As you may have noticed from my recent posts, I’ve become more and more fascinated failure and with how people learn from it. One way to become more resilient is help your team learn from their experiences by making it safe to fail. Supporting emotional safety is important, and you can do this by avoiding the blame game.
It’s that time of year, where we (in the US) wait eagerly for our wage, income, and tax statements to arrive and we scramble to find all those receipts we need to complete our federal tax returns. Why not help your volunteers get all the deductions they have coming?
How to Lead Volunteers in Uncertainty: Your Important Work Ahead When we experience massive change, particularly when it's unwelcome or unexpected, it may feel like the best thing to do is crawl under a rock and wait for the storm to pass. But, that couldn't be any farther from the truth; especially when it comes [...]
Beware of These 6 Trends Lurking in Your Volunteer Program Over the past four years, we’ve collected a significant amount of data on the business of the volunteer program. Over 5,000 leaders of volunteers in 18 countries have taken our annual Volunteer Management Progress Report survey and we’ve all learned so much about our [...]
The other day I was reading the Five Challenges Facing Marketing, a Harvard Business Review blog post by David Aaker who’s an author and brand marketing expert. I’m always curious what the business world is doing, partly because it helps me grow my own small enterprise, but also because I almost always find something I can re-purpose for nonprofits. This time was no different. The other day I was reading the Five Challenges Facing Marketing, a blog post by David Aaker. As I read his prophetic insider’s view on what’s troubling marketers, I had a surprising revelation -- businesses are struggling with some of the very same issues nonprofits grapple with.
Now You Know: Volunteer Management Skills From Surprising Sources Professional development for volunteer managers is one of my favorite topics lately. One way to do it on the cheap is to listen to podcasts and read books. I'm always on the lookout for those that make me think differently about my practice and boost my [...]
Much of the job of initiating volunteers is helping newcomers negotiate conflicting emotions – surprise, fear, ambiguity, etc. – as they work to settle into their volunteer jobs comfortably. Unfortunately, too few organizations take a strategic and thoughtful approach to onboarding. As a result, they become a revolving door for dissappointed volunteers seeking a better fit elsewhere and are left wondering why.
It’s occurred to me that we spent a tremendous amount of time persuading others. And yet, we spend little time understanding how to do this well. Maybe it’s also time to figure out how to get better at “buy in.”
No matter how friendly your organization or how powerful your mission, before volunteers will commit to you volunteer opportunity they must overcome some emotional barriers and worries, both large and small. Your volunteer recruitment materials must provide the critical information they need to calm any anxiety they may have. Then, you can set the stage for success.
If your phone’s not ringing off the hook (or your email inbox isn’t full) with inquiries about your volunteer openings, maybe it’s time to take another look at your recruitment postings. Would you answer your own volunteer ad? If not, it’s time to renovate!