In the nonprofit world, most of us are never going to achieve our missions with paid staff alone. The need is too big. Budgets are too small. Missions require influencing hearts and minds as much as they entail delivering programs and services. We must find strength in numbers. That is more true than ever, given…
Tag: <span>community</span>
“We can make gatherings that make people feel of use versus feeling used.” So said Priya Parker in an October 2024 webinar called “How to Dream Up a Gathering You Actually Want to Host”. Her quote made me pause the session. Yes! How do we create volunteer gatherings that offer a sense of being of…
This summer, I started learning to make mosaics. The raw materials are intriguing: glass tiles, small stones, scraps of the broken and discarded. Creating a mosaic is an exercise in taking overlooked bits and bobs and finding the whole among the pieces. I can’t help seeing a parallel to volunteer engagement (of course). For many…
There’s nothing quite so satisfying as finding the right book at the right time. Here are a few books that found me when I was ready for them. They show up frequently in my thinking, writing, and facilitating. Most of them are not about volunteer engagement per se. However, they all deepened or expanded my…
In my volunteer value workshops, participants snap a picture of one slide more than any other: the iceberg. It seems to capture what many of us struggle to put into words. What is visible about volunteer value is small compared to all the ways that volunteers add value. The iceberg image also helps reveal the…
I just finished reading Fr. Gregory Boyle’s Barking to the Choir. The following sentence hooked me and wouldn’t let go. “We always seem to be faced with this choice: to save the world or savor it. I want to propose that savoring is better, and that when we seek to ‘save’ and ‘contribute’ and ‘give…
It’s that time of year again. The time when we sort out the best and the worst of the year behind us. I thought I might use hours, a common volunteer engagement metric, to assess key relationships in my life. As I review my calendar, one friend stands out for the amount of time we…
Volunteer numbers. Service hours. The financial value of volunteer time. These are the figures tucked into reports on volunteerism. It’s all well and good for compliance. Yet it doesn’t tell us much about if or how volunteers had an impact on the community. Isn’t that interesting? The things we report most tell us little about…
It’s been said that what gets measured gets managed. The adage is useful: the process of measurement supports goal setting and accountability. And yet, it can also fall short when it comes to things that are hard to measure or when the act of measurement is harmful or distracting. In those cases, it may be…
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…