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.

How are frogs like processes?

Both can make amazing leaps. You can too if you don’t needlessly weigh yourself down.

Let me begin by quoting a portion of a blog by Aleem Walji, Head of Global Development Initiatives, Google.org:

“Mobile is growing faster in Africa than in any other part of the world. While levels of internet penetration are well below 5% for the continent, nearly 40% have access to mobile phones and Nairobi sends more text messages in a single day than New York (a statistic frequently quoted in the region).”

You see, because land-line telephones have not typically reached rural Africa, there is no legacy system in place to act as a boat anchor – nothing to hold them back from adopting something new and better.

I have been aware of this phenomenon for some time, but it resurfaced in a very real way for me while presenting at the Asia Pacific Regional IAVE conference this past weekend. My presentation was on the Mission Points model of measuring the Return On Investment of volunteer engagement. The Mission Points model looks to supplant the outdated Wage Replacement model of measuring ROI, with something more aligned to the needs of today’s volunteer sector.

What fascinates me is that, although there were some concepts in the Mission Points model that the Asian participants will want time to digest, there was no sense of struggle with – or resistance to – the ideas presented. I can’t help but to think that the reason for this is similar to cell phones taking off in Africa. The Asian participants have not adopted the whole Wage Replacement model in the same way that the volunteer sector has in parts of the western world. Without an anchor to hold them back, they were free to look at something new and judge it solely upon its own merits; and they did not have to be concerned about what might be left behind in order to get it. (More information on the Mission Points ROI model can be found here at: www.volunteer2.com/ROI.)

So the point is, be very cautious of the “that’s-not-how-we’ve-always-done-it” attitude. While it is certainly true that not everything new is necessarily good, we should always be on the lookout for old processes that prevent us from looking forward.

Cloud computing is certainly one of those things that many people are wary of because it is a software model that they are simply not used to… yet. The writing is on the wall, and while I would never make a silly claim such as “it will be with us forever” (because nothing is these days), it is clearly the direction we are headed in for the next while.

At Volunteer² we asked ourselves questions around this ten years ago, when we chose not to develop a desktop version alongside our cloud based software. In retrospect, I am thankful to my team for convincing me that generating a desktop model would have been our own boat anchor – slowing down the development of what we know today as Volunteer Impact.

Calculating the ROI of volunteer engagement for internal performance monitoring

While working with leaders of volunteers at conferences, or one on one, I have repeatedly heard that the contribution of volunteer time is highly valued; but that this value has been difficult to measure.

There are a variety of ways to measure the effect of volunteer engagement, and each approach has its own specific purpose. Some methods look at the benefits that volunteering brings to the volunteers themselves. Some look at the monumental vision of how volunteerism shapes a community – or bigger yet, a society. Many approaches look only at wage replacement value in relationship to the number of volunteer hours contributed.

This last method, although perhaps helpful in the past, has become less useful as the sector has come to recognize volunteerism as something more than just hours. The Mission Points ROI model treats the number of volunteer hours consumed by an organization, as an expense. Viewed as expenditure, we would value volunteer time in the same way that we value money: we would spend only to the degree necessary, to best reach the mission of our organization. Consuming more volunteer hours might mean more gets accomplished – or it may mean volunteer time is being wasted.

The Mission Points ROI model allows us to see volunteer contributions as an expense, and in turn encourages us to manage our incredibly valuable volunteer resources more effectively.

I would like to thank the many conference participants that have helped shape the vision of the Mission Points model through offering their input during workshops and presentations. I would also like to thank some very knowledgeable individuals who have, in one way or another, supported my pursuit of developing this model, and/or contributed directly to it. This includes Susan Ellis, Steve McCurley, Andy Fryar, Martin Cowling, Rick Lynch and Rob Jackson.

Volunteer² is happy to announce the launch of another free online resource for the volunteer sector: the Mission Points ROI calculator, designed to help you measure the Return On Investment associated with engaging volunteers at your organization. I invite you to explore this concept further, by downloading the Mission Points ROI manual, and giving the concept a try at www.Volunteer2.com/ROI. If this sounds interesting to you, please feel free to share this information with your peers. As we develop the Mission Points ROI model further, we welcome as many suggestions as possible in order to improve and refine it as a vital Volunteer Management resource.

