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Guest Post by Carla Ganiel

It’s been about four months since we launched this blog. Many readers have shared with me that this is the first blog they’ve ever read, and since we’re no longer “new,” I guess this means that those of you who were new to the blogosphere aren’t so new anymore either. In the spirit of expanding our horizons even further, I thought this might be a good time to review a few ways you can participate even more actively in the conversation we are creating here.

Comment. Posting a comment is a quick and easy way to add your voice to the conversation. Simply click on the comment link that appears at the bottom of each post. Ask a question, agree or disagree, or share a new perspective. Don’t be shy. Comments are one of the ways blogs create community. We want to hear from you!

Subscribe. You can have new blog posts delivered right to your email inbox. See the “subscribe” heading in the right-hand column of this blog? Type your email address in the box just below that heading and click “sign up,” and you’ll never have to worry about checking the site for new content again. You’ll get an email as soon as we’ve published a new post. If you read multiple blogs, consider subscribing to them all through an RSS Reader.

Become a Guest Blogger. Write a post of your own and submit it to our editorial board. To find out more about what we’re looking for, read our submission guidelines.

Carla Ganiel is a nonprofit management consultant from Tremont, Maine.

Guest Post by Carla Ganiel

Over at Problogger, Suzanne Falter-Barns asks “Have Blogs Killed Conventional Websites?”

Meanwhile, Jason Preston of Blog Business Summit explains why every business should have a blog. Jason says, “If you wrote a blog about the ins and outs of trucking, and people who were interested in trucks (or being a truck driver) could find the answers to their questions and get a sense of your (undoubtedly good) personality, what company do you think they’ll look to first when they need to get hired?”

What about nonprofit organizations? What about volunteer programs?

If you wrote a really interesting blog about the issues your organization or program seeks to address, would it help you attract more volunteers?

Does every volunteer program need a blog?

Carla Ganiel is a nonprofit management consultant from Tremont, Maine.

by Christy Monroe

In the three weeks since this blog has launched we’ve seen a diverse snapshot of topics from across the field of volunteer management in Maine. Hot topics, burning issues, scorching successes…we’ve learned from them all.

Blogging is not only an enjoyable conversation among peers, but also an excellent tool for sharing knowledge and adding value to each other’s work. Professional development built around a community of practice gives us the opportunity to advance further than any one person could go by themselves.

Whether reading this blog, commenting, or submitting a guest post you’re in the process of exchanging knowledge for the greater good of our volunteer management community.

Check out this blog post from Michele Martin on blogging for learning. She discusses key points like focusing on the process, adding value, and forming a learning community. She encourages people to share mistakes as well as successes for an optimum learning experience.

And remember that anyone is welcome to share their story or opinion on a volunteer management topic by submitting a guest post to this blog.

Christy Monroe is an AmeriCorps VISTA member at the Maine Commission for Community Service.

Guest Post by Carla Ganiel

In my last post I mentioned that I subscribe to over a hundred blogs. How do I manage all that information without getting overwhelmed? And how do you “subscribe” to a blog, anyway?

When I first started reading blogs, I used to bookmark them the way you would any other website you wanted to return to, but eventually that got to be too much. I found myself checking my favorite blogs several times a day to see if any new content had been posted, while some blogs I forgot to check for weeks at a time. Clearly, the more blogs I tried to keep track of, the less efficient my bookmark approach became.

Then I discovered RSS, short for “Really Simple Syndication,” a tool that lets you know whenever a blog or other website has been updated. Once again, Darren Rowse at Problogger provides an extremely clear and thorough explanation of how this works. To put it simply, blogs publish a feed, to which you can subscribe. Darren writes, “It’s like subscribing to a magazine that is delivered to you periodically but instead of it coming in your physical mail box each month when the magazine is published it is delivered to your ‘RSS Reader’ every time your favorite website updates.”

