Why blog about managing volunteers?

Well - I've given a few hints in the stories about language.  Here's my list of laments for volunteer management:

• The labels and the language we use can be first-class put-downs. 
• I have been at meetings where a chorus of 'poor-me's' becomes a downward spiral with lots of hang-dog heads.
• I've seen job descriptions that go on for 10 pages, asking the impossible of any one person.
• I've noted how the Manager of Volunteers is sometimes confined to a poky office miles from where the real action is.
• The organisation gives heaps of praise for the work of volunteers and never a nod to the person who makes it all happen.
• There is a 'professional development' policy for paid staff, yet support for sending managing volunteers on training programmes never seems to be included.
• Volunteers and their manager are the soft and fluffy bits of the organisation, and certainly don't need to be included in strategic planning or management decision-making.

This is why I write about managing volunteers. I want something better for volunteers, for their organisations, and most of all for the people responsible for volunteer programmes and services.


Oooh, I hear you say.  You think I have gone to extremes in these examples of exploitation and lack of recognition?  If you have never experienced any of the above then you and your organisation are most fortunate.  Please, share your good news stories.  My future blogs will be accentuating the positive, as well as the heap of helpful resources already available.

Whose volunteers are they anyway?

There's just one more thing related to language. My colleague Alison was brave enough to tell a story against herself. Read about it here, and I hope I do not need to spell out the moral of the tale.

Alison's story

I thought I was a pretty good manager of volunteers. I could report regularly on how many volunteers I had, how many new ones I had recruited, any issues my team had and updates on vacancies. I was proud of my volunteers and their performance, which of course was due to the training and support I provided for my team. I was also a passionate advocate for my volunteers with other staff.

Until the day I got gutted by a new boss. I was reporting with my usual enthusiasm on the progress of my volunteers, and he stops me in mid-flight. Excuse me Alison, he says, very politely, they are not your volunteers – they are part of the organization. You will not, he says, ever again, looking at me directly, use the word ‘my’ in reference to volunteer services.

Well, that was a pretty clear instruction, and I had to do a lot of re-jigging of my self-image, and my perceptions of volunteers, and what my role was really about. And I had to cut that possessive ‘my’ from my vocabulary. What happened next was just amazing.

Other staff started to show how they felt connected to volunteers, to value and respect the volunteer contributions to our services. And they stopped dumping on me every time a volunteer put a foot wrong. They started taking responsibility for guiding and supporting volunteers, especially the newbies. They started engaging with volunteers, getting to know them and learning how to draw on individual volunteer skills and strengths. Just like they always did with their colleagues. Well hello – volunteers are a valuable asset and a valued resource, no less than paid staff.

As for me – once I had got over the humiliation of being told off, which is what it felt like – I discovered there were a whole lot of new things to learn. Like being able to have open discussion about further developments of volunteer services. Like feeling more engaged with the whole organization instead of being a precious sub-set, and a bit on the outer. The most important lesson was finally understanding what my role was all about.

I am not a ‘volunteer’ manager – I get paid for managing volunteers. So I do all that HR stuff of recruiting, training, placement, performance appraisal – but that does not mean I ‘own’ the volunteers, any more than the HR person in your organization ‘owns’ the paid staff. But neither am I a ‘manager of volunteers’. When volunteers are spread across the organization in various roles it is not my job to micro-manage what they do – that’s up to team leaders and other managers, and part of that integration thing that happens when you drop ‘my’ from your vocabulary. What I am really employed to do is manage volunteer services – not the people, not the individuals, but making the services happen. So OK, I might have to turn my hand to event management when there is a Street Appeal, or to rally resources for a particular client need, or to discuss options for a recruitment drive with the manager of our op-shops. I have to be really good at setting up processes and policies for recruitment and screening of volunteer applicants; I have to ensure the best possible orientation and training programmes; I need to have really good communication channels open for the volunteers, by phone, email and even old-fashioned snail-mail; I need to be really smart in maintaining a database; and then I have to show off my marketing skills when it comes to Volunteer Awareness Week and International Volunteers’ Day.

And by heck – I need to keep up with all the stuff out there in cyber-space that tells me what’s happening in the world of volunteer management. That’s what managers do, right?

I do not have to do all this stuff on my own. All round me I can draw on volunteers with amazing skills and willingness to take on assignments. When I let go the ‘my’ of my work I can embrace the ‘our’ and accomplish so much more than ever before.

Who do you think you are?

Here is another way to think about language. One of the canon's we teach volunteers is never to say 'I'm just a volunteer'. Nobody is 'just' anything, and if you catch a volunteer saying that it means the organisation is not paying attention to the contribution to its vision and values, and to its services. So why would you say, when somebody asks, "I'm just a volunteer manager"?

Susan Ellis has a long list of alternative responses at http://www.energizeinc.com/hot/2008/08jan.html. Have a look at this to see how inventive you could be next time someone asks "So what do you do?". The one I like best is "I find buried treasure" - because that is the really exciting thing about managing volunteers, watching people grow and develop, and accomplish things they never thought were in their capacity.

What's in a Name?

This blog is about and for Volunteer Managers. The first thing I would say is Mind Your Language! Are you a volunteer, or a manager? Or both? But if you are paid you are not a 'volunteer' manager. So what should I call you?

This is where we have to start thinking about the real nature of the job, what we do and how we do it. I'll be offering lots more things to think about on this site, so don't go away.

For starters, we need to get a lot more explicit about what we do. Do you really do all the hands-on management and personal supervision of the volunteers in your organisation? Or are you more realistically managing the delivery of services provided by volunteers? If you say yes to the first question, and you have a roll-call of 100+ volunteers, I say whew! no wonder you don't have time to think about the real business of managing volunteers. If you say yes to the second question you will be engaged in all parts of your organisation, working with other staff, developing, negotiating, being creative - and you will be a real manager of volunteer services.