Leaders in the volunteer sector reinforce bad practices

Jayne Craven just posted UN Volunteers, IFRC, ILO & others make HUGE misstep. and the news she brings us is not good.

Quoting Jayne,"The measurement so many of us have been campaigning to end - or at least not make the primary measurement of the value of volunteering - is being officially embraced by UNV and IFRC."

I agree with Jayne that there are more useful and quite frankly more accurate ways of measuring the value of volunteer engagement.
 
To Jayne's list of ways we can talk about the value of volunteers at the community level, I would like to add one at the organizational level.

• To what degree does the engagement of volunteers lead to the accomplishment of the organization's mission? 

I see a use for calculating a value for the time a volunteer contributes but given that it is a resource that is consumed in the process, it ought to be treated in a similar fashion to money being spent. It is a part of how something gets accomplished and not, as the UNV/IFRC position views it, the accomplishment itself. An organization spends money and spends volunteer time in pursuit of a mission. In a well run organization the value of what it accomplishes outweighs the grand total of both types of expenditures.
In the next couple of weeks I'll be introducing an ROI (Return on Investment) calculator for volunteer effort. It does not look at the big community/global picture such as the enlightened ways Jayne describes volunteering can be valued.  This calculator is designed as a management tool to help nonprofits allocate resources in a manner that maximizes the accomplishment of its mission. Common to Jayne's view of valuing volunteer effort, the focus is not on the accumulation of hours as goal. It is being sponsored by www.Volunteer2.com so it will be available to use at no cost.

5 tips for keeping emails to volunteers from getting trashed or spam filtered

With the launch of version 3.0 of our software we added some tools to help us look at the performance of the software so that we can tweak things to make them better. One of the things that we have learned from this is that our servers are handling over 8,000,000 emails a year! With this kind of volume and the relationship that we have with the very large email and internet service providers, we can see the effects of email writing that triggers spam filters. With that in mind I’ve dug up some advice from various sources on how to write emails that will get delivered and get read.

1. Only send mail to the people that ought to receive it 
2. Avoid spam triggering words and phrases
3. Use subject lines that let the volunteer know what the email is about 
4. Avoid large attachments and certain attachment types
5. Remove bad addresses from your database

1. Only send mail to the people that ought to receive it 

Yahoo’s mail service reminds us that spammers write to many people who don't want their mail, so their anti-spam filters are designed to identify that behaviour.  One of the patterns they consider to identify a spammer is too high a percentage of respondents that choose to move the email to the spam folder. 

To avoid being perceived as a spammer, don’t send out an email to all volunteers with many different messages intended for different groups of volunteers. Filter the list to send only the pertinent information out to the right people in each email. Volunteers would rather receive two emails with separate messages where both pertain to them, than one long email with a mishmash of information, some of which has nothing to do with them.

2. Avoid spam triggering words and phrases

One of our clients had an email treated as spam  by more than one of the large internet mail providers because she included the phrase “Free tickets”. It was a totally legitimate offer she was making to her volunteers but too many spammers have used similar wording.

Sendgrid.com tells us that “Unfortunately, there is no complete list of spam trigger words. Further, it is not always the case that your email will end up in the spam filter simply by using a so-called trigger word. The key thing to remember is that a spam filter is trying to remove commercial advertisements and promotions. So generally, words that are common in such emails should be avoided or used sparingly.” Mannixmarketing.com has put together 100 Spam Trigger Words & Phrases to Avoid in subject lines.

3. Use subject lines that let the volunteer know what the email is about

So if your email gets past the spam filters you still have to prevent it from being mistaken for spam or unnecessary information and deleted without so much as a glance. 

Mindtools.com suggests that we treat subject lines a little like newspaper headlines. “A newspaper headline has two functions: It grabs your attention, and it tells you what the article is about, so that you can decide if you want to read further. Email subject lines need to do exactly the same thing! Use a few well-chosen words, so that the recipient knows at a glance what the email is about….Of course, just as it would be ridiculous to publish a newspaper without headlines, never leave the subject line blank. Emails with blank subject lines are usually spam!”

