Nonprofit volunteers were the focus of a tweet last week from a friend involved in the Social Media Club of Kansas City who works in the nonprofit sector. The tweet was about the challenge of managing an influx of nonprofit volunteers who want to contribute time and expertise to an organization. Handling monetary contributions is relatively easy - send a check, fill out an online credit card form, establish an electronic funds transfer. But with nonprofit volunteers seeking to offer their effort, someone in the nonprofit organization has to allocate time to coordinate, train, and supervise these volunteers. Despite the typical need for help, this can create a real choke point leading to both nonprofit volunteers and staff becoming frustrated and dissatisfied.
We'll be addressing this potential issue as an opportunity today as The Brain
My tweeted suggestion back to my friend, and something we'll explore in more depth today for CASA, is to create job descriptions for nonprofit volunteer positions.
By taking time upfront to craft job descriptions of roles volunteers can play in a nonprofit organization, they can help match themselves to appropriate roles, identify training needs (and potentially self-train if resources are available), and be more successful with greater self-management of their volunteering effort.
This approach, however, isn't limited to nonprofits.
When I was directing our company's NASCAR sponsorship marketing strategy, we both needed broad organizational help to make the program work and had a lot of people (usually big NASCAR fans) who wanted to be involved with the sponsorship marketing effort. The mismatch came from people not understanding what help we needed and being able to determine whether they were still interested. Through finally coming up with several job descriptions, it became easier to let people know what we needed and get them started contributing time with less supervision from our department's NASCAR sponsorship team.
Look at your own efforts. No matter the size of your organization, are you doing things to help "volunteer" supporters (and in turn yourself) act on their interest in your cause and be more successful at it? If you are doing a great job at this, what strategies are you using to make it happen? – Mike Brown
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