Category: volunteering

Problems with the Current Model

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE

From the new Spark whitepaper, The Mission Driven Volunteer, written with Peggy Hoffman:

The current model of volunteering in associations, based on standing committees, is broken, leading to:

  • Difficulty recruiting volunteers
  • Do-nothing committees
  • Poorly attended meetings
  • No new ideas
  • Volunteer burn out
  • Disengaged and disheartened volunteers

All these are artifacts of a system that values form, position, and title over function, meaning, and action.

This model is pathological for several reasons:

  • It ignores the reality of generational differences.
  • It handcuffs organizational decision-making.
  • It limits opportunities for involvement.

Want more? Download your free copy at http://bit.ly/13Wwe1F.

 

Announcing: The Mission Driven Volunteer

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE | 1 Comment on Announcing: The Mission Driven Volunteer

I’m excited to announce the third Spark white paper – The Mission Driven Volunteer – co-authored with Peggy Hoffman, CAE, President of Mariner Management.

This week, I’ll be blogging about the contents of the whitepaper.

The basic premise is:

Associations’ current model of volunteering is broken. Standing committees value form and position over function and effectiveness. They ignore generational differences, produce slow, inefficient, and unoriginal decision-making, and limit participation.

Mission-driven volunteering is a new model that allows associations and our volunteers to focus our limited resources, measuring everything we do by how well it supports and contributes to the mission of our organizations. Mission-driven volunteers embrace ad hocracy and micro-volunteering, allowing diverse groups of members to contribute in ways that make the most sense to them.

I’ll be writing more about each of these points this week, but in the meantime, pick up your free copy at http://bit.ly/13Wwe1F, no divulging of information about yourself required.

Walk a Mile in Their Shoes

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE

The presentation Peggy Hoffman, Eric Lanke, and I recently gave at ASAE’s Marketing, Membership and Communications Conference on volunteer engagement was about learning to manage volunteers by being a volunteer, aka “Walking a Mile in Their Shoes.”

I addressed this topic by sharing my story of volunteering with the National Capital Area Food Bank as a means of illustrating the following points:

  • Learn by doing: What can we learn about what works, what doesn’t work, and what our volunteers need to be successful by volunteering ourselves?
  • Have a defined task: Do your volunteers know exactly what you need them to do?
  • Create clear expectations: Do your volunteers know what constitutes success at their volunteer tasks, and how they’ll know when they’re done?
  • Match skills to opportunities: Do you work to find out what your volunteers are really good at and really passionate about before matching them with assignments?
  • Ensure their time is well spent: Do you respect your volunteers’ time?
  • Show that their efforts are appreciated: Do you make sure your volunteers see the impact of their work? Do you report back on what happened with the ideas and recommendations they provided?

Per our session design, I then asked attendees to apply those principles to answering the following question: What have you learned from your own experiences as a volunteer that you can bring to your role as a manager of volunteers to improve their experience with your association?

Our session participants came up with some great advice:

One woman talked about her experiences as a soccer mom to point out that we need to be careful not to over-complicate or over-manage the process. If people want to volunteer, make it easy for them to contribute and get involved. Be ruthless about stripping away any unnecessary hurdles.

Another attendee warned us, based on her time serving on the PTA, to beware death by meetings. It can be hard for 100% volunteer organizations to find good facilitators, but that’s critical to respecting your volunteers’ time. When people are forced to waste time in long meetings that go nowhere and accomplish nothing, they quickly become disillusioned and disengaged.

One participant referenced phone banking to raise money for a college alumni association to illustrate the importance of communicating with your experienced volunteers. If processes, procedures, goals, policies, etc. change, new volunteers won’t know any different, but your experienced volunteers will be confused, and, again, potentially turned off to volunteering for your organization.

What have you learned from your own experiences volunteering that you can apply to your association work to help you do better by your volunteers?

Dump Your Committees

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE | 1 Comment on Dump Your Committees

Volunteerism is changing.

I know I’m not the first person to think – or write – about this. Hell, Peggy Hoffman and Cynthia D’Amour have built their businesses on working with new volunteer models. But recent events have conspired to bring it top of mind for me.

The thing about standing committees is that they’re standing.

Think about that for a moment.

Not “walking.” Not “running.” Not “flying.” Not “innovating.”

Standing. As in “still.”

OK, that may be excessively harsh.

One of the problems with standing committees is that they can easily become zombies, continuing on with calls and meetings and reports to the board whether or not there’s actually anything for them to DO.

Now maybe, at some point in the past, nobody really cared all that much. It was part of your community responsibility to be on the call or in the meeting or to write the report, and if nothing was happening, you were OK with that. Common good and whatnot. At least that’s the theory about Boomers, although I tend to think it’s way less true than everyone pretends it is, but whatever.

One thing we know about following generations is that we’re at least more comfortable expressing our irritation with wasted time and effort. We want to come together, GSD (Get Shit Done), and move on.

What does that remind you of? A task force, right? Bring together a group of people who are genuinely interested and skilled in the task at hand, work on it until it’s done (whether that’s an hour, a day, a week, a month, a year…), have a nice happy hour to celebrate your success, disband.

I know what you’re about to say: “Our standing committees are set in our bylaws. Do you know what a pain in the ass it is to try to change our bylaws?”

Actually, yes, I do, having been through it in prior associations. And you do probably have to maintain a standing finance committee. But just because something is hard to do doesn’t mean it’s not a good idea.

