The Bureaucratization of Volunteering

At Volunteer Ireland's national conference I was asked to be part of a panel on the bureaucratization of volunteering. Below were my introductory remarks that a few folks though I ought to share on my blog.

I see the bureaucratization of volunteering as a little like the changes that occur in the relationship of a  couple, beginning in courtship and dating, and through marriage and beyond.

In the beginning of the relationship, everything is new and exciting, and the possibilities seem to have no boundaries. Both parties might have some similar ideas about where the relationship is headed, but they might have different ideas about what the most important milestones are. One party might want to jump right in while the other has vetting process that has to occur.
Although the process might start with episodic encounters one of the parties eventually begins to feel that the casual nature of the relationship can only go on for so long that there ought to be some form of commitment.

And so we find ourselves in the engagement phase. There are still some freedoms but the boundaries are becoming clearer. Definitions of what is acceptable behavior and what isn’t might not be documented but frequently we learn that there are things we can’t do any more.

As the organization or relationship grows, a pressure emerges to follow the path that others before us have followed, that being to bring some form of contractual agreement to bear.  At this stage, while some boundaries become firmly documented, others  seem to simply grow over the passage of time.

In some situations, the rules that have become entrenched seem to get in the way of why the two parties came together in the first place. Sometimes a volunteer wonders if volunteering with another organization might bring back some of the fulfillment, seemingly lost in the current arrangement.

In other situations the two parties stay together, despite it not being good for each of them any longer. Without meaning to, or perhaps even realizing it, both parties stand in the way of what the other could accomplish and also, accept a lower standard for themselves in what they could achieve. 

In some situations however, the formalization of the relationship brings about a stability and foundation upon which something tremendous can be built. Despite the formalization, there is a conscious effort to avoid status quo thinking, and also to avoid restricting the aspirations and actions of the other party.

So if the bureaucratization of volunteering as a little like the changes that occur in the relationship of a couple, we ought to strive for just the right amount, and in doing, have the perfect marriage.

How today’s “data is man’s best friend” attitude can lead you far astray

 While most of my posts are specific to volunteer management, this one reaches out more to fundraisers and IT folks. 


In business I can very easily justify spending $100,000 if it guaranteed (i.e. no risk) that  it  would reduce costs by $100,000 or boost sales enough that the profit from each sale would add up to be $100,000 a year for the next three years. (I get there is rarely a situation where there is no risk, but let’s work under that assumption to keep things simple for now.) By spending the $100,000 I would save/gain $300,000 over the three years and in the end, be $200,000 ahead!  .  It would still be an easy justification if the net effect on the bottom line was +$50,000 a year.  By spending the $100,000 I would save/gain $150,000 over the three years and, in the end, be $50,000 ahead!  One could even argue that if there truly was no risk, it would be justifiable to spend $100,000 once to create an extra $33,667 on the bottom line for three years. The business would then end up $1,000 ahead three years down the road.   It’s only $1,000 but that’s still $1,000 (remember that in this scenario there was no risk).

As a business owner, it would be easy to justify any of the above because I would be trading money in my pocket for more money in my pocket. That sounds simple and in business it is. I get the feeling though these days that the charitable sector sees this just like it would be seen in business. Although I am a big advocate of charities and nonprofits adopting appropriate strategies from the for-profit sector (and visa versa), this is one that I don’t see as appropriate.  While in the business case, I would be trading money in my pocket for more money in my pocket, in a charity’s case, it would be trading money in the donor’s pocket for both money in the charity’s pocket (the pocket that does the good stuff the donor wants to support) and also the pocket of the technology providers.

In some of the chatter I read and hear about donor databases connecting seemlessly to membership databases or volunteer databases and donor databases talking to each other etc. etc., I have seen too many examples lately where the mentality seems to be, “If we spent $X and we think it will generate donations anything greater than $X, it is worth pursuing”. I have various issues with this but there is only one I want to focus on today.

Picture for a moment that you have recently donated $1,000 to the ABC charity to help them _______ (insert your passionate thing here). If later you found out that it was a commissioned fundraiser who earned $990 parting you and your $1,000, you who likely not be very happy that only $10 went to (insert your passionate thing here). With just a slight change in the scenario, would you feel any better if there was no commissioned fundraiser but after the new data analysis technology that sought you out as a potential donor was paid for, the net result of your donation was that $990 went to the technology provider and staff time on the project and $10 went to (insert your passionate thing here)?

