“I have all these volunteer impact ripples. Now what?” Shelli Beck, CVA, Director of Volunteer Services at Lyngblomsten, had invited staff who engage volunteers to identify the “ripples” of impact that volunteers make. Everyone recorded their observations on stickie notes and arranged them on a display board with a picture of ripples. It didn’t take…
Tag: <span>volunteer engagement</span>
“You are talking to the choir here.” So said the participant attending a session at the Arizona Summit on Volunteerism and Civic Engagement. Jeff Glebocki (Co-Director of the Initiative on Strategic Volunteer Engagement/ISVE) and I were there to share recommendations from recent research about investment in strategic volunteer engagement. The nonprofit Volunteer Engagement Professional suggested that any…
Nonprofits juggle many priorities: delivering programs, raising funds, cultivating awareness and relationships, responding to changing community needs, and building trust with multiple audiences, to name just a few. These tasks tend to fall in separate departments, yet one strategy—when done well—can contribute to each of these areas: investing in volunteer engagement. Southwest Human Development in…
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…
“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…
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…
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…