Mail Chimp analyzed over 40 million emails sent from customers and found that 9 of the top 10 highest open rates had the company name in it

Examples:

Really Bad - Subject: Free donuts

Bad - Subject: Free donuts at orientation

Good - Subject: Volunteer orientation 10:00 this Thursday

Very Good - Subject: Anytown Museum volunteer orientation 10:00 this Thursday

4. Avoid Large Attachments and Certain Attachment Types

In general, .jpg, .gif, .png and .pdf attachments are safe to send, provided you include some content in the email as well. However, executable attachments such as .exe, .zip, .swf, etc. should be avoided entirely. 

TechRepublic.com suggests “Don’t attach large files to an e-mail; anything over one or two megabytes shouldn’t be sent via e-mail. E-mail attachments consume inordinate amounts of e-mail server space and network bandwidth and are often the culprits behind virus outbreaks.” Because of their link to viruses, emails containing attachments can have a greater chance of being treated as spam if other elements of the email are similar to spam. Many sources online agreed with limiting the file size of attachments, not only in a single attachment but as a total as well. Some email inboxes have limits to their capacity; emails with large attachments can claim too much space to be kept.

5. Remove bad addresses from your database

Spammers list typically have a larger percentage of bad email addresses than legitimate lists. One great way to look like a spammer is to include bad email address in your bulk emails, especially when you keep sending to that address.

Interestingly Useful Resources for Nonprofits

Last month I read a blog post by Heather Mansfield entitled 22 Fun, Useful, and Totally Random Resources for Nonprofits. Even as a person working in technology I find it a challenge sometimes to keep up with all that is new so her title caught my eye. The whole blog is worth a read when you have the time. For now I am sharing some of Heathers thoughts on a few of them and adding in one of my own.

5. BrainyQuote - brainyquote.com Heathers’ comments: “A directory of quotes by famous people, this websites list thousands of inspirational quotes useful for Tweeting and Facebook Status Updates. A good quote is certain to garner your nonprofit Retweets and thumbs up on Facebook any day of the week.”

I am including this in my list because I like how random thoughts can sometime help us become creative in solving problems that are completely unrelated. For the few seconds it takes first think in the morning or going into a lunch break it a great way to stimulate new thoughts.

13. Internet Archive Wayback Machine - web.archive.org Heathers’ comments: “This resource is always good for a laugh. Simply plug in your nonprofit’s website URL and you can see cached versions of your site going back to 1996. Love it!”

For fundraisers it is also a good way to look at what organizations a potential sponsor has funded in the past and perhaps why. It’s also a good reminded for us all that what goes online, potentially STAYS online.

16. Square - squareup.com Heathers’ comments: Part-smartphone app, part-hardware device, Square enables the processing of credit card payments on your smartphone. Great for farmers’ market vendors, silent auctions, and fundraisers on the go!

Although there might not be much use for this in the world of managing volunteers (and only available currently in the USA) I have included it here as an example of one of the vast number of ways that cloud* based technology is going to change our lives. Does your nonprofit and your volunteer management strategic plan include moving to the cloud? If not you will likely spend more on technology than you need to and get less back from it. (*data and software stored on servers on the internet rather than on our desktop or company servers)

19. Twitter Mosaic - sxoop.com/twitter Heathers’ comments: “A website that allows you to create an image with a mosaic of your Twitter Followers’ avatars. Useful for web campaigns, Twitter Mosaic also provides the ability to create t-shirts that include your nonprofit’s Twitter name and your mosaic of Followers.”

Aside from a cool way to show your sense of community I have included it on my list as yet another reminder to us all about how many creative ways there are to share data.

22. Worldometers - worldometers.info Heather’s comments: “A website that provides world statistics updated in real-time in categories ranging from world population to stats about energy and water consumption.”

This one really fits under the random and fun headers in the blog title and should only be visited when you have a few minutes to be amazed and process some highly thought provoking information.

My addition - Our Shared Resources – www.OurSharedResources.com It doesn’t have the broad reach that Heather’s pick have but it’s great for those in the volunteer sector. This is a free service where those who work in the field of volunteer management can add useful resources and others in the field will be able to access them. It currently has almost 900 registered users (you don’t need to register to access materials) from over 30 countries and more than 300 resources.

A new take on job displacement/replacement?

This posting is based on a post entitled A new take on job displacement/replacement that Rob Jackson made to the UKVPM forum. I'll start with Rob's thoughts.