But it is still a positive return on investment for the charity. The data that was analyzed/shared/extrapolate etc.  suggested that you would give and you did.  In fact, it is the same ROI of the one   scenario above in the for-profit business examples. The 1% ROI was fine in the for-profit model but apparently not here.  Of course those are exaggerated numbers and everyone reading this likely already understands  the importance of infrastructure costs and how these need the support of donors. I get it too and that is not what I am at issue with here.

The big questions to leave you with are ….

•    When you are looking at a new expenditure for analyzing or sharing or extrapolating data for the sole purpose of raising more donations, what ROI is acceptable to your organization?
•    Perhaps more importantly, what would be acceptable to the donors making the new donations?
•    If the donors knew the portion of their donation that went into the analyzing / sharing / extrapolation of data that was spent getting them to consider donating, would they still have given?
•    Where do new infrastructure costs related solely to getting more donations cross the line?

Data Will Always Give You the Wrong Answer When You Ask the Wrong Question

If a nonprofit or charity truly values the time of their volunteer, why is there pressure on managers of volunteers to increase the number of hours volunteered continually, without a correlated look at what outputs are generated with those hours. "How many hours did we get from volunteers?" is the wrong question, but sadly, it's the one on which the sector is currently focused. The right question is "What is the relationship between the number of hours of volunteer time that we consumed related to the value of what we accomplished?".

Consider the information below about a hypothetical nonprofit.

Year	1	2	3	4
Number of Volunteer Hours	100,000	90,000	80,000	70,000

In most of the organizations with which I have worked, the reporting that is requested from volunteer managers focuses on reports such as those above and in almost all of them, the manager would be considered to be failing in her job: the numbers of volunteer hours went down every year. In many cases, those hours are looked at as time that would have had to have been paid for or as associated with services that would not have been delivered had the time not been volunteered. Both can be false assumptions.

What if we add more data to the picture. (Assume for now that all this organization does is plant trees.)

Year	1	2	3	4
Number of Volunteer Hours	100,000	90,000	80,000	70,000
Trees Planted	500,000	500,000	500,000	500,000

It turns out this volunteer manager has been doing a great job and should be congratulated for accomplishing more with less. How did she do it? Maybe she had been over-scheduling in the past and got better at it with more experience. Maybe she provided her volunteers with training and they were then able to plant trees with greater ease and therefore planted more trees per hour. Maybe she bought better shovels.

The point is that from a resource management perspective, year 4 is far better than year 1. When the right question is not asked, the answer leads us astray.

Some of you might have raised your eyebrows on "bought better shovels". If you did so because you recognized that the cost of those shovels needs to be included somehow in this analysis, pat yourself on the back: you are correct. (If however, you did so because you thought it was wrong to spend money on better shovels when you had the option of letting volunteers work inefficiently since they are "free", get someone to kick you in the back-side.)

I believe that if we truly value the time of our volunteers, we should operate under the premise that we are spending their time, just like we spend cash. And, similarly to how we spend cash, we should spend as little of it as needed in order to accomplish our mission.

This relates to the principle of Scarce Resources. The important element of the principle of Scarce Resources is not that something can't be found, but rather, that a consumable resource can only be used once. A single dollar cannot be used to make two separate purchases and person cannot volunteer the same hour in two different places. That we must choose how to spend that dollar and we must choose how to spend that hour demonstrate the similarity between the two. As they are similar in nature, we should treat them the same: Consume as little as possible to achieve your mission.

I recognize that sometimes money is harder to come by than volunteer hours, so the option to purchase the "better shovels" might not always exist, but that does not break down the rationale of looking at volunteer time as something we spend and should try to minimize. Scheduling of volunteers in a manner that better aligns with needs and providing volunteers with better training can reduce the number of hours consumed with little or no increase in cost.

Simple financial reporting is a lousy management accounting tool - even more so in nonprofits

The adoption of the approach above can not only lead to more efficient consumption of volunteer resources, it opens the door to better management across an organization as a whole. Financial reporting by nonprofits only tells a portion of the story. By their nature, nonprofits more or less break even each year. The dollars spent are equal to the dollars they take in.
The following table represents the essence of financial reporting in the nonprofit sector (albeit simplified). It shows the two years of an organization as working at similar levels financially in that they both have neither a profit nor a loss, but are seemingly underperforming on donations/revenue in year two.

Year	1	2
Donations and Fees for Service	~$1,000,000	~$800,000
Expenses	~$1,000,000	~$800,000
Difference	$0	$0

Let's look at how these two years compare if we add something new to the reporting.

