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by Carla Ganiel

How many of you are using facebook, twitter or other social media to recruit volunteers?

I mean really using it? I’ve encountered several of my favorite organizations on facebook. I’ve even “friended” some of them, but I rarely receive any communication or updates after that initial contact.

If all you’ve got is a profile you never update, then you aren’t really using social media. The power of these tools is the ability to reach large numbers of people quickly. They are particularly well-suited to recruiting episodic volunteers. Need some help with a special event you’ve got coming up? Send out a message and see who responds. Then send a second notice about the event reminding everyone who didn’t volunteer to attend. Maybe you’ll engage someone who will volunteer the next time you ask.

The benefits of social media extend beyond volunteer management to fundraising and advocacy, too. A couple of months ago a local bank invited the public to help allocate its community investment dollars by voting on a slate of nonprofit organizations or writing in others. At the time, all I could think was how this type of fundraising opportunity was perfectly suited to an organization with a well-developed social media network and strategy. Then just last week, one of my fellow commissioners asked me to post an action alert on my facebook profile encouraging my friends to call their senators in support of the GIVE Act.

As a member of Generation X, I often warm up to new technologies more slowly than some of my Millenial counterparts, but social media is clearly here to stay. Volunteer managers would be smart to begin experimenting with ways to use this technology to reach current and potential volunteers, donors and supporters.

Not sure where to start? Find a young volunteer to help you, and start reading Beth Kanter’s blog , which is dedicated to exploring the many ways nonprofits can use social media in their work.

Carla Ganiel is a featured blogger and specializes in strategy consulting for nonprofit organizations.

By Trudy Hamilton

Spring is upon us (I know it doesn’t seem like winter is releasing its grip). Spring always makes me feel alive, after a long, cold winter. For some reason, the cold really sank into my bones this year, so I am looking forward to all the new sprouts, the fiddleheads in the pot, and tender dandelion greens in the salad bowl.

Another thing that is stirring this spring is a new association, AL!VE. AL!VE is the Association of Leaders in Volunteer Engagement. We hope to become an excellent resource, support, and advocate for volunteer managers nationwide. We hope to include everyone, but one of our main ideas is to be the association for what I like to call the Independents, those of us who do not have an affiliation with Hands-On Network, and we aren’t tied to tightly to the Corporation for National Community Service or other national entities.

The Independents often lack the formal support that Volunteer Centers enjoy, and those operating under the umbrella of AmeriCorps. We don’t have all the answers provided to Girl Scout or Boy Scout staff, or other large volunteer- and membership-driven organizations.

We do, however, manage volunteer programs for Area Agencies on Aging, perhaps the local library or transportation program that engages volunteers to ensure success. We recruit, engage, and motivate the millions of volunteers in this country that are not associated or affiliated with the national outfits.

AL!VE isn’t ready to have members join yet, but as one of their Board members, I’d like some input from those of you in the field. What would you like to see provided by AL!VE for the Independents? Services? Training? Research? Advocacy? What ideas do you have? What does a national organization need to do to meet your needs? What should be a priority? This is your chance to express your ideas and share your experience, while we are still working on the details. So, I invite you to send me your thoughts. A peer2peer forum has been created especially for Al!ve. This will serve as a place where we can chat about your ideas during the development stages and then as a place for members to collaborate once Al!ve is officially established. Please join the conversation.

We plan on opening the organization to new members at the National Conference on Volunteering and Community Service in San Francisco this June, so you’ll hear more about AL!VE after that.

Trudy Hamilton is Volunteer Manager at Seniors Plus and a featured blogger.

By Ann Swain

Over the years, most volunteers I have managed would never be characterized as ‘timid’. People who are somewhat shy would not take it on themselves to volunteer unless their assignment did not call for interaction with other people. However, on occasion I have been in the unique position of ‘coaching’ a timid volunteer who has decided to use their volunteering experience to come out of their shell.

Find the special characteristic of the timid volunteer and build on their strengths. When that strength is actually brought to the attention of the shy volunteer, it’s interesting to see them light up when you identify them as having a strength; they rarely will tell you they have strengths in person to person relationships, but you can always find something. I held a training for volunteers which focused on personal strengths and it was amazing how many of the participants said they did not have any strengths. After the training, each participant had identified an area in their life that was a strength for them. They each walked out of the training a little taller that day and hopefully, a little more confident.

Ann Swain is a Senior Companion Program Director and a featured blogger.

By Melissa Boyd

Last Friday, I presented at the 4th annual Southern Maine Council on Transition Youth Conference entitled “Be Your Own Superhero…the sky’s the limit!!” which was a professional conference for high school students with disabilities and others regarding employment and training options available after high school.

My presentation was about my experience as an AmeriCorps member and a person with learning disabilities. I wanted to tell my story about my AmeriCorps experience while encouraging these young people to consider becoming a member themselves.

As a student in elementary, middle and high school I was placed in special classes as I had trouble understanding what I was reading. My math and reading scores were extremely low and my grades were less than average. I can remember my high school guidance counselor telling me to just work at the local grocery store or stay in the field of hospitality and continue to waitress. Deep inside, I knew that I had always wanted to go to college even though my grades were poor. I was accepted into Berkshire Community College and after my first semester, one of my Professors, Karen Border pulled me aside after she had read one of my essays.

