Engage Library

An Invitation to Our Readers to Help Us Design, Create and Staff a Feature that Will Integrate All-Volunteer Organization Views

Participants from Australia, Italy, Brazil, Finland, Japan, Lebanon and North America

In this issue of "Along the Web" we focus on liability, risk management and other legal issues pertinent to volunteering. These legal areas tend to be very jurisdiction-specific. We've limited the list here to countries with a common background in the English system, but we've…

The people who must raise funds often have little idea about the volunteer management aspect of their own agencies. Development staff and Coordinators of Volunteers frequently know little about the financial assets of volunteers active with the organization and rarely ask these…

Retaining volunteers is both an indicator of and a key to success in volunteer management. When volunteers keep coming back, it is a sign that the program is being managed in a reasonable way. The return of trained and seasoned volunteers gives the volunteer program manager more…

Why did we choose "Should Volunteer Administration Be a 'Profession'?" as our inaugural topic for "Points of View?" Quite simply, it is because the jury is still out on whether or not it is a profession. This is not a debate over the need for professional skills and attitudes.…

One of our most significant problems as a profession is that we cannot find each other. It is difficult to speak to or for a constituency we can't always find. We don't always know where to throw our pearls of wisdom and we don't usually have the kind of numbers (of…

Until recently there was no agency within the UK focusing specifically on volunteering research and its connection to policy and practice. Volunteering sometimes appeared on the curricula of the various organisational-focused voluntary sector courses. But it was very much a…

Volunteering and volunteer work have changed dramatically in the last few years. So too have management practices in the not-for-profit sector as shrinking resources combined with increasing demands for service press administrators to search for new ways of doing business. One…

Getting your workshop off on the right foot is essential. Like the appetizers to the full meal, icebreakers allow participants to get a taste of what is to follow. As with every other part of effective training successful icebreakers result from proper planning and interactive,…

Harriet Naylor, always known familiarly as "Hat," was one of the true pioneers in the development of volunteer program management as an acknowledged field in the United States. In her role as national director of the Office of Volunteer Development at what was then the…