Year	1	2
Donations and Fees for Service	~$1,000,000	~$800,000
Expenses	~$1,000,000	~$800,000
Difference	$0	$0
Trees Planted	20,000	20,000

All other things being equal, Year 2 has clearly outperformed Year 1, since the same job got done while consuming fewer resources. If these were two different organizations rather two years of the same organization, to which one would you rather make a donation?
The financial records alone would not have demonstrated the differences in performance between these two years; in both years, the organization ran a balanced budget.
The path to the right answer begins with the right question
Because of the arithmetic simplicity of both of the examples above, we can intuitively see which year had the better performance. The application of this in real world, however, needs some means of comparing the data along some similar element. The return on investment formula,

ROI = (Inputs-Outputs) / Outputs,

provides us with that common element. Key to this methodology are three things.

1. The value of volunteer time is treated as an input, along with cash expenses
2. The outputs must be tracked and we must place a value on those outputs
3. The outputs must be in line with the outcomes associated with the organization's mission

For some organizations, putting a value on the outputs can be fairly easy, while in others it can represent the biggest challenge in putting this model into practice.
For organizations whose outputs are similar to something in the for-profit sector, a monetary value for these outputs is easy to derive: use the same value the commercial sector uses. If your nonprofit does tax returns for people who need help with them but can't afford it, use the price you would have to pay if you went to a commercial service for one.
In other situations, putting a dollar value on something such as a friendly visit in a hospital is more difficult, although it is possible (although outside the scope of this article). Where it is deemed that actual dollar values simply cannot be placed on the outputs of your organization, the ROI model can still be used but the results have to be looked at slightly differently because dollars are used to value inputs and something else is used for outputs whereas the equation is designed to compare apples to apples.
Rather than place a dollar figure on each output, place a Mission Points value where the various Mission Points assigned to the various outputs indicate the relative degrees to which each one contributes to your mission.

What if Richard Branson Managed Volunteers?

Why Richard Branson? Well my first answer will be "why not?". As Graham Allcott suggests in his book, How to be a Productivity Ninja, (highly recommended) looking at things through a lens that is completely different than our own can help us think of things in a new light and think of things we might never have otherwise. My second answer is that Richard Branson is a wealth of inspiration. It’s hard to deny the fact he is an accomplished individual. (If his accomplishments are unfamiliar to you, you can brush up on them at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Branson).

Like many volunteer departments, he started his path with no financial budget to speak of. He had a vision however, that he could build on small, early successes and grow continually from there.  He has not only found a way to make ends meet, but grow from roots in a youth oriented magazine he founded as a teenager to a multinational corporate powerhouse and world leader.  Your volunteer engagement doesn’t have to grow to the size of Branson’s employee base for his path of layering new successes on previous ones to be a source in innovation for you.

He has always maintained a “why can’t we do it” attitude that has also existed at the roots of so many volunteer efforts (despite an ongoing push in the sector to encase this attitude in bureaucracy… but I digress). He has, in many occasions, been the underdog that has demonstrated what is truly possible, despite being told it would never work. Branson was challenged by dyslexia, had difficulty learning to read, found himself at the wrong end of more than one scholastic whipping for failing in school, and when he got his first business off the ground as a teenager, it was halted by a postal strike far from his control.  Somehow he rose above all of these challenges to achieve significant business, personal and humanitarian successes.

We can’t accomplish everything we might want with our volunteer engagement and sometimes success in one area means taking resources away from another area and acknowledging a focus that means some desirable outcome won’t be met. Branson has had to make many difficult choices along the way, such as selling off one business to support the larger success of another.

His successes in life seem to come from (among others things) commitments to:

• Giving people what they want (when existing companies seem unwilling to do so) – Realizing that people (many of them youth) could not get approved for long term mobile phone contracts, he built the Virgin Mobile brand on meeting that need and pioneered the mobile pay-as-you-go concept.
• Never giving up – When a massive postal strike shut down his ability to ship the record albums he was selling, he shifted distribution to retail shops.
• Doing good – Virgin is committing substantial amounts of money to create greener fuels. Although it will benefit Virgins transportation companies in the long run, Branson sees decisions like this as imperative by all businesses if we are going to have a future to do business in at all.
• Being Innovative – In launching the music publishing arm of the Virgin companies, Branson signed the then unknown Mike Oldfield (debut album Tubular Bells included a track that became part of the Exorcist sound track) and the Sex Pistols because no one else would as they were too much like trouble makers. Both of these acts were an important piece of the foundation that grew into the powerhouse Virgin Music is today.
• Going for it – While finishing up a vacation, the flight operated by a tiny airline that was to take Branson and his fiancé, along with many others off the island got canceled. They were left stranded. Branson saw a charter company plane and booked a charter flight. Charging a portion of the charter fees to each of the others stranded, he essentially booked the first Virgin Airlines flight (long before there was a Virgin Airlines).
• Having fun – He has crossed oceans in a balloon, appeared apparently naked in Times Square (dressed in a naked looking costume with a phone where you’d expect something else, to promote “nothing to hide” phone contracts) and he knows how to turn off email from time to time.

