8 Ways Investing in Volunteers Builds Trust and a Freebie for You! Volunteers add so much more than an extra pair of hands to your organization. They bring tremendous value in so many ways. Understanding your Volunteer Return on Investment (ROI) can help you understand the depth of their worth and create more buy-in from [...]
Creative Volunteer Recruitment Ideas for a Complex World It's a challenge to be heard in our noisy world, so it's imperative to think about creative volunteer recruitment ideas that will continue to drive people to support your organization. This can be further compounded if your information is hard to sift through or the volunteer application [...]
Nonprofit Technology Trends You Need to Know to Reach Volunteers In my book chapter for Volunteer Engagement 2.0, I talk about nonprofit technology trends that are impacting how volunteers’ needs and expectations are changing. Technology is one of the most important and rapidly evolving domains in our lives and those of the volunteers with whom [...]
Volunteer Sustainability Strategies You Need To Increase Capacity In the face of ever-growing community needs and persistent economic strains on nonprofits, volunteer sustainability isn’t just a nice thing. It’s a necessary thing. Volunteerism is a strategic choice to use human resources to build capacity, and recent data shows it works. The Points of Light Service [...]
Four Volunteer Technology Trends You Need to Know This week, I presented some new thoughts on key volunteer technology trends that nonprofits can tap for better engagement with my friends at Wild Apricot. I thought I'd share it with my readers. Check out the free recording Need Volunteers? Four Tech Trends You Need to Know below. Enjoy! If you’re [...]
How to Increase Your Productivity: Take a Vacation! For the last six months I’ve been working two jobs -- my continuing work with consulting clients and launching VolunteerPro, my new online community. To say my self-care has been lacking would be an understatement. When I found myself losing sleep and getting grumpy with my team, [...]
If you’re like most volunteer program administrators, you “wear many hats.” The constant need to multi-task is a critical issue that needs to be addressed. But, given the current economic climate and budget shortfalls, it’s not likely that help is on the horizon. To succeed in this environment, we may need to work smarter, not harder.
7 Deadly Sins to Avoid for Better Online Volunteer Training If you lead volunteers, it's likely you’ll be called upon to design and deliver online presentations as part of your volunteer training or orientations. I’ve been participating in and presenting webinars for about seven years now, and I’m sad to say I don't see much [...]
How to Calculate the Lifetime Value of Volunteers It’s not uncommon for nonprofits to calculate the lifetime value of their donors. It helps them make decisions about how much is reasonable to spend on cultivating new contributors. This metric also helps the organization assess whether they are doing a good job at retaining supporters. But, [...]
Gathering candid opinions from your volunteers will help you gain insights around what you need to improve. Despite our best efforts, however, sometimes our surveys raise more questions than insights and don’t help us understand the specific actions we need to take next. If that’s the case for you, here are some suggestions that I hope will help generate the rich, actionable feedback you need.