SITE

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.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 21st, 2008 at 8:21 am and is filed under Blogging, Strategies, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.