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Volunteer Managers: vital to good volunteer management, or expendable when cash is tight?
AVM want to do a piece of research looking at whether volunteer managers really do add value to organisations. We are very worried that some organisations seem to view volunteer managers as a 'luxury', and that in a cash strapped organisation, volunteer management staff are often some of the first to be made redundant. We would like to be able to show the actual difference that having a volunteer manager in place makes. We hope this will enable us to come up with a solid, evidenced business case for investing in volunteer management.
We will be doing a quantitative survey later, but first of all we would like to collect some more qualitative data. We have come up with two questions, it would be really helpful for us if as many volunteer managers as possible could have a look, and try and answer them.
You can reply to this forum post. Or if you would be happier with giving an anonymous and private answer, you can post a reply to info@volunteermanagers.org.uk
Please have a go at answering, we need as many people's opinions/experience as possible.
Question 1
Economic conditions mean that organisations are being forced to tighten their belts, and justify staff roles. What arguments would you use to show that your role is important, and helps your organisation to meet its objectives? It would be really useful for us if you could try and back up your argument with examples and facts.
Question 2
Volunteer managers often have key performance indicators (KPIs) which have been set by a fundraiser, or funder, who might not necessarily know that much about volunteer management. Some common KPIs don't necessarily reflect good volunteer management. For example, 'Increase number of volunteers' isn't relevant if your organisation only has a limited number of tasks for volunteers to do, or only has the resources to involve a small team. If you could set your own KPI's to indicate successful volunteer involvement, what would they be, and how would you evidence them?
I am recently appointed to this role with Arthritis Care in Scotland but have worked for many years with volunteers - managing and supporting them even though this was not always the job title I had at the time. The current role in managing volunteers is in training, supporting and developing peer educators. These are individuals who have a long term health condition which they are living with. Most have come through a self management course of some kind and decided they wanted to pass on the benefits they experienced to others. In this situation the partnership between paid staff member (myself) and the volunteers is vital and has a number of beneficial outcomes:
We retain the very real experience each individual has of living with their condition and what that has meant for them. This build so many bridges with course participants and the atmosphere in the training actuals shifts when course participants hear a little about the background and experiences of the volunteer trainers. This builds empathy and trust and opens up the course to active learning by new course members. Only peers who have shared the experience of those they are sharing with can achieve this mix of shared empathy and passing on skills they have learned - most likely from a paid member or staff. Part of my role in this situation is to monitor and support the presentation of the volunteer trainers. I can focus on being more objective, identifying skills issues and learning and the responses of the course participants to each volunteer's inputs. Here again is the partnership which pays such dividends and preserves both the empathy that is required in these situations with some training development structure perspectives from myself. This supports the deepening of the learning and the very positive outcomes which are reported by course participants. For another volunteer to take this role on - as I believe used to be the case in the early days of Arthritis Care's work in this area - pushes that volunteer to have to be one thing in one situation and take on another role in others- Many can achieve this but I believe that separating the roles brings greater benefits to both the volunteers, the staff and the organisation
Issues of KPI in this area of work is so important. These need to be relevant to the work and size of each organisation or even a part of an organisation utilising volunteer input. Key indicators here are the same as those for staff growth and development - ensuring skill sets are met and kept up to date and that job/role satisfaction is particularly high - After all volunteers are not getting paid - they should at least be having a high level of stisfaction from what they do! Many more soft indcators are required to be built in and agreed monitoring parameters set between funders and the organisation. Identifying methods of quantifying the impact of volunteer input on the service users as opposed to those impacts paid staff are having can be developed. Similarly retention rates of volunteers can be a sigh of an effective and supportive volunteer management strucutre. In a mentoring and support/supervisory role like the one I have currently within Arthritis Care the same personal development and aspiration tools that we hold for managed paid staff can lead to more useful KPI for this role in relation to satisfying funders needs. This would be varied depending on the nature of the organisation itself and we wouldn't just assume that an KPI for an young people's project would be mirrored in a service working with groups of retired individuals. Volunteers, volunteers managers and the roles of volunteers are not heterogeous and we should not assume that what applies in one volunteer managment role equally applies elsewhere
Q1 - I'm speaking from a different perspective as I am a CVS Director but have been Volunteer Centre Manager in two CVS's and was a volunteer manager for a large charity so have a variety of experience. I believe that in this economic climate volunteer managers are more essential than ever. We have seen a massive increase in volunteers registering with our Volunteer Centre over the last 6 months. Government is pushing volunteering as a way into employment (however unlikely that might be). Government are prepared to pay organisations £200 per volunteer they take on who is classed as 'long term unemployed' so making volunteer managers the first in the redundancy firing line would seem somewhat short-sighted. In order to have a positive experience the volunteering needs to be well organised, structured otherwise volunteers lose interest and become disheartened.