Darren recommends two free RSS readers for beginners, Google Reader and Bloglines. I use Google Reader and have found it very user friendly. I have it set up as my homepage so that whenever I turn on my computer the first thing I see is a list of new blog posts that have been published by all the blogs to which I subscribe. I don’t read every single post from every single blog subscription. Instead, with Google Reader, I can scan through them quickly, reading the headlines and deciding how to manage the content.

If the headline doesn’t grab my attention, I might just delete the post. If I’m interested in the topic, I might skim it and then delete it. Or I might read the whole thing and visit the blog to leave a comment. If I want to share the post with my friends, I can email it to them right from Google Reader. And if I want to bookmark a particular post for future reference, I can use another great tool, del.icio.us, a social bookmarking site that lets me organize all my links online, access them from any computer in the world, and share them with my friends.

To subscribe to this blog’s feed, click on the orange RSS icon in the right-hand column. You can also subscribe to receive updates whenever comments are made by clicking on the RSS 2.0 link when you leave a comment.

This may seem like overkill if you’re new to blogging. Maybe this is the only blog you read. But blogging has a funny way of snowballing, and you may be surprised at how quickly you find yourself keeping track of more and more blogs. If that’s the case, you may be ready to try out RSS sooner than you think.

In the meantime, there’s another option to help you keep track of updates to this blog. Simply enter your email address in the box in the right-hand column and click “sign up,” and we’ll send you email updates to let you know when we’ve posted something new.

Carla Ganiel is a nonprofit management consultant from Tremont, Maine.

Guest Post by Carla Ganiel

I currently subscribe to over a hundred blogs on topics such as nonprofit management, education, business, entertainment, the environment, literature, and politics. I even subscribe to blogs about blogging! But three years ago, I didn’t even know what a blog was.

I know that many of you are new to the concept of blogging, just like I was, and if you’re anything like me, you have an inbox full of email, a desk piled high with books and articles for professional development, not to mention very demanding jobs and personal lives that require time and energy. Do you really have time to read one more thing?

Today I want to tell you why blogging is worth your time as a volunteer manager, but first, let’s cover a few of the basics.

What is a blog? Darren Rowse has answered this question more completely than I could hope to on his own blog, Problogger. According to Darren, “a blog is a type of website that is usually arranged in chronological order from the most recent ‘post’ (or entry) at the top of the main page to the older entries towards the bottom.” Archives, like the ones that appear on the right-hand column of this blog, arranged both by subject and date, are a common feature of blogs. But the thing that most distinguishes a blog from an ordinary web page is the capacity to create a truly interactive environment through comments. A blog is not a newsletter, a press release, or some other species of one-way communication tool. Blogs are about dialogue.

Why blog? Blogs allow you to build community and share ideas around a common area of interest. Have you ever gone to a conference and felt that you gained more talking to your peers over coffee between the sessions than you did in the workshops themselves? That’s what blogging is like—those short, incisive little conversations about the things that matter most to you.

I also believe that blogging is a critical piece of professional development, whatever your field. One of my favorite bloggers, Penelope Trunk, has written a post about why blogging is essential for a good career.

If you’re new to the world of blogging and other social media, Michele Martin’s “Social Media Spiral” is a very useful tool that helps delineate the connections between new media and the older technologies that we are already comfortable with, such as email. Where are you on the spiral?

What does blogging have to do with volunteer management? The stated purpose of this particular blog is to serve as a communications tool for volunteer managers, but beyond that how might volunteer managers use blogs—and other social media for that matter—to advance their work and their professional development?

First, blogging is a way to expand your base of support, whether that is volunteer support or financial support. Second, blogging provides an easy way to communicate quickly and frequently with volunteers, donors and other stakeholders. Third, blogging is a way to build your brand. Ryan Healy used his blog Employee Evolution (another of my personal favorites) to establish himself as an expert on millenials in the workplace. Blogging can do the same for your organization and give you an edge as you seek to recruit volunteers and donors interested in your cause. Finally, as volunteer managers, we often work in isolation and lack an accessible peer network. The Volunteer Maine Blog is a place to establish a network of peers to support you in your work.