“I want to talk with you about something very important” she told me. She helped me understand that I was dyslexic.

I was so relived to find out that I had the ability to retain information. Over the next six months, I learned more about my learning disability and how to work with it. Even today almost twenty years after I was diagnosed, I still struggle at times.

This leads me to my first year of service with AmeriCorps. I was living in Portland at the time and my service placement was half in Portland at the Muskie School and half in Biddeford with Pathways a school for kids who were considered at risk for a variety of reasons, many because of learning disabilities. When I arrived at Pathways, part way by bus and at least ten miles on my bike, the students were amazed that I put in the effort to come every day rain or shine. Our small old parks and recreation building in Biddeford, lacked books, supplies and the resources normal classrooms enjoyed.

One thing that AmeriCorps has taught me is that creativity is indeed the mother of all invention. I worked with the two staff and assistants at the center and we came up with a plan. We needed to teach these students, who had been kicked out of classes, put down and given up on that learning was fun and they could achieve great things. This was no small task and our plan to educate them in a new way was nothing short of inspiring. Our little building sat below the Saco River and the head teacher had experience in boat building. We worked with the students and had them call Home Depot to get supplies for a boat donated and together we built a boat. The art of boat building requires reading, collaboration, math, science and a lot of hard work.

After we finished the boat we had University of New England Environmental students visit our center and teach the kids how to test the water on the Saco River. Our efforts garnered media and political attention. After one year, Pathways was upgraded with a new building, more supplies and more teachers and became a place where students wanted to learn in an alternative way.

I’m happy to report that I am finishing my Masters degree at the Muskie School at the University of Southern Maine in May thanks to Professor Karen Border being my hero!

Service has taught me that everyone can be a hero in their own way. Our life experience not only shapes who we are, it shapes who we become. Consider joining AmeriCorps, a year of service can change your life and benefit others!

Melissa Boyd is a 2 year AmeriCorps Alum, Graduate Student, and Commissioner for the Maine Commission for Community Service.

By Larry Ullian

President Obama wants to raise the number of National Service volunteers by a whole lot: from 75,000 to 250,000 positions for AmeriCorps. Already according to USA Today, online applications are coming in three times faster than a year ago at AmeriCorps. Peace Corps applications are up 16% over last year.

Senators Kennedy and Hatch are co-sponsoring a bill called the Serve America Act, which increases opportunities and ways to do community service such as offering tax incentives for employers who allow workers to take time off for service and establishing funding sources to help non-profits recruit more volunteers.

This means lots and lots of volunteers and an increased need for competent managers of those volunteers. Are we prepared for the potential influx of eager volunteers with high expectations and equally high enthusiasm? It doesn’t take much to turn off a volunteer if he/she is inadequately recruited, matched, supervised, acknowledged, and encouraged. Are we ready?

The competencies for managers of volunteers (http://www.volunteermaine.org/volcomps) is a foundation that you can use to assess your readiness and the readiness of your own volunteers to lead a new, vigorous, and varied population of citizens dedicated to public service of all kinds.

Larry Ullian is the Director of Program Development at USM’s Muskie School of Public Service and a featured blogger.

By Anne Schink

In her classic book “The Volunteer Recruitment Handbook”, Susan Ellis notes that “Recruiting is the third step.” She makes the point that before you spread the word far and wide about ‘we need volunteers’, your organization needs to be really clear why they want volunteers, how they intend to use them, and how they plan to integrate them with staff.

When was the last time you took a long, hard look at your volunteer program to see if it was really meeting the needs of your organization or your customers, whoever they are? With all the pressure that nonprofits are feeling during this period of economic uncertainty, it is a good time to do a thorough analysis of ways that volunteers could contribute to your organization’s health.

Maybe you should ask everyone who is feeling under pressure what a ‘wish list’ would look like if they could have any extra help they wanted. Would it be someone to finally create a filing system that worked? Or streamline the financial management practices? Or create a Volunteer Handbook? Or create a training curriculum on a topic that all your volunteers and/or staff need? Or targeted training on a burning topic for your Board? Would it be a new desk? Or computer? Or books on a topic for your library?

Or someone who would love to run a support group for volunteers in challenging placements (as referred to by Margaret Puckett recently) who doesn’t really want to do direct service her/himself?

As the volunteer manager you could help your agency implement that wish list by targeting your recruiting of volunteers to those very specific tasks or projects. These small projects, with limited time frames, focused on specific skills may appeal much more quickly to the newly retired or suddenly unemployed. The traditional long term regular volunteer who arrives weekly year after year is not the norm in tomorrow’s world. Think creatively about how volunteers can enrich your agency and your programs and be very specific about defining what you want and how you want it done.

It may not look like a typical way to ‘recruit volunteers’ in the sense we think of it. Picture the man with a megaphone on the street corner yelling “We need help! And we mean you!” But this is the trend for the future. Highly skilled volunteers will respond to a call that challenges their abilities, but they may not be willing to commit to you or your organization for life.

At the same time you might just find that one of those long time loyal volunteers has a hidden skill, if you take the time to check in periodically to see if your volunteer would like to do something different. You might just uncover a gem! Do you have a success story about using a volunteer in a unique way?

Anne Schink is a consultant in volunteer management, training, and facilitation. She is also a featured blogger.