127 – Volunteer Centric, Community Centric, Organization Centric: What’s the Difference?

September 12, 2024

Episode #127: Volunteer Centric, Community Centric, Organization Centric: What’s the Difference?

In this episode of the Volunteer Nation podcast, Tobi delves into the different approaches to volunteer engagement: volunteer-centric, community-centric, and organization-centric. Tobi provides insights on the significance of each approach, their benefits, and challenges, while sharing practical tips for balancing these orientations within nonprofit organizations.  

Through analyzing search trends, real-world examples, and thought exercises, this episode aims to help nonprofits create an effective strategy for engaging and retaining volunteers, ensuring community involvement, and maintaining organizational sustainability!  

Volunteer Centric – Episode Highlights

• [00:52] – Understanding Volunteer Engagement Trends 
• [06:32] – Volunteer, Community, and Organization Centric Approaches 
• [19:18] – Concrete Examples and Practical Applications 
• [26:08] – Evaluating Your Organization’s Approach 
• [31:41] – Vision Week 2025 Strategic Planning Boot Camp 

Helpful Links

• VolunteerPro Membership Community 
• VisionWeek 2025 
• Google Trends 
• Volunteer Nation Episode #122 – Rethinking Community Involvement with Ruth Leonard 
• Volunteer Nation Episode #102 – 3 Keys to an Irresistible Volunteer Offer 
• Volunteer Nation Episode #077 – Engaging Communities in Social Change with Vichi Jagannathan  
• Volunteer Nation Episode #098 – How to Meet Volunteer Needs with 7 Solid Pivots 
• Community Centric Fundraising 

Contact Us

Have questions or suggestions for the show? Email us at wecare@volpro.net.

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Episode #127 Transcript: Volunteer Centric, Community Centric, Organization Centric: What’s the Difference?

Tobi: Well, hello, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Volunteer Nation podcast. I’m your host, Tobi Johnson, and I hope you are having a lovely week this week as we move into fall in the Northern Hemisphere, and for those of you in the Southern Hemisphere, we move into autumn. The changing of the seasons is always a really interesting time. I think people get reenergized and, you know, it’s fun. 

Start to think about things differently, and that’s kind of what we’re going to do today. We’re going to take a different perspective on volunteer engagement whether our organizations are volunteer centric, and what the difference might be between being volunteer centric, community centric, or organization centric. 

And, you know, what got me thinking about this was, I’ve been doing a fair amount of training on volunteer recruitment lately, and often when I’m talking about trends in volunteer engagement and interest in volunteering, I go over to Google, And I’ve, I think I’ve talked about this before, but I go over to Google Trends and I’ll link to this Google Trends in the show notes in case you haven’t had a chance to go poke around on it. 

It’s kind of interesting, but you know, for the first time in recent years, the relative popularity of Google searches for the search term volunteer opportunities near me is falling overall. And I have been looking at the graph incorrectly. Just full, full disclosure here. I’ve been looking at the graph incorrectly. 

So, I did a little bit of research into it. And so, I want to, if you go on Google Trends, I want you to understand what this graph means. So, first, the graph, when we look at, look at Google Trends and we type in a search term, it will show us how popular it is. The term, the, the numbers they give you in the graph are not the search numbers or the search volume. 

It’s a rating of how popular that search is compared to other searches. So, a value of 100 is peak popularity. It’ll never get above 100 on this, uh, this chart. A value of 50 means that the term is half as popular. So, a line trending downward, which is what we’re seeing, uh, in the last several months, or about a year, of the total number of searches for that term means it’s decreasing, and it’s also that its popularity compared to other searches on Google is shrinking. 

So, long story short, people are searching for information other than volunteering and volunteer opportunities near me. And I thought it might be interesting for me to just call out a few numbers. So, in May 2020, relative search ranking was 29. Now, of course, because nobody was online, they were looking at other things, right? 