So the question I propose that you consider in your own circumstance is, “What would Richard Branson do if he was managing the volunteers here at _______” Let’s take “donate millions” off the table right from the start and dig deeper into what morsels of his way of doing things could help propel our organizations forward.

• What do we subject our volunteers to that in a Branson influenced organization they would boldly promise not do?
• What challenge have you faced that seemed to be insurmountable until someone had an a-ha inspiration that then made it all possible?
• How big could your organization’s benefit from volunteer engagement grow to be if everyone involved saw it as boundless as Branson saw his future as a teenager?

Share your thoughts using the comments space below here or join in the chat on twitter using #ttvolmgrs

Resources to calculate the ROI of volunteer engagement

For the past couple of years I have been working on a new model to measure the return on investment of engaging volunteers in a n organization. Because the emphasis of my model is to treat the expenditure of volunteer hours the same as the expenditure of cash I refer to it as the Scarce Resources Model. In economic terms, scarce does not mean hard to find but rather that there is a finite pool. Because there is a finite pool choices have to be made how each dollar is spent and choices have to be mad how each volunteer hour is "spent".  Better choices lead to a higher ROI which typically indicates a better allocation of resources toward an organizations mission.

The programming team at Volunteer² has put together a few free online calculators to help organizations measure their ROI. You can find them at www.volunteer2.com/ROI.

The model is young and certainly not perfect, but according to one participant of my conference workshops on the subject, "leaps and bounds better than what we have today". Not everyone is on board but the vast majority of conference participants agree.

I'll be writing more on the topic over the next year and I welcome your feedback.

Up-coming venues that include this presentation include:
July 17 Portland OR USA - Volunteer Portland (Session Sold Out)
August 9 - Chicago, IL USA - ICOVA Conference
September 11 - Ottawa ON Canada - Volunteer Ottawa 
September 18 - Columbus OH USA - 2012 Annual Ohio Conference on Service and Volunteerism
September 27 - Vancouver, BC Canada - Volunteer BC Conference
October 24 - Truro NS Canada - Recreation Nova Scotia Conference
October 26 - Topeka KS USA - 2012 Kansas Conference on Service & Volunteerism


Email me at tony@volunteer2.com with your location if you would like me to let you know when I'll be presenting at a venue near you, or if you would like me to try schedule a workshop in your community. (The workshop is free and if I'm traveling close enough, there's no travel costs to pay.)

Attending next week’s National Conference on Volunteering & Service in Chicago?

If so, come hear the latest buzz and research on service and volunteerism in one forum:  the Reimagining Service Forum on June 19, at 8:30 a.m. CT. The Forum will spotlight many agents of change including:

•    Jonathan Greenblatt, Director of the White House Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation; and,
•    Wendy Spencer, the newly confirmed CEO of the Corporation for National and Community Service.

And a research panel featuring:

•    Karen Baker, Secretary of Service and Volunteering, CaliforniaVolunteers;
•    Farron Levy, President/Founder, True Impact;
•    David Smith, Executive Director, National Conference on Citizenship;  and,
•    Peter York, Chief Research and Learning Officer, TCC Group.

Grab your breakfast and head on over to participate in this lively Forum; you’ll leave with new information to support your work in the nonprofit, corporate and philanthropic sectors.  We hope to see you there!

You always get the wrong answer when you ask the wrong question

I recently conducted a small survey of people that work with volunteers that asked which of two organizations they would choose to give their time, given the following highly hypothetical set of circumstances.

• Both organizations (let’s call them A and B) planted 500,000 trees in a year.
• Planting trees was all that each of them did.
• They both spent the same amount of money in a year.
• In fact the only difference between the two was that Organization A had 900 volunteers and Organization B had 1,000 volunteers.

Roughly, the results we as follows:

• 35% chose A because they felt that A “needs more volunteers”.
• 15% chose B because “it must be the better organization because it had more volunteers”.
• 10% said they could not see any difference.
• 40% chose A because it was more efficient in its deployment of volunteers.

