Behind every annual report touting the number of hours that volunteers serve is a host of staff harassing gently reminding those volunteers to submit their time sheets. Tracking volunteer hours inflicts pain ranging from annoyance to misery and does so across sectors and role. Volunteer Directors, Corporate Social Responsibility Managers, Service Learning Coordinators, and the…
Category: <span>Volunteer Impact</span>
“The most enduring and controversial question within the field of volunteerism is the one that relates to the ‘value’ of volunteers and the hours they contribute”. Andy Fryar This enduring question comes to the forefront each year during National Volunteer Month when Independent Sector releases its annual update of the financial value of a volunteer…
1 Abandon numbers and dollars when describing volunteer value. In folk tales, when a gift is counted or priced, it loses its magic.1 2 Remember that you cannot measure everything that matters, especially when it comes to community and volunteerism. As William Bruce Cameron puts it, “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not…
As the year wraps up, I want to thank you for joining me in the Volunteer Commons. There are so many demands on our time and attention these days, and I am grateful that you spent some of yours with the ideas in these blogs. Thanks also to those of you who liked, commented, emailed,…
Volunteers can be beneficial to organizations and the communities they serve. Yet, it’s hard to prove. Not that your team hasn’t tried. The volunteer hours painstakingly collected. The calculations of a financial value for volunteer time. The articles promoting the health or employee engagement benefits of volunteerism. Data about volunteers donating more money than non-volunteers.…
Nonprofit leaders love to extol the virtues of volunteers. They declare that volunteers are the heart of the organization. They assert that the organization cannot do what it does without volunteer involvement. Yet the dirty little secret of the nonprofit sector is that many of these same leaders think that volunteers are more trouble…
Three years ago, I facilitated a session about capturing volunteer impact in Manhattan. We discussed connecting volunteer contributions to the organization mission. I encouraged the group to think about capturing volunteer impact instead of measuring it since so much of what volunteers offer doesn’t show up in numbers. The participants teamed up to match volunteer…
The scene… A volunteer administrator puts the finishing touches on his budget for the year. He is excited about the ways this funding will enable volunteers to advance the organization’s mission in meaningful ways and support paid staff in engaging those volunteers well. The budget is higher than in past years but still modest compared…
In a 2018 article, nonprofit leader Jan Masaoka called the nonprofit sector to task. She named the growing professionalization of the sector and its reliance on consultants as a step away from nonprofit roots in activism and the causes that drive it. This shift has led to increasing “sophistication” in nonprofit operations, with paid professionals more…