Q2 - I beleive the main KPIs are the value of the volunteer to the organisation, the two-way commitment between the volunteer and the organisation, the level of enjoyment the volunteer gets from volunteering and the experience gained by the volunteer. The main ways to evaluate this are by regular supervision, questionnaires and how long the volunteer stays with the organisation. An exit questionnaire could also be useful.
where can i get more information regarding the £200 payment for taking on the long term unemployed as volunteers?
Hi the £200 is for "brokerage" (connecting the volunteer to the volunteer placement) DWP are very clear that this is not a scheme to fund volunteering.
Whilst it is true that the government are now pushing more and more to get the unemployed into "volunteering" (their definition not mine), in order that unemployment statistics can be massaged still further in preparation for the election; this does not mean that we have to sell our collective volunteering soul for the Yankee dollar, whilst at the same time potentially kicking our traditional volunteers and volunteering streams in the teeth.
One thing that hasn't been mentioned, in all this talk of KPI's and targets is that we (volunteer managers) are in many ways the moral custodians of volunteering, and we have a duty to represent ALL volunteers not just those that bring in a fast buck, and/or tick a box, in meeting KPI's
We, that is all of us, are in our positions today not because of government "initiatives" and historically certainly not as a result of government cash, but rather as a result of the efforts of the traditional volunteers that have supported organisations both large and small, through the good times and the bad, over many, many years, we or rather they wrote the book.
So the question is, when recruiting are we now like so much of society to see the monetary value of a person over and above their value as a human being, and a volunteer.
E.g. Do we reject the retired person in favour of the unemployed person who has added cash value, and because the puppet master dictates this; if so where do we then turn when the cash runs out, which it will?
When considering KPI's if we sell out in this way, (by the way its not a legal requirement to do so), then perhaps we need to look at how volunteer managers motivate forced "volunteers" who have been sent by the job centre, and who may well have no real interest in volunteering, but rather fear benefit cuts if they don't ?
Equally with forced volunteers there is a need to police of the system, the government and the job centres will invariably want to keep tabs on people, so we will without doubt also become agents of the benefit system; is this what we wish to become? or do we say, tell you what keep your £200, and in return we will be free to make our own decisions, and still able to let those people who are unemployed volunteer if they wish to, and allow them to contact us in their own right, in which case we as always can continue to welcome them with open arms.
The choice is ours, not theirs!
Question 1
I am the volunteer development manager for (RDA) Riding for the Disabled Association) we have approximately 18,000 volunteers throughout the UK who provide people with disabilities the opportunity to ride and/or carriage drive, promoting therapy, enjoyment and achievement at all levels. Approximately 95% of our Groups have waiting lists and to meet this need we require a vast number of new volunteers. The role of a VDM is paramount to this. As the vast majority of our Groups are run by volunteers we have set up a project that will provide them with the skills, knowledge and tools they need to recruit volunteers and more importantly retain those volunteers, leading to "centres of excellence" in volunteering. It is essential to have a VDM who is able to provide these tools and support the Groups. Without this person our organisation risks our volunteer pool becoming stagnated.
Volunteers feel confident and valued if there is someone specifically available to help them, leading to a more professional and happy volunteer workforce.
Question 2
For a middle sized voluntary organisation "the number of volunteers recruited" is an important KPI, but the impact they have on the organisation and its work is more important. For example one of my current KPI's (approved by funders) is to recruit a further 1,000 volunteers by 2011, which in itself doesn't sound a lot, but those 1,000 new volunteers will enable us to increase our rides by a further 26,000 opportunities each year.
Each year our 18,000 volunteers give approximately 3.5 million hours of their time. For me this is a far better KPI than how many are recuirted.
As a VM who works on the principal of first identifying a piece of work the organisation needs doing and then going out and recruiting a volunteer I feel the key justification has to be the hours worked by volunteers. You can even stick a financial value on this if this will help your organisation value it a bit more (not something I'm a great fan of but it can and does work - sadly).
No organisation expects to take on large numbers of staff without having a HR function to ensure this is done properly and professionally similarly my role as a VM is to ensure our recruitment, management and support of volunteers is such that they stay with us and deliver the work they have been recruited to undertake.
The hours worked when translated into full time equivalent staff can be a very powerful tool to persuade management of the importance of a good VM to support volunteer involvement in the organisation. I'm also never averse to painting the scenario of what would happen to an organisation if it's volunteers went on strike for a day? Volunteer management is essential to ensure volunteers can give of their best and that the work they do makes a significant contribution to the organisation. If it doesn't we are not valuing their gift of time and it's equivalent to wasting a donation of cash. What charity would want to do that!
As a simple person myself (no comment anyone!) I favour two KPI's:
Neither of these are necessarily easy to measure but the first one is mainly an administrative information gathering exercise and the later a question of a regular survey of current (and possibly previous) volunteers.