What is Volunteer Management/Administration?
Volunteer Administration is concerned with the effective integration of volunteers into an organization to enhance performance and results. The profession includes people who direct volunteer involvement as a full time job and those who carry this responsibility in addition to other job duties. Volunteer Administrators serve in this role as paid or unpaid leaders.
What does it take to be a competent, confident, and professional manager of volunteers and why is it so important?
- To be competent you need experience, education, and some history of having applied those learned skills and knowledge in a variety of settings.
- To be confident, you need to have accumulated a variety of experiences and education with useful feedback along the way so that you’ve learned from your mistakes as well as your successes.
- To be professional, you could use a credential, but more importantly, you need to have a philosophy and a set of ethical standards that guide your behaviors, decision-making, and interactions with the volunteers for whom you’re responsible. It doesn’t hurt either to have a moral sense and a dedication to the “common good.”
There are 19 competencies that you’re going to see following this welcome page, and they are all based on the assumption that a well-prepared and competent manager of volunteers is the primary reason a volunteer program succeeds or fails as measured by all the usual indicators (program processes, outputs, outcomes, and impact on a community).
