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Guest Post by Noble Smith

The answer is currently no for both questions!

Why? You will, hopefully, understand and agree in a moment.

There are over 78 million baby boomers about to descend on non-profits. As reported in the September 10th issue of TIME, this new crop of retirees are younger, healthier, better educated, more demanding, living longer and for us non-profit leaders and volunteer managers, are seeking more active roles with us. They are demanding different opportunities from the generations that proceeded them and they will run circles around us before we can catch their tails, unless…

On top of this “boomer buster”, in a survey undertaken by AARP in June 2007, it is estimated that over 50% of our country’s citizens will want to volunteer when they retire. Are we ready for them and the “boomers”? No, unless….

Many of these new and forthcoming retirees are steeped in business-like structures and methodologies for solving challenging problems or just running an operation. They are strategic plan oriented; they are gurus at benchmark assessments and they expect those individuals and organizations with which they associate to be constantly three steps ahead of even their fast pace. A little exaggerated, but not by much!

This emerging cadre of workers wants to insure from the outset that their involvement will have real value and have a significant impact on the core values, vision and mission of the non-profit.

No longer will the volunteers just lick stamps, wash dishes or pick up trash. That doesn’t mean that these tasks are not important for the well being of the non-profit and that some volunteers will undertake these tasks. But, we, the leaders of non-profit management, must launch a more exacting matching skills initiative. We are not going to assign the retired CEO of the nation’s largest gas and chemical company to wash test tubes, unless we want him to be one of the 32.9% of Maine’s volunteer task force that “retire” after the first year of volunteerism.

This coming influx should be a positive force for non-profits since it will force all of us to initiate the necessary retooling of our operations. It compels us to insure that our non-profits have renewed strategic planning exercises. And, it encourages our organizations to view ourselves as a business, a successful, profit-driven group of fully committed employees.

This seeming indictment of our short comings (for some, but not all) needs to be taken without shame or embarrassment. We are about to receive a largess that will set the tone of our organizations and volunteerism for generations to come. However, if we set new standards of operation, higher levels of planning, increased degrees of business awareness and mandatory commitments of benchmark assessments together with a hard-nosed process of skill matching initiatives, we will reduce that level of attrition substantially and the value-additives for both the volunteer and the institution will be seeds for future germination.

It does not matter whether the non-profit is small or large, rural or urban, on the coast or in the backwoods. All of us need to step back several paces and with our Board of Directors answer the questions – are we really ready, what do we need to undertake to sharpen our operations, have we reexamined our vision, mission and core vales recently, and, very specifically, are our volunteer procedures, operations, communications and task assignments sound, timely and attuned to today’s and tomorrow’s volunteer?

I am a strong advocate of a continuing planning process, particularly for the construction (and renewal) of strategic planning. It is this process that involves Board, staff and volunteers who, collectively, sweep away the cobwebs, sharpen the pencils, clear the fund raising decks and strengthen the glue that holds the organization firmly together.

Unless we undertake this business-like exercise that keeps us all trim and matching in cadence…..

Unless we listen intently to the vibes and orchestrations of and from our potential new volunteers……….

Unless we erase the adage that we non-profits are just charities…………..

Unless the “boomers”, in the end, congratulate us on a job well done, we cannot answer yes to the two questions “are we ready” and “will they accept us.”

Of courses, I am probably just preaching to the non-profit choirs for all of you have probably eliminated the word “unless” from your lexicon and can already answer, yes. Maybe it is only some of those neo-Pleistocene non-profits that are tainting our records. I don’t think so!

Noble Smith is President of Noble Smith Associates in Harpswell.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 3rd, 2008 at 7:00 pm and is filed under Generations. 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.