In November 2021, it was at an all-time high of 100, a ranking of 100. In January 2023, it dropped to about 92. In November 23, at the end of that same year, last year, it was at 92. That was another peak. And just Last month, it was at 65, so it’s been dropping, and it always makes me, gives me pause. If you’re interested in the global number of, just absolute number of searches every month for that term, volunteer opportunities near me, right now it’s at about 165, 000 people in any given month are typing that into Google and looking for volunteer opportunities. 

So, it’s not the fact that people aren’t out there looking for volunteer opportunities, that there’s a change or a shift. Sometimes data is about trend lines, not about an absolute number. And so, when I see that trend line going down and people being interested in other things, it gets me to think, you know, so why might people not be searching for volunteer opportunities near me. 

Now, it might be because they’re, you know, we’ve had a pandemic. So, during that time, obviously, people were searching for lots of information probably around the pandemic or things they can do when they’re holed up at home, those kinds of things. This year, what might be impacting the relative popularity of that search or the interest in volunteering might be an election. 

People may already know, you know, we have big elections here in the U.S, it’s election season, and people who want to volunteer may not need to search for volunteer opportunities because they already know they want to volunteer for the campaigns. And we know hundreds of thousands of people have stepped up to volunteer this election season. I also think it might be because, you know, war or crisis. So, people are online searching for other essential information. Could be the economy. These are all things that you don’t really control. You don’t really have any control over, you know, whether we have a global pandemic, whether there’s a crisis, whether it’s the election season, you don’t really have control over that. 

There are other reasons, though, that you might control. That might be the reason why people aren’t searching. So, it may be that volunteers were treated poorly by nonprofits, and they feel like, you know what, I’m kind of done volunteering for a while. Could be that they reached out to nonprofits, and no one got back to them when they reached out. 

It could be they don’t feel like they belonged. at the nonprofit they were hoping to serve. So, there’s a lot about volunteer experience that could impact the number of people who are interested in looking at volunteer opportunities versus poking around and looking at other stuff on the internet. 

So, I always use it as sort of a proxy for understanding whether there’s a public appetite for volunteering right now. That brings me to today’s topic because I have been doing a fair amount this year of program audits and communications audits and looking at language and messaging that nonprofits are using, whether it’s in their web page or in their postings or in their emails to volunteers to encourage people to step up and support their nonprofit. 

And one of the main things that stands out almost every single time is that the website or the orientation or the onboarding really is organization centric versus volunteer centric. You know, it kind of feels like, you know, you jump on a website and it’s all about the organization, the requirements to volunteer, the organization’s mission — all important information, but is it the information you want to lead with?  

Don’t you want to get to know your volunteers? Don’t you want to communicate with those prospective volunteers in a way that meets their needs first? You know, it’s kind of like having that really See you or even slightly narcissistic friend or family member who dominates the conversation and always reverts the conversation back to them. 

I know you have somebody in your life. You’re probably thinking of them right now. You love them to death, but you can only handle them in small amounts, right? Because it’s always a one-way conversation. They’re just talking at you, and you’re sort of like, you know what, I’m kind of done with the monologue today. 

Sometimes our organization’s communication to prospective volunteers or even current volunteers can feel that way, really one way, one sided. So, I want to talk about the different ways and different sorts of orientations we can have in our communications, our activities, our programs, when we think about volunteers. 

It could be that we are operating in an organization centric way, like I just talked about. It could be we’re operating in a community centric way, which is an interesting lens also. Or our approach could be volunteer centric. And so, I want to talk about the differences between these and maybe even give you some examples so you can assess and figure out what the right balance is. 

And if you are in a balanced way, this topic is important because I think striking the right balance between these Three stakeholder groups, if you will, is critical to maximizing impact in nonprofits, right? You’ve got the community stakeholder group, you’ve got the organization, its employees, its funders, etc. 

That stakeholder group, and you have the volunteer and community stakeholder group, or volunteer stakeholder group, I should say. You know, I used to think, you know, we need to be 100 percent volunteer centric, but we need a balance of all three. We need, really do need to balance all three. 