“Hi all. I came across a situation recently that I'd welcome your thoughts on. An organisation currently delivers a service to its clients through freelancers. These self-employed people are engaged by the organisation to deliver a specific, time limited service direct to their clients. Due to changes in funding etc. the organisation is looking to deliver the same service through volunteers in future, rather than freelancers.

Now, if they people were currently employees and not freelancers I guess some people would raise concerns about job replacement.However, because they are self-employed freelancers engaged for a specific task would you have the same concerns?”

Rob raises a great question. I have come to believe that the sector looks at this issue with both conviction and intense polarity. We all know of examples where volunteers are restricted from doing the work otherwise done by a unionized employee. In some cases this restriction can exist in the absence of a union as well. On the other hand, I have come across many postings looking for volunteers to build a nonprofit’s website. In doing so, the organization is taking away the opportunity for an independent contractor or small business to earn revenue. Why do we look at these two so differently? I think Rob’s posting provides some direction to the answer to this while asking the question, should it be this way.

Would you reduce someone to part time because you found a volunteer who could make a long term commitment to take on a portion of a staff member’s job? Would you stop using an outside accounting service because you found a volunteer who could make a long term commitment to fill the role? If yes, would that change if you knew that the decision meant that someone at the accounting firm you were using would have to reduce someone to part time?

If you would not reduce a staffer to part time but would switch to the volunteer accountant, why? A good accountant could, like a staff member, become part of the team that helped make the organization strong.

If you would not switch to the volunteer accountant, would that decision be supported by your organization’s mission statement in that you are giving up the opportunity to use the saved funds to apply directly to the achievement of your mission? Is an organization’s moral obligation to fulfill its mission to the best of its ability or to provide employment? Certainly in most cases employees are required for an organization to fill its mission but in many cases there are particular roles that go either way. In those cases what should guide an organization, providing incremental employment or accomplishing more of what was created to do?

What are your thoughts?

Crowdsourcing conference program selection

I love it when a few unrelated things happen close enough together that they get to have an unexpected synergetic result. The most recent occurrence of this for me happened over the course of the past week but I only put it together while out running yesterday. The three things at play were:

1. I read Beth Kanter's and Allison Fine's new book, The Networked Nonprofit, on my flights to and around Australia (I highly recommend the book even if you think your organization is already working well with social media)
2. Three presentations were cancelled at the last minute at the Volunteering Australia conference.
3. I was asked about helping organize a conference and that got me thinking about what I thought worked well an not so well at the VA conference

1. The Networked Nonprofit has a variety of examples of organizations that have recognized the benefits of giving up a little control to stakeholders and in doing so end up better addressing their mission. These organizations have also found that this type of engagement can help raise the participation level of it's stakeholders.

2. Cary Pedicini (CEO at Volunteering Australia) told me that they were so overwhelmed with offers to fill the cancelled sessions that they could not consider them all and were as a result just going to leave sessions as cancelled. (They were after all in the middle of running a conference.) Far too late for it to be of value to the conference I had the idea that we could have used Twitter to crowd source a selection from the numerous people that offered to fill the slots. (V.A. did a great job of incorporating Twitter into the conference for the benefit of onsite and offsite participation.)

3. Although some of the sessions were quite interesting, I felt that some of the workshops missed the mark in delivering content of real interest and value to leaders of volunteers. In his closing remarks Cary acknowledged this had been some of the feedback that they had received and reminded us that where this happened it was not for a lack of trying on the part of the V.A. team. ( I am not being particularly critical of the V.A. conference here. I imagine this to be a challenge of the selection committee of any conference.) That they tried hard to make the program as good as it could be is a important point though. If trying hard is not the only requirement for success, what else could help?

So as a variety of thoughts bounced around in my head while running, when the three above happen to collide, this what came to mind...

Why not let the people who are planning to attend a conference (or even the one hoping to but awaiting approval) be the ones to select the majority of the conference program? There are a few reasons why I suspect that the conference committee should still have the capacity to add ones they see as particularly relevant to the the conference theme or anything else. But even this idea might end up getting challenged in time as conferences experiment with this concept.

