In his recent Ted Talk, “The way we think about charity is dead wrong,” author and fundraiser Dan Pallotta raises some serious questions about our current mindset in the social sector. He argues that a discriminatory belief system about nonprofits stunts our growth and capacity. This also impact how we think about and resource our volunteer programs.
Are You Curious About Australian Volunteerism? Let’s face it, it’s getting harder and harder to engage a quality, committed volunteer support network. Society is evolving and volunteers are, too. The approaches organizations used in the past to engage volunteers simply aren’t working anymore. Australian volunteerism is not immune to this problem, and we can learn [...]
A Nonprofit Research Report You Need to Download Now If you work with volunteers or lead an organization the engages them, check out our 2017 Volunteer Management Progress Report survey results. The report with groundbreaking nonprofit research was just released this week. This “state of the industry” survey includes questions related to volunteer management practices, [...]
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.
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 [...]
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.”
Volunteer Leadership: An Effective Model You Need to Know Now, more than ever, volunteer administrators are called upon to strengthen their volunteer leadership skills. The ability to inspire and influence is critical to a volunteer coordinator's success on the job. Whether they work with volunteers, community partners, executive management, or colleagues, a coordinator must have [...]