Focusing only on one leaves our nonprofit vulnerable because we’re not really paying attention or kind of leaving the other stakeholder groups in the lurch. And we want to meet the needs. You know, that’s one critical and interesting difference between nonprofits and for profits, for example. 

Nonprofits have a complex array of stakeholders’ needs that they must meet. It’s sort of you know, endemic to what we do as a sector. So, let’s talk about this and understand this better because it is part of what we do and it’s part of our mandate as causes for the greater good. So, let’s talk about these three different terms, volunteer centric, community centric, and organization centric. 

Let’s start with volunteer centric. The volunteer centric approach really focuses on the needs, experiences, and motivations of volunteers. So, in this approach, volunteers are considered the core of the organization’s operations and decision making. And when we put volunteers at the center, we often will experience higher volunteer engagement and retention, and we will have strong relationships with those supporters. 

And we end up, they end up finding us on Google and coming in and talking to us about joining us. So, our recruitment efforts are often easier when a volunteer goes to our website or experiences or reads or takes in our volunteer postings. They get the sense that they are essential, that they are an important part of the picture at the organization. 

Sometimes there’s always a challenge, there’s always pros and cons to these, uh, different approaches as well. The challenge of a volunteer centric approach sometimes volunteer needs can overcome or overpower the organizational needs or the community goals. And so sometimes volunteers can sideline the broader mission by sucking up the air and the organization starts to spend all its time and energy appeasing volunteers. 

And I’ve seen this in organizations, I’ve been in, in organizations where we start to forget, we spend so much time thinking about the volunteer program that we forget the larger mission. So that’s the volunteer centric approach. And again, I think it’s always a balance of these three. I did an episode in Volunteer Nation, episode 122, Rethinking Community Involvement with Ruth Leonard. 

Ruth’s book is so amazing at, she has a specific chapter in her book, and check that, check that, um, I’ll put the link in the show notes. Check out that, uh, episode. She talks a lot about the different critical ways of looking at volunteer engagement and the different ways we need to also critique the way we look at volunteers at the center. 

So, there’s a really, she’s got a fantastic point of view on calling us to think and challenging us to think differently about volunteer engagement. So, when you think about the volunteer centric approach, also listen to that episode. It’s interesting to think about ethical considerations, etc. 

All right, let’s talk about the community centric approach. The community centric approach prioritizes the needs and voices of the community being served. The community will inform directly of the organization’s program services and strategies. Usually, the, the, there’s greater alignment with the community’s real needs because there’s trust and collaboration, and that lived experience of members in the community is infused in that wisdom is brought from the community into the organization. 

There’s a core kind of philosophy that the organization is not separate from the community, that they are all part of the same community together. They’re not separate and apart. Often you think about we’re here to serve a community, but we’re separate than the community versus we are part of the community and we’re working with the community. 

So, it’s a subtle difference, but I’ve been in organizations where I know I can feel the cultural difference there. The challenges of this are it can be difficult for nonprofits to balance the diverse needs of the community with the resources they have available because often some of our, you know, we’ll, we’ll be in community where there are a variety of and wide-ranging challenges. 

And some of them really aren’t in the scope of work of our organization or within our mission. And we want to help, but we don’t have the resources to do it. So, it leaves people sometimes feeling a little bit impotent because they see that community needs, they’ve talked to community members, and they feel like they don’t have answers. 

But again, if you think about the community as integrated and an organization integrated in the community, then it’s a shared solution that we want to arrive at together. So the organization isn’t coming in on a, like a white knight on a horse, fixing stuff in the community, right? That, that’s not an integrated community centric approach. 

So there’s some subtleties to this, again, ethical things to think about. A great website, and I’ll put a link in the show notes, is the community centric fundraising website. They have defined community centric fundraising as a model that is grounded in equity and social justice. And that website is fantastic for thinking about all the critical ways that we need to evolve how we work in community and within community. 

