Energize Book Blog

Can you believe it – volunteer management now has its own Idiot’s Guide book! Working with the standard template, author John L. Lipp  crammed a lot of very useful information into 304 pages, all in bite-sized chunks.  Read on for our interview with John and a taste of the great information you’ll get from The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Recruiting and Managing Volunteers.

Energize,Inc. (EI): What makes this book different from previous books on volunteer management?

John Lipp (JL): As a profession, we’ve been very fortunate to have some great books on volunteer management. Many of those books gave me a lot of guidance over the years and the feeling that I wasn’t alone. I’m hoping this book will do the same for a whole new generation of leaders in the field, especially those who might not even think of volunteer management as a profession.

I wrote this book from the perspective of a practitioner. I’ve worked in the field for 22 years and spent many of those years directly leading volunteer programs in a variety of settings. I’ve made lots of mistakes along the way, and want to share what I’ve learned and hopefully prevent others from repeating some of those mistakes. I’ve also had my share of battles, usually with people who only think of volunteers as free labor or in very condescending terms. In that spirit, I hope the book will not only be valuable for people whose main job is volunteer management in an organization – whether or not they are paid or volunteers themselves – but a valuable resource for all people who find themselves supervising volunteers in some capacity. In other words, I hope this book gets shared among several people in an organization and that it just doesn’t sit on the volunteer manager’s bookshelf.

It’s also nice being part of the “Idiot’s Guide” series, with their familiar orange covers and format. Hopefully, this will make the book – and the information inside – very accessible to lots of people. I’m also hoping more bookstores, major chains as well as the independents, will carry it with their other titles in the “Idiot’s” series. It will probably end up in the business section, with other management books. I actually feel the “for profit” sector can learn a lot from those of us who work in the independent sector, so maybe the book will even have some crossover appeal? That would be great!

EI: In the chapter on volunteer training, you introduce the “Goldilocks Rule .” What’s that?

JL: The “Goldilocks Rule” comes from personal experience, when I served as Director of Volunteer Services at an organization that provided emotional and practical support volunteers for persons living with HIV/AIDS. At the time, the organization was requiring all volunteers – whether or not they intend to provide direct services to clients – to attend a two weekend training program that was Friday night and all day on both Saturdays and Sundays; approximately 35 hours. It was a phenomenal experience, but at the same time, it was way too much for people who wanted to provide other volunteer services for the organization; services that we really needed.

Although I initially got some resistance, we ended requiring a much shorter training for those volunteers who wanted to work behind the scenes.  I learned that the key to preparing volunteers was to give them just the right amount of training they needed to be successful in their positions. If your organization requires too much, you can lose valuable people who might have a lot to offer. Require too little, and you may be putting your organization’s clients, and the volunteers themselves, at risk. It’s a balancing act. Goldilocks understood when things were “just right,” and most volunteers will too.

EI: The book goes through each step of the process of effective volunteer involvement – from position design, to recruitment, to recognition.  In your opinion, what’s the one step in this process that’s most often neglected?  How does that neglect affect volunteer engagement?

JL: I teach a lot of classes on volunteer management and leadership and, from talking with participants over the years, I’ve come to realize that many organizations want to focus on quantity – “how many volunteers and how many hours” – and not on quality, “what is the impact those volunteers are making?”  As such, a lot of organizations don’t spend enough time planning for volunteers and instead put all of their efforts into recruiting.  As we all know, bringing in volunteers without a clear sense of what role they will play and how they will be supported can lead to a lot of frustration and finger pointing down the road.  In short, never underestimate the importance of a good position description; the process of crafting them helps answers a lot of these questions ahead of time.

EI: We tend to put lots of time and effort into big, fancy recognition events, but your book contends that creating an overall “culture of thanks” is just as important to making volunteers feel appreciated.  What is a “culture of thanks” and how is it cultivated?

JL: A “culture of thanks” is a fancy way of saying that recognition of an organization’s people – volunteer or paid – should happen every day. People should feel welcomed, appreciated, and receive some acknowledgment of how they’re contributing to the cause.  Big, fancy recognition events can be a lot of fun, but they don’t replace the most simple gestures – smiling, greeting people when they come in, and saying “thank you” as they leave.

EI: Any closing thoughts?