Ready to join the conversation? The interactive nature of blogging can be a mixed blessing. In many ways, a blog is only as good as its readers. I hope you’ll join the conversation on this blog by making comments. Try it now. Go to the bottom of this post, click on the comment link and write something. Introduce yourself, share your ideas about how else you think blogging might be a useful tool for volunteer managers. Ask a question. Tell me if you disagree with me, and why.

Ready to go a step further? Check out our submission guidelines and send us a guest post.

Carla Ganiel is a nonprofit management consultant from Tremont, Maine.

by Paula Gagnon

Maine has one of the highest volunteer rates in our region and in fact our rate is well above the national average (33% compared to 26.9%). However Maine is a huge state and being able to communicate across this state is a challenge. As Chair of the Maine Commission for Community Service I understand how distance, time and weather contribute to our challenge in communicating and getting together. Each year we cancel at least one meeting of the Commission due to weather and some months making a quorum is a challenge. There are some wonderful things going on in the different regions of our state with managing volunteers and yet until now volunteer managers and non-profits have had no easy way to share best practices or to problem solve as a group. Technology to the rescue!! Now we have this blog!

The purpose of this blog is to create an online community for Maine’s volunteer managers. You can participate by reading, leaving comments, and writing guest posts. The easiest way to keep track of new postings is by subscribing. To do so, simply type your email in the box in the right hand column and click “sign up.” Or, if you are already using an RSS aggregator to subscribe to other blogs, you can subscribe to our feed as well. To leave comments, click on the link at the bottom of this post. See our submission guidelines to submit a guest post of your own.

The practices I have used for volunteer management and the managing of un-paid student interns at the college level have been very similar to the practices I use in managing or supervising a paid staff. In my day job I am a college administrator and work closely with administrators, staff, faculty, adjunct faculty, temporary employees, student employees, and student interns. As Chair of the Maine Commission, I work closely with paid staff and with volunteers. I have a list of requirements that work in both of my worlds.

1. Everyone should have a job description (written) that clearly articulates outcomes and they must be measurable. There is nothing more frustrating for a volunteer than to show up and have to wait while someone finds you something to do!

2. Everyone needs to receive the training or obtain the skills to enable them to be successful. We all see the value in investing in our employees. It’s the same for our volunteer force. The better they are trained the more likely they are to not only be successful but to stay in our organizations and continue volunteering.

3. Everyone needs high quality supervision. We would not think of spending funds to conduct a search for a new employee, invest in training them and then leave them alone to either sink or swim. And yet this happens to volunteers all the time. In some of our organizations the supervision of our volunteer force is assigned to the receptionists or even another volunteer. Volunteers represent a sizable resource in our non-profit sector. In Maine, in 2006 our citizens logged over 42 million hours of volunteering. If we do the math that is a value of approximately 400 million dollars….now that’s a natural resource!

4. Everyone deserves and needs feedback. Supervision of volunteers has to be more than just a work schedule. They need the same kind of performance reviews that our employees do. Volunteers want to know how they are doing and they want to know how to improve. The managers of our volunteer force must have the time allotted in their jobs to conduct these very important feedback sessions if we are to retain our volunteer work force.

5. Everyone needs recognition. The employee of the month philosophy applies to volunteers too. In our own state the Governors Service Awards and the volunteer honor roll give us an opportunity once a year to recognize outstanding service by our volunteers. It’s even better if it is integrated into the culture of your organization.

6. Everyone needs to be informed when they are not doing a good job and volunteers are no different. It is better to professionally “fire” a volunteer with respect and dignity than to let them continue to perform below your organization’s standards. Both the liability of the organization and the future of the volunteer culture are at risk if we do not address poor performance.

Finally, those of us in management positions need training and education so we can manage our workforces effectively. In Maine right now over 60% of those individuals who manage volunteers learn either by self-study or on the job training. It is my hope that this blog, the various partnerships that have developed across our state among non-profits and the work being done to offer volunteer management education will change that statistic.

Paula Gagnon is Vice President and Academic Dean at York County Community College and Chair of the Maine Commission for Community Service.