If you happened to mentally make your own choice and ended up in the last group (A due to greater efficiencies), you already appreciate the usefulness of the Scarce Resources Model of measuring volunteer ROI and you’ll find my session helpful in showing how you can measure ROI in your organization. You already understand the “why” (which begins the presentation) but the meat of the presentation that follows is the “how”.

If you fell into any of the first three bullet points above, I invite you to consider a brand new perspective in measuring the ROI of volunteer engagement.

In its most basic level, consider the wage replacement method of measuring ROI that compares the total dollars spent to the number of volunteer hours multiplied by some benchmark hourly value of volunteer time. In theory (because I know nobody would do this), if someone had 20 volunteers come in every Saturday and sit there and do nothing for three hours, their total hours for the year would go up and therefore their ROI would go up. While nobody would do this (at least not intentionally), it illustrates the flaw in this methodology. When the wage replacement model was first introduced, it filled a void where no measurement was being done and as such served its purpose. Like all professions, the volunteer sector looks for tweaks and improvements to what has been done on the past and the Scarce Resource Model as the next step in management reporting.

The second slide of my presentation reads “All the wrong people are here”. I say that because I recognize that Mangers of Volunteers are asked for wage replacement modeled reports by their boards, bosses and fund granting agencies. While teaching the Scarce Resources Model to managers of volunteers is clearly useful, those asking for reports need to reconsider what information is truly useful to them: because, as my first slide empathizes, “You always get the wrong answer when you ask the wrong question”.

Up-coming venues that include this presentation include:
May 25 - Victoria, BC Canada - Volunteer Victoria
May 31 - London, England - Volunteer Fair
June 17 - Chicago, IL USA - Summit on Advanced Volunteer Engagement
June 18 - Chicago, IL USA - National Conference on Volunteering and Service
June 21 - Chicago, IL USA - Salvation Army, Central Territory Conference
July 17 Portland OR USA - Volunteer Portland 
August 9 - Chicago, IL USA - ICOVA Conference
September 11 - Ottawa ON Canada - Volunteer Ottawa 
September 18 - Columbus OH USA - 2012 Annual Ohio Conference on Service and Volunteerism
September 27 - Vancouver, BC Canada - Volunteer BC Conference
October 24 - Truro NS Canada - Recreation Nova Scotia Conference
October 26 - Topeka KS USA - 2012 Kansas Conference on Service & Volunteerism



Email me at tony@volunteer2.com with your location if you would like me to let you know when I'll be presenting at a venue near you.

Where would you volunteer?

I am conducting some research related to volunteer management. If you can help by filling in a short, four question survey, I'd appreciate it.

All questions are check box or < 20 word answers. The results of the survey and my thoughts on what the results mean will be posted here at the beginning of March. Please feel free to share this with others. Thanks.

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/LZSD855
 

Communications & Community

The recent launch of our new support and feedback process for Volunteer² got me thinking about how open communications with our clients can build community and create an environment where everyone benefits. If gathering client feedback and providing easy access to frequently asked questions was good for us and our clients, in some circumstances it might also be good for nonprofits and their volunteers. Let me start by describing our early experiences with our newly implemented system from Uservoice.com.

Regarding suggestions for product improvements - We have received great information from clients; better than ever before. We have always been receptive to feedback, but now – because clients get to vote on other ideas as well as add their own – we get a better sense of the big picture of what clients want. Given that our clients are the front line users, obviously, their ideas matter. In the end, we build better software, which is always a part of our mission.

Regarding the searchable FAQ - We can see that some of our clients are getting the answer to their questions without having to wait for our reply. It opens a door for clients to understand our software better, and as such, they can do more with it. This, of course, is good for us too as it saves us time.

So how was I thinking this could apply to you and your volunteers?

Regarding suggestions for organizational improvements - Volunteers are often part of the front line of an organization. A suggestion box approach yields one-off ideas, but a community approach where volunteers get to vote and comment on other ideas, creates dialog and a better understanding of the issues.

Regarding the searchable FAQ – Volunteers have questions. For some, a searchable FAQ is the most convenient way to get the answer, especially when they think it might be a “dumb” question. It opens the doors to your volunteers being better educated as a volunteer and as such, fulfill their role better than before. It also, of course, can save you time.

Building community with your volunteers is likely not anything new to you. Using these new communications tools such as the one we have begun to use is just another resource to make it happen.

PS. Uservoice is not the only service like this. Because each is a little different, a few are worth exploring.