JL: It is such an exciting time to be in our field! There are all these international, national and local movements to engage volunteers.  At the end of the day, it will be up to our field to make sure all these new recruits have a meaningful experience and can truly make a difference.  It’s going to come down to capacity building; helping the leadership in our various organizations understand what kind of systems need to be put in place to maximize the impact of all these new volunteers. I say it a lot in my book – volunteers are free, but volunteer programs are not!  I’m hoping my book will help spread that message. I have no doubt that everyone reading this blog “gets it” – now we just need to make sure that our bosses “get it” too!

The book is available at Amazon.com – they even have a kindle version, which I think is very cool! I feel a little embarrassed saying this, but if anyone wants a signed copy, they can order it directly from my organization Pets Are Wonderful Support (PAWS) in San Francisco. If they do it that way, all the proceeds from the book will go back to directly support our programs to keep low-income seniors and people with disabilities, including HIV/AIDS, living independently with their beloved pets. Just go to the Shopping Link at www.pawssf.org.

Finally, if anybody has any questions or feedback about the book – I’m especially open to suggestions about what should be included or changed for a future edition! – please e-mail me at John@voluncheer.com.

A million thanks for this opportunity to be part of the book blog and for everything Energize, Inc. has done for our profession!

Here’s the third  in a series of questions submitted by our readers and answered by volunteerism and risk management expert Linda Graff (read previous posts, on Risk Management and the Swine Flu and policies on reference checks).

The Question: I presently have a volunteer driver who has just come back from leave for medical conditions (stroke).  She still has her license and is eager to drive for us again.

My supervisor received an irate call from her son stating that his call was confidential and he did not want his mother driving due to her health condition.  He also implied that her health condition had deteriorated due to her busy schedule with us.  He made it VERY clear we are not to tell her he called.

The volunteer’s husband has passed and she enjoys her volunteer work.  The volunteer called wondering why she is not getting drives.

The son should speak directly with the mother, but won’t. The volunteer is getting frustrated, as we haven’t given her a clear answer as to why we are “holding off”. In the end if I can’t reveal the son’s call, what do I say to my volunteer?

Linda’s Answer:  Since the volunteer was off work for medical reasons and since the work she is wanting to return to is responsible, demanding, and risky, it would not be unreasonable to request that she provide a physician’s note verifying her ability to resume her volunteer driving responsibilities.  This way you can be more certain that she actually is well enough to drive for you and you transfer the responsibility for determining so to the expert.

You might consider (though this is tricky) notifying the son that this is what you plan to do and let the son make his case to the physician if he chooses.

I might add that the question of driving ability arises often in my workshops on risk management.  As you observe, the possession of a driver’s licence does not guarantee good driving ability, particularly for some of the demanding driving roles we ask volunteers to fulfil, such as night driving, driving long distances – sometimes will an ill person in the car – driving in demanding weather conditions, and so on.  It is also common for managers to worry about a decline in driving capacity among elderly volunteers or volunteers, who, as in your example, have experienced a related health issue.

My recommendation is that the organization recruit a volunteer expert assessor of driving capacity – a driving instructor – who will either routinely (every year or two) take volunteer drivers for a test drive to ensure they are still driving with the degree of skill required, or as the need arises, such as in the case of recent illness.  This technique ensures a more accurate assessment by someone who has the qualifications to do so.

Here’s the second  in a series of questions submitted by our readers and answered by volunteerism and risk management expert Linda Graff (read the first post, on Risk Management and the Swine Flu, here).

The Question:
I am continually updating our volunteer policies. I have been researching the pros and cons of doing written reference checks for volunteers. At a workshop I attended a few years ago, a lawyer recommended the written check over a telephone check for some types of volunteer work. I cannot find any documents to support this view. What is your opinion on this matter?

Linda’s Answer:

I favour telephone based reference checks.  I detail the reasons in my book, Beyond Police Checks, but briefly, here, my sense is the referees will be incline to be more candid and spontaneous, and divulge more pertinent information verbally by telephone than they would in writing.  Take good notes, date and sign them, and keep them on file.  If necessary, you might summarize what you’ve heard and ask the referee to sign off that you have accurately reflected their opinion, but that seems excessive in most settings.

As promised, here is the first in a series of questions submitted by our readers and answered by volunteerism and risk management expert Linda Graff.  Thanks to everyone who submitted a question; come back soon for the next installment of Linda’s good advice.