The community centric approach, again, like any approach, is going to have its pros and cons. Now, let’s talk about the organization centric approach. So, this focuses on the nonprofit’s internal goals, its sustainability, its fundraising, its long-term growth. It prioritizes mission fulfillment, financial health, and organizational efficiency. 

The benefits of this approach are that it ensures the organization’s longevity, stability, and ability to scale its impact. So, it’s sort of a business way of thinking about our nonprofits and managing our nonprofits. It’s very much about, you know, what is our mission? What are the resources we have? How are we going to meet them? 

How do we know we’re successful, et cetera? is when we become too focused on that. We risk becoming disconnected from the community or volunteers if we become overly focused on internal metrics. Now I see that this comes up sometimes in federal funding of community programs. I’ve run several federally funded programs in my lifetime in my career and You know, sometimes the metrics that those programs, it doesn’t necessarily have to be a federal funder. 

It could be any funder where if they’re not connected to the community, we often are left to make sure we’re working towards these metrics versus working towards the community. Good, which may not match the metrics actually. So we’re sort of teaching to the test. If you get what I mean, we’re doing, you know, we’re doing it to try to tick the boxes. 

And we’re spending time and energy so we can tick the boxes and keep the money coming in, but maybe that their, their boxes and their approach isn’t really meeting the core community need. And it may, may not have evolved. Maybe the program did at one time, but it hasn’t evolved with the times. So that’s an organization centric approach. 

So I hope you’re getting the drift of these. They’re none, not one of these, you know, they really need to be a balance. You can see how any one of these can. be a negative influence on an organization, but they could also be a positive one, right? And so it’s not an either or, it’s a both or all three and, right? 

And so let’s take a pause from my discussion on the differences between volunteer centric, community centric, organization centric approaches to community engagement. And after the break, I’m going to give you a, some concrete examples, and then I’m going to give you a quick way to assess. And you can assess for yourself. So, grab a piece of paper and a pen, pencil, if you’re not driving, and we’ll be right back after the break.  

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Okay, we’re back with my chat about the differences between volunteer centric, community centric, and organization centric approaches in nonprofits. This goes for public sector programs as well. 

So, what does this look like in practice? What are the kind of concrete examples? Let’s start with volunteer centric. In this case, What it would look like is a nonprofit that structures its programs based on volunteer skills and passions. Now, it will often result in high engagement, but might struggle with meeting community expectations, right? 

So, those might be the challenges. It’s really important if we’re moving towards a volunteer centric example, that we want to balance the volunteer leads. needs with the organization’s mission and also with community needs. In Volunteer Nation episode 102, Three Ways to an Irresistible Volunteer Offer, I talk about how to message to volunteers informational and emotional needs. 

And so that is a very volunteer centric way of communicating. And so, uh, you know, in your marketing we often see volun we, we, volunteers will get an understanding from our organization whether or not volunteers are at the center and are important partners in the mission, based on what we say, but also based on what we do. 

When volunteers show up, what happens? Do they feel like they are made to belong? Do they feel like they’re appreciated? Do they feel like they’re valued? If they don’t, then they don’t believe that it’s a volunteer centric organization. Now, people don’t often have a language for this, but they certainly have a gut feeling, and that gut feeling often drives behavior and depth of engagement. 

All right, let’s look at the community centric example. An organization that involves the community in decision making and program design, leading to deep trust, but sometimes facing challenges in managing volunteer needs or internal goals. Sometimes that’s the way. We need to maintain deep community ties, but still maintain our organization’s focus. 

This is hard because sometimes we start to, you know, be pulled in different directions and start to experience scope creeps. And people really start to get burned out because they’re trying to do too much. For example, when I worked for one organization, it was an employment and training organization. 

We bought, brought together a business round table because I wanted to hear about how businesses might be interested in supporting our young people and how we could improve our curriculum and the way we did business so that young people would be more prepared for employment with community based businesses. 

