Our feature articles are sourced from practitioners around the globe and seek to encourage new thinking, highlight innovative practice and stimulate debate in the world of effective volunteer engagement.
I remember trying to recruit church volunteers for regular, one-to-one visits with jail inmates. I wasn't having much luck, until I realized that my broader, "real" or "true" goal was not one-to-one visits. It was, instead, providing healthy outside contact and influence for…
Abstract
An innovative approach to raising funds burst onto the nonprofit scene a few years back. Entitled "new philanthropy," it has enthusiastically been adopted by fundraisers wishing to raise the level of their success. This article proposes that those responsible for…
Volunteers with strong loyalty to their cause tend to hold their traditions sacred. Imagine what would happen if two long-standing volunteer groups, serving different children's hospitals in the same city, united after decades of fiercely independent -- even competitive --…
Modern technology makes it easy for anyone with a computer and an Internet connection to access training on virtually any subject. With the click of a mouse, you can learn how to arrange flowers or earn a degree without leaving the comfort of your home. You can log in to join a…
As the Internet continues its pervasive growth through global society, attempts to utilize it in volunteer involvement also continue. This article will review efforts to use the Internet to address one of the basic questions in volunteering-- how can volunteers and volunteer…
The future of volunteer management as a profession is a hot topic on both sides of the Atlantic, if not in other parts of the world. As evidence, consider the fact that the inaugural issue (Fall 2000) of e-Volunteerism featured several articles dealing with this subject.
If our…
The growing trend called "volunteer vacationing" reflects the increase in short-term and family volunteerism reported in national surveys in the United States. An increasing number of organizations, public and private, cater to these volunteers with packaged service trips.…
Research years ago showed a very high turnover rate among Coordinators of Volunteers -- the figure I remember is one out of three leaving the field every two or three years (though often staying in the same organization). It was a substantial percentage, anyhow, and I expect it…
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…
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…
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…
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…