Session proposals could be entered online and then those who plan on coming to the conference could register their intention to do so, even if still awaiting approval, and then vote on the sessions they would like to attend. Session proposals could include a field indicating the minimum number of participants required for the proposer. Although I have not yet thought through all of the logistics yet, I can easily envision cases where even though a presentation is only of interest to a few people that the presentation could still go on, even if over a coffee in a cafe rather than in a traditional meeting room. Give that most of this is distributed data entry (proposers rather than conference committee) that could be used on the real conference registration form as well, and also given that the conference participants rather than the conference committee make the program selection, this would reduce the amount of work required by a conference committee while potentially creating a conference program more in line with what the conference participants seek. This does put another task on managers of volunteers who are already busy but it's an optional one and it does give people a real voice in the conference agenda.

Please offer your comments on other possible challenges and/or on what you like about it. Given the nature of participant involvement that is at the root of this, your feedback on this concept would be greatly appreciated.

Social Networking advice from N-TEN, Chicago

Today's post is a collection of thoughts from, or inspired by, the keynote presentation of an N-TEN meet-up I was at in Chicago.

Geoff Livingston was the keynote presenter and as we are seeing more often these days, he presented to us from the comfort of his home via Skype. This is becoming common enough that it barely deserves mentioning, but I do so because it underscored one of his key points. The way we do things in the world today is changing... and changing fast.

The changes related to mobile technology and the evolution of social networking are going to have the biggest impact on us. Individually they will be large: combined they will be enormous! One of the many challenges nonprofits face is keeping up with the changes in technology. They have to move with the social networking flow to new platforms as easily as their constituents do. The issues of "who has time" and "our IT department won't let us" simply have to be broken down to be a successful nonprofit in the future (and the future is now).

When you consider the popularity of iPhones and other smart phones along with iPads and the competitive versions that are already hitting the market, people are simply going to be able to connect to the internet more often and form more places. It is forecasted that by 2013, mobile devices will overtake PCs as the most common Web access device worldwide. You might like this or not like this, but you cannot ignore it for it will have an impact on your organization.

When it comes to using social media Geoff's advice is to avoid using it only to tell people what you are going to do. Use it first to learn from your constituents. They might have some good insights on the things you could do to help accomplish your mission. They might have questions or concerns worth addressing. Use it to let people know what you have done recently. Be specific through the use of stories, pictures and videos. Show volunteers making a difference: show the result of the volunteers' efforts. Encourage your volunteers to tell stories. They will likely anyhow but if you offer some encouragement, they will tell more stories and better stories.

The combination of the growth of mobile technology and the evolution of social media are creating a world of broad reaching, decentralized and speed-of-light communications. It makes it easy to envision a situation where by the time you even get back to the office from one of your events, volunteers from the event have already posted stories, pictures and videos describing their experience and their accomplishments.

Let the volunteers' stories be part of your organization's stories and be certain to pay attention to them. If you have not already, start telling your own organization's stories. A plenary presentation delivered via Skype attests, the future has arrived.

If you would like to get some of Geoff's thoughts straight from him (and I encourage you to do so) you can follow him on Twitter @geofflivingston or check out his blog at www.geofflivingston.com.

Top 100 Wish List for the Volunteer Management Sector

DJ Cronin began blogging on volunteer management last March and has just posted his 100th entry. To mark his 100th post he came up with his personal top 100 wish list for volunteer management sector. Others have added to it already.

The list has numerous items that will make you stop and think. Comments to the post are welcome so if you agree, disagree or have something to add you can be part of the conversation and DJ’s commemorative 100th post.

Read more at djcronin.blogspot.com

Volunteer Management Software Security (or lack thereof)

At each of the last two volunteer management conferences I have been at there has been another new volunteer software vendor. Upon looking into each of these packages I found something quite frightening.

Both software systems let a user’s password sit exposed on the user’s profile page. While this might appear to be convenient for the volunteer, it represents a security vulnerably that cannot be overstated. If it gets displayed on the page then it can be read directly from the database. In one of the two systems the page was not even using SSL (the encryption technology that should be used when sending private information over the internet). This means that the password (along with anything else) could be intercepted in transmission. Even with SSL in place passwords should be encrypted while stored on the database. This ensures that even if other security measures should fail, the passwords (which are often the same passwords used for other sites such as banking) are protected. It is not that the other systems are prone to failure but good security looks to protect from more than one angle.

If you are looking at new volunteer management software, be certain that SSL encryption and password encryption to your “must have” list.