And so that’s a way of bringing the community into our organizations. Also in Volunteer Nation episode 77, check out engaging communities and social change with Vichy Jaganathan. And Vichy, I’m sorry, I’m probably mispronouncing. I remember when we were on this episode, I kept trying to pronounce her name and I kept getting it wrong. I probably got it wrong this time. I’m really sorry. Vichy And her team have done an amazing job of working inside and with communities. To basically design solutions so they don’t come to this community and say we have the solution help us implement it. They go to the community and say, hey, we’re living in the community here. 

We’re part of the community. We have some resource. We want to make change. We know changes. There’s a few big problems we’d like to solve, but what are the solutions you think? What is the road map you believe we need to follow? to solve some of these big issues. So it’s a grassroots to grass tops type of approach and can be very, very powerful. 

And by the way, it naturally brings in volunteers because people, once they are involved with making the plan for change, they want to be part of implementing the plan for change. So it’s a very empowering type of approach. But again, we’ve got to make sure we’re balancing that community need with the capacity of our organization to meet it. 

For the organization centric example, think of a non profit focused on achieving specific strategic goals, raising funds, scaling impact, but focuses so much on that that it alienates volunteers or over, uh, looks grassroots community needs. Maybe this organization treats volunteers like widgets or like any warm body can help us. We just need people. That’s a type of organization centric, or volunteers are treated as potential risks that we want to screen out versus people we want to welcome in. And there’s a real over focus on risk management. I’m not saying risk management shouldn’t be done. When you’re working with any group of people, you should be conducting a risk management and prioritization process. 

I do that often with our Some of our clients, when there’s an overzealous kind of, I guess that’s the only other way I would have screening people out because they’re potentially harmful when we see our community as mostly harmful. That means we’re really focusing on our organization and we’re not really seeing the big picture. 

We want to make sure we’re not losing sight of the people who make the work possible. You know, often if we are volunteer driven organizations, our volunteers and community members are those that make our work possible, and that is a high value. They’re giving us their highest, their most valuable treasure, and which is their time, their most valuable asset. 

We only have a limited amount of time, and so you know, when people are giving their time, it’s so valuable. So on Volunteer Nation episode 98, I talk about how to meet volunteer needs with seven solid pivots. And those pivots are often away from a volunteer, or sorry, an organizational centric orientation to a volunteer centric orientation. 

Those are some deeper examples of those volunteer centric, community centric, and organization centric sort of orientations. I want you to take a minute to evaluate your own organization, where you currently stand, and how, and maybe to reflect on how you can better balance these out. Look, just think about your culture, your policies, your communications, your activities, your programming, what volunteers are invited to do and what they’re not invited to do, those kinds of things, how you appreciate your volunteers, how, whether or not they have a say in what you do, think to yourself, I’m going to jot this down on a piece of paper, just jot down volunteer centric, and just do three boxes next to each other, three squares next to each other, at the top of one write in volunteer centric, at the top of the middle one write in community centric, at the top of the the box on the right write in organization centric. 

And I want you to think what percentage of your focus is on each of these approaches? Now, they should all, all three percentages should add up to 100. So, let me go through these and you can kind of just assess while I’m describing. And just kind of give your best guesstimate. So, volunteer centric, see if this sounds like you or how, but to what extent does this sound like your organization, your organization implements flexible opportunities for volunteers that align with community needs and organizational goals and its communications focus on volunteers informational and emotional needs first. 

So, to what extent is that 100 percent, 30 percent, zero percent? Because remember we’re going to, each of these, when we add up these boxes is going to come to 100. If it’s 100 percent, then the other two must be zero. So, it’s probably not 100 percent, right? So that’s your volunteer centric. Okay, let’s try community centric your organization ensures community involvement in key decision making and tape and sees the organization and community as interdependent while balancing the operational needs of the nonprofit. 

Think about that for a minute. So, to what extent 0 to 100% Is your organization community centric? And again, if it’s 100%, the other two would have to be zero. So, just give your best guesstimate. Nobody’s checking your work, so don’t worry. This is just a fun thought exercise. All right, the third one, organization centric. 