The Question:
With the anticipated increase in  problems with swine flu expected over the winter, most hospitals in Scotland are considering how they can involve more volunteers to free up medical staff and to allow people to help others in a time of potential crisis.  With the experience of SARS in Canada, what would you advise to help manage the risk for front line and other volunteers?

Linda’s Answer:
This is a really interesting question that probably has wide applicability as so many communities and organizations brace for the potentially disruptive effects of the H1N1 virus world wide.

There are two aspects of this question I’ll pick up on.

The first has to do with the division of labour between paid and unpaid staff.

Normally I think it best not to assign the same work to paid and unpaid staff.  While legislation and legal precedents vary by jurisdiction and, obviously, by country, one risks things like attracting the applicability of labour law and/or labour standards where they otherwise would not apply when volunteers do the same work as paid staff, and open the possibility of suits by volunteers for back wages where they have been doing materially the same work as paid staff.  Additionally, volunteers can feel resentment at not being paid, and staff can feel threatened that volunteers will replace them.

The question becomes more complex when, for legitimate reasons (e.g., dramatic increase in demand for service – emergency, disasters, etc.; loss of funding) the involvement of volunteers is critical to service provision.  In such cases organizations need to think through both the immediate issues of mission attainment as well as the down-the-road fall out, such as dealing with potential resentment from paid staff or other damage to ongoing volunteer/paid staff relations.

While I remain certain that volunteers should never be engaged in a way that displaces paid staff, I am less hard-lined about whether volunteers might be engaged to replace paid staff who are no longer in place – for a variety of reasons (but usually the loss of funding).  As the nature and organization of work changes over time, I can no longer support the notion that volunteers can not be asked to perform work that at some point in the past was done by paid staff.  We have seen many transitions in the organization of work and I do not think that duties that have been at some point in the domain of paid staff can never be reassigned to volunteers – as long as doing so does not jeopardize the livelihood of the paid staff in question.  This is particularly so in nonprofits where the realignment of duties leads to better service or greater mission accomplishment.  This begs the question of managing relationships with organized labour, unions, and paid staff in general, an important matter that goes beyond what I can tackle here.

The second aspect of your question has to do with the ethics of risk, a matter that has troubled me since the very example you cite – the SARS crisis in Canada a few years back.

I know of several hospitals and long-term care facilities in Toronto (and probably elsewhere) which asked volunteers to staff the screening desks during the SARS crisis.  Elective procedures were cancelled, unessential staff were sent home, and most facilities also cancelled all volunteer involvement.  They closed all entrances but one and all persons entering were required to be “screened”.  That is, they were asked if they had a cough, a fever, had been to Asia recently, etc. etc.

In the midst of this most threatening and frightening public health crisis in living memory, facilities asked volunteers to undertake what might, arguably, have been one of the riskiest roles.  Asking volunteers to undertake very risky work is one thing, and of course I anticipate readers saying, but Linda, we do that all the time.  Look at volunteer firefighters, disaster response volunteers, and so on.  And I acknowledge such roles.  The problem I had with the SARS situation was that at least one hospital prepared a special waiver that they asked their screening desk volunteers to sign which absolved the facility of any and all liability connected to illness of or harm to the volunteer arising from their screening desk work.

So not only were those facilities prepared to expose volunteers to extremely high risk (for no pay, in a society which often not only pays for work, but pays more for dangerous or demanding work), but were prepared to abandon those very volunteers at the earliest possible opportunity if they suffered loss or harm from their volunteer roles.  I also note, in this province, we do not provide worker’s compensation for volunteers, nor do most organization offer any kind of health insurance benefits to volunteers for injuries they might suffer on the (unpaid) job.

I think there should be some limits to the degree of risk we will expose volunteers to, even when volunteers themselves might be willing to undertake the work.  And when we do expose volunteers to higher risks, I believe we should be prepared to offer them health care coverage for on-the-job injuries they might sustain.

Finally, in principle, I think there is good basis for planning to engage volunteers in extended roles as part of disaster planning.  We have endless precedents – volunteers sandbagging communities in times of flood, and pandemic plans to, for example,  engage citizen volunteers as grave diggers in anticipation of city employees being unavailable to fulfill such critical roles.

When exceptional plans are prepared, it is important to consider the ethics of risk, the conditions that would need to be in place to trigger implementation, and some thoughtful plans for returning to “normal” when the emergency subsides.  These kinds of considerations should be a part of the overall plan and have the force of policy.