The New Volunteer Workforce: Reading Notes

This blog post is a part of our "Reading Notes" series - where we read an article, post a summary, and our comments on it.

Article Title: The New Volunteer Workforce
Url: http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/the_new_volunteer_workforce/
Date: 12/02/08

Notes:
A tremendous read about volunteering, packed full with stats and research tidbits. The article makes the case that volunteering is severely undervalued by nonprofits, corporations, and the laity in general. The result is that nonprofits are leaving billions (that's billions) of dollars on the table.

Despite Hillary Clinton's claim that 'words don't matter,' the authors make the case that part of the problem may lay in the term "volunteer" itself. The term implies "free" which connotes something that is not valuable (see quote below). You know who's already figured this out?

Coders.

What is the most efficient and value producing volunteer workforce in existence today? It's the open source movement. And being an "open source coder" is a synonym for "software development volunteer." So there's one condor-sized feather in the cap of the authors' hypothesis.

I've blogged about volunteer terminology before (http://blog.mobilevoter.org/2008/07/new-name-for-vo.html) - it's the reason that we changed the name of our endeavor from "Volunteer Now" to "The Extraordinaries." I'm convinced that volunteerism of the 2010s will look nothing like we've ever seen and that it will go by a different name. And you won't think of it as "donating your time." You'll think of it as something fun, social, and good for you. You may even think of it as entertainment for a cause.

This article calls for a more structured and dedicated approach to volunteer program management. The result of which will be taking some of that $36billion off the table and into the pockets of nonprofits. But can we do better? Can we envision that which does not go by the name "volunteerism." Because, frankly, even if nonprofits do a much better job at recruiting, retaining, and managing talent, there's still a lot of value left on the table. And its value that's not even being measured right now. We're looking at one specific table, but there's a whole range of Arizonian mesas in the distance.

To see them, we need only look to the example of the open source software movement. It shifted not only the terminology, but the business model. For one, it shows us that volunteerism doesn't necessarily have to be focused around the (nonprofit) corporation. Social good *and* economic value can be generated by loosely organized communities of individuals. For two, the product that results from this group may actually be of higher quality than that produced by any given corporation. And if you're wondering where that leaves nonprofits, well, they gain too because software is cheaper, better, and more widely available than ever before - and in our information economy, software is how nonprofits do business.

But software production is only one area of expertise. How do we apply this business-model-busting approach to the rest of that which should not be called "volunteerism?"

Pithy Quotes:
* "most nonprofits do not view their volunteers as strategic assets"

* "most nonprofits are losing staggering numbers of volunteers every year. Of the 61.2 million people who volunteered in 2006, 21.7 million—more than one-third—did not donate any time to a charitable cause the following year.3 Because these volunteers gave about 1.9 billion hours in 2006, and the value of their donated time was about $20 per hour4—that calculates to about $38 billion in lost volunteer time in one year."

* "A few nonprofits have grasped this concept [that volunteers can generate a tremendous amount of value] and are taking what we call a talent management approach—investing in the infrastructure to recruit, develop, place, recognize, and retain volunteer talent."

* "Five of the main reasons why more than 1 in 3 volunteers don't re-volunteer
1. Not Matching Volunteers’ Skills with Assignments. Volunteers with valuable and specialized skills are often dispatched to do manual labor rather than tasks that use their