Creating a Volunteer Handbook? Here’s What to Include
Volunteer Handbooks (also called Manuals, Guides, etc.) are a key foundational risk management strategy. They are also an important part of the talent management of your volunteer corps.
Leading Volunteers Is Easier When You Adopt These Practical Techniques
As promised in a recent post I’m sharing more thoughts on nonprofit leadership. Today’s post is based on my reading of Doing More with More: Putting Shared Leadership Into Practice, a Nonprofit Quarterly article. It offers a nice overview of the key ingredients needed to bring about collaborative leadership that in turn results in enhanced nonprofit capacity.
Volunteer Stipends, Interns, and Employee Volunteers: Some Important Things to Know
If you're thinking about offering volunteer stipends, or allowing employees to volunteer, be sure you understand how labor laws might affect you. Here is a brief run down.
Effective Delegation: Are You Delegating or Dumping?
In the harried rush to meet deadlines and respond to email, phone calls, and crises, we often communicate the best we can to our colleague, cross our fingers, and then rush of to the next thing. But is this most effective tactic in the long run? Probably not -- not with our paid staff and certainly not with our volunteers.
Why You Need to Embrace Organizational Support for Volunteers
If you’ve been involved in volunteer management for any length of time, you’ve inevitably come across people who just don’t get it. They either view volunteers as widgets who can be automatically plugged in to shore up the organizational need du jour, or they think volunteers are too much hassle to be worth it. If the decision makers in your organization feel this way, you’re not likely to get the support you need.
Calculate Your Volunteer Program’s ROI with this Easy Framework
We assume that volunteer programs enhance the capacity of nonprofit organizations by supplementing and extending the work of paid staff. But by how much? Maybe it’s time for us to get down to the business of calculating our volunteer program ROI.
6 Ways to Recruit College Student Volunteers
I have a new friend who is an engineering professor at a local university. He’s been struggling with implementing a new student service program in one of their dorms. He asked for suggestions, so I thought I’d share them with my readers, too.
Corporate Volunteers: What Do They Want From Nonprofits?
In the midst of scandals and declining trust, businesses are increasingly concerned with maintaining a positive brand reputation in the public eye. This represents a potential windfall for nonprofits who are looking to leverage needed resources from the business community, including volunteer support. So, what does buisness want?
How to Design a Volunteer Training Program that Boosts Learning
How to Design a Volunteer Training Program that Boosts Learning When designing a volunteer training program, the biggest challenge is how to create a training process that doesn’t scare volunteers away. Often, the programs I work with have daunting amounts of information volunteers must learn in order to perform with confidence. Programs must be assured [...]
How to Engage the New Remote Volunteers
How to Engage the New Remote Volunteers In Part I of this post, I discussed the changing nature of the workplace and how technological advances affect how we can work with remote volunteers. In today’s world, most volunteers are both virtual and mobile -- even those that work on-site -- because many already access information, [...]