time? Can they pop in your office at any time? For a know? I have had to, over the years, get pretty jealous with my time because I have a lot to do. And as much as I’d like to get on the phone and have people pick my brain for free over and over and over again, my business would be nowhere if I did that all the time. And similarly for volunteer managers, we’ve got to start to deploy, set up some walls so we can get our deep work done, so we can work on our business, not just in our business.
And what I mean by working on your business, doing program development, analyzing data, setting strategy, coaching others, versus putting out fires, working in your business is really about putting out fires. And so I use for setting one of the ways I set boundaries is I use calendarly. And if you’re interested, I have a booking link on my Tobi Johnson on this website’s page where this podcast lives on Tobijohnson.com. And there is a strategy book a call link at the top of the page in the menu and I’ll put a link also in the show notes. If you want to see the questions I asked to pre qualify folks who I’m going to have a conversation with have a discovery call with.
So it might be interesting. If you’re thinking about volunteer recruitment, are there for example, info or pre qualification questions, just a short few that you might ask to make sure that that person who wants your time is a person that’s going to be a good fit for your organization. That’s just one example of using Calendly this way or any other scheduling software, you can check out my discovery call or book a call link and just see the questions I ask. If you’re interested in working with me, of course you want to book a call.
There’s times when folks really aren’t I’m not the fit for them, whether it’s budget or what they’re looking for, or they’re not looking for anything except free information, which we have tons of free information we give out. So I always recommend I’ll send people a link to a free webinar that we have or I’ll share certain resources that are related to their questions so they can start to research on their own. So there’s times where I want to be on the call with people that are going to be able to get impact from my work with them and that it’s not a waste of their time and it’s not a waste of my time. Now you don’t necessarily do this with all your volunteers.
There’s another way to set boundaries and communicate boundaries around your time. And that is to say I have open office hours and my open office hours are these times or here are the times you can book a call with me. If you’re a volunteer and you have a concern and you want to book a call with me, you can book using this link and again you can use those questions to understand so you’re ready to have the conversation or refer that volunteer to another person. So the nice thing about these scheduling apps is that you can set the times you’re available. So I’m not available every day of the week. I am only available certain days of the week for certain spreads of time. That ensures also that I’m fully present and ready to have that conversation and I’m not distracted by the other work I need to get done that day. So you need to set, communicate and maintain boundaries on your time.
One thing I used to do when I worked, led our volunteer program in my last job is I would close my office door and I actually had an office, not everybody does. You can put up a sign in your cubicle as well and I would put on my door a dry erase board and I would lay out my day here’s where I’m going to be, here’s where I have open door, here’s where I don’t. And I would block off time where I’m doing grant reports or grant proposals or reviewing budget or whatever. And that time if the door was closed, my team knew that I was busy doing those other things. So you can keep people up to date about when they can catch you. That also helps. So you’re not trying to shut people out. What you’re trying to do is manage and wrangle all of the requests that are coming in for your time, energy and attention so that they’re in focus, spurts that you can focus your time and energy well in that time and give that person your full attention.
So that’s tip number nine. Set, communicate and maintain boundaries. My last tip for organizing volunteer services, department of one is to really ensure and encourage whoever is in that role to engage in extremely active self care. Now, boundary setting is one way to engage in active self care, but there are others certainly exercise, nutrition, mindfulness, et cetera, therapy, socialization, whatever people choose for their personal self care. But it’s just important that folks keep resilient. This is a difficult job. It’s a people job. It is emotional, there is emotional work being extended when you are the volunteer coordinator, and I had a volunteer pro member say to me once they felt like emotional air traffic control at their organization.
I thought that was a great characterization of the kind of emotional work which is negotiating conflict, often managing expectations for other people, managing disappointment. Sometimes there’s a lot, and so it’s pretty high emotional work. And so to reduce burnout, when you’re organizing that department of one, you’ve also got to choose the right people for that department, and you’ve got to make sure that those people have a self care plan in place, that they are actively engaging in, whatever it may be. So it’s hard to stay organized with a depleted mind. I know because I’ve gotten there from time to time, more times than I care to admit. But I’ve learned through the years that you must engage in active self care or I’ve not been engaging in my normal active self care lately, and I’ve noticed that my mind starts to become depleted, and I have a harder time concentrating. My productivity has gone down. And so now I have a plan to reboot and get back to all those basics.
Awesome. So that’s my show for today. Thank you so much for joining me. I hope this has been helpful, insight into how to organize a volunteer services department of one. It’s not easy. If you listen to this podcast, you probably thought I was going to talk about staffing structures and pay and et cetera, et cetera. No, those aren’t the biggest problems. The biggest problems are getting the work done, making sure volunteers are involved, making sure your organization has the talent from the community that it needs to meet its mission.
That is the harder work. The other stuff’s icing on the cake. And so my tips today were focused more on that. Like, how are we going to get this work done? Whether this person is embedded in another department or they’re working completely alone. Most people working in volunteer services, if they don’t have more people on their team, they feel like they’re working alone. They feel like a department of one. I’ve heard this many times. So we’ve got to do things to help this role become more integrated with the rest of the organization and to again, question whether or not wearing many hats is the smartest move for our nonprofit.
So I hope that’s been helpful. I hope it’s given you maybe even reinforce some things. And if you like today’s episode, would you rate it and drop me a line, drop me a comment? I’d love to hear what your key takeaway was. And of course, share with friends. That is the way we meet and reach as many people as possible. And we want to do that because we want to help the world do better when it comes to engaging communities. All right, so thanks for joining us, and I will see you next week, same time, same place on The Volunteer Nation. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Volunteer Nation podcast.
If you enjoyed it, please be sure to subscribe rate and review so we can reach people like you who want to improve the impact of their good cause. For more tips and notes from the show, check us out Tobijohnson.com. We’ll see you next week for another installment of Volunteer Nation.