Scared?

What about an experiment?

The next time one of your board members comes up with a great idea that doesn’t have a natural home in one of your existing committees, try putting together a task force to work it, and see what happens. If it goes well, try disbanding one of your standing non-bylaws-mandated committees (you know you have at least one) and spreading their work to some task forces. If that goes well, maybe it’s time to open the conversation about which standing committees you really have to have, and which you don’t.

 

Super Swap

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE

I had the opportunity to attend the July Super Swap at ASAE yesterday. I attended two sessions: one on volunteerism, one on technology: fad v trend.

The best things I learned/heard include:

Volunteerism

  • Different tools have different strengths. Match the tools you offer your volunteers to what it is they’re trying to do.
  • Create volunteer job descriptions and publicize them before recruitment, so people know what they’re getting into. Then interview applicants before accepting and assigning them.
  • Volunteering is more than just serving on a committee. Other ideas include writing an article for a newsletter or magazine, presenting for a webinar or at a conference, taking over items from staff to do lists that you never get around to (how about calls to members?), providing or promoting content on social media, organizing local networking events, fundraising, acting as a focus or advisory group, mentoring, membership recruitment, advocacy…

Tech: Trend v. Fad

  • Fads are generally negative, but they can lead to new ideas.
  • A trend is a fad that’s graduated.
  • Trends gain momentum, while fads lose it.
  • Particular tools may be a fad (MySpace), but the ideas are trends (connecting with people you know or would like to know online and simply).
  • Until you’re answered the “why,” there’s no point in considering the “how” – it’s ALWAYS easier to do nothing.
  • ALWAYS have a call to action in any communication, otherwise, why are you bothering me?
  • Don’t expect less from social media in terms of measurable ROI than your other communications channels, but don’t expect more either.

 

Innovate Now! But How?

Posted on | by Elizabeth Weaver Engel, CAE | 1 Comment on Innovate Now! But How?

We’re constantly being urged to innovate, but frankly, in a world of venture capital, nanotechnology, medical advances, and big R&D budgets – none of which nonprofits have access to on a regular basis – that constant drumbeat of “innovate…innovate…innovate” can feel more than a little intimidating – it can even seem impossible.

The thing is, your association is never going to be Apple (hell, Apple might not be Apple after visionary founder Steve Jobs is no longer on the scene).  And that’s OK.  You don’t have to change the world for everyone to have an impact on someone.

So as a community, if we’re not going to discover an abundant, non-carbon-based, renewable energy source or find the cure for AIDS or bring peace to the Middle East or create the next iGottaHaveIt device, what can we do?  Where is our ground for innovation?

It’s right under our noses: membership and volunteerism – the two things we, as a community, can lay claim to owning.

And the thing is, we NEED to innovate in both of these areas, because they’re key to our operations and they’re in the midst of being subjected to some pretty powerful generational forces.

I posted about this earlier this spring, but I think the current association model, particularly as relates to membership and volunteering, is an artifact of its creation by the Boomers.  Membership is often a one-size-fits-all prospect, with lots of “community good” stuff, well, stuffed in there, whether or not the individual member wants it or wants to support it.  That lets us get away with pricing at least some of our offerings below what they actually cost us to produce, artificially inflating demand, which in turn, makes it hard to kill things that should die.

John Graham gave a speech at the Association Foundation Group’s national conference a few weeks ago where he indicated that the association model is predicated on only about 25% of our members taking advantage of any given service that’s offered to them. His point was that if they all took 100% advantage of their memberships, we’d go out of business.  My response was different – that means that, for any given “benefit” you offer to members, 75% of them don’t want it.  And yet they’re paying for it.  And we wonder why we have a hard time articulating our value proposition!

To paraphrase the always-provocative Scott Briscoe (and I linked to this post recently in my regular Wednesday What I’m Reading feature):  we’re inundating our members with too much irrelevant crap.  No wonder they “don’t pay attention!” (how often have you said that?)  They aren’t interested in 75% of what we keep insisting on telling them about – no wonder we can’t get their attention about the 25% that actually matters to them.

Xers and Millennials – aka, your members of tomorrow – have much higher expectations of paying for what – and only what – we actually want (the article linked relates to Boomers versus Xers as parents of school-age kids, but it’s both interesting and relevant for our discussion here).  I quote:

Gen Xers are acutely sensitive to the prices they pay and the value they receive in return.

Prepare for the modular “opt-out” consumer. 

(Oh, and did I mention that the article was written by Neil Howe?)

We need to be thinking seriously, innovating seriously, about how that affects the membership model NOW.  Hell, we needed to start thinking about this yesterday.

Those same dynamics – localism, pragmatism, focus on the bottom line, personal accountability, distrust of authority and institutions – affect volunteering just as strongly (if not more so) than membership. We’re not interested in neverending committee meetings that don’t actually accomplish anything.  We don’t want to have to “pay dues” to get a leadership position – we want responsibility based on what we’ve accomplished, not on our ability to outlast the other guy.  But don’t listen to me – check our Deirdre Reid’s New Volunteer Manifesto.  She says it all way better than I could.

Associations, and nonprofits more generally, REQUIRE volunteers to operate.  But if we can’t innovate around what we offer and our expectations and put together a model that fits with what GenX and the Millennials are looking for, there will be no one to fill those seats.

So what do you think? What are you doing to address generational change and how it will affect the building blocks of your organization?  Where else can associations innovate?