Your organization focuses mainly on mission, fundraising, and long term sustainability, but attempts to remain adaptable to the needs of volunteers in the community. So, is that organization centric? Let me add one other thing. Does this sound like you? Your webpage for volunteers, your recruitment webpage, is filled with information about your organization. 

Sort of like that slightly narcissistic friend or family member. add very little about what volunteers are interested in, in terms of making a difference. I like to talk about what’s your big why? Are you leading with what’s the big why? What, what difference can volunteers make? Are you leading with these are the 25 steps to apply, right? 

Think about that. To what extent is your organization, what part of the pie, the three, three-piece pie, is your you might have been good to do this as a pie. Anyway, you could also not, just rely on your own lens. You could evaluate and get feedback from other stakeholders, like your volunteers, community, and internal teams, just to see what they think about the percentages of these and the balance of these. 

Thanks. Look, gang, this was a fun thought exercise. It’s certainly not scientific in any way, but I hope it got you thinking because we really do, especially those of us who are involved in community engagement, it’s really behooves us. To find a balance that aligns with our mission, values, and stakeholders, which are our volunteers, funders, the community, our employees, we need to strike a balance between these types of approaches. 

It’s not easy, but it’s essential to your success and you risk alienating one or all of these groups if you don’t take them into account. And each of these approaches are essential to your mission. So again, it’s not an either or. You know, for a long time, I’m like, we need to be more volunteer centric. We need to be volunteer centric. 

I’ve done more thinking and reading and considering and mulling it over, and I believe that we need all three. And maybe we need to lean more into volunteer centric than others. Maybe not. Maybe the best balance is. 33 percent, 33. 33 percent in each domain. I don’t know. I think it depends on the organization and what feels right. 

I think we just need to be aware. You know, there’s no hard and fast rules, but we need to be aware when we are neglecting. I think that’s the most important thing, when we are neglecting one of these domains. Because again, they are all vital to your mission. So that’s all I got for today, gang. I really appreciate you joining us. 

Thank you for listening in. One last thing I wanted to mention that we have now opened the wait list for our Vision Week 2025 Strategic Planning Boot Camp. We, this is the third year we’re offering this. And we’re going to do five days. I’m going to go live for about an hour a day, and I’m going to take you through a process that by day five, you’re going to have a written concrete plan for 2025 for how you are going to engage and bring about impact with volunteer talent. And it’s a fantastic opportunity to get your ducks in a row. We’re doing it November 18th through 21. I would also, if you’re planning on participating, block out some time that week after each of our sessions to do some work yourself, because you won’t be able to get it all done. 

during my teaching sessions, but we’ll have time during the week for Q& A, we’ll hear from others who are doing strategic planning in their volunteer programs from, that are members in our volunteer pro community, uh, it’s going to be a lot of fun. Every year we have a lot of fun and every year we ask people, should we do this again? 

And every year we hear people say yes. So it’s going to be very uh, affordable. We haven’t figured out the price point yet. We’re still thinking through the different options to, to make sure it’s available to as many people as possible, but also doable for us. So, uh, stay tuned for that. But if you want to get on the waitlist now, you can go to volpro.net/vision and there’s a simple waitlist form. When you hit confirm, we’ll also give you a link. You’ll get forwarded to a link that has a curated list of supplies. So, if you want to order up your supplies for Vision Week. This is a very fun and active process and I’ve used this process for my own planning for years now. 

I think it works. I’m going to be giving you productivity tips as well. It’s a lot of fun. It’s going to be very focused. We want to all be accountable to one another, and if you want to get your plan together for 2025 and just get it done and dusted, join us for Vision Week, okay? Get on the wait list, and we’ll send you additional information when it breaks. 

All right, everybody. Thank you for joining us today. If you like this episode, I hope you’ll share it with a friend. And like us, rate us, leave us a review. We love reviews. We love ratings of five, five stars because we want more people to hear what we’re doing. Take care, everybody. I’ll be here same time, same place next week on the Volunteer Nation. 

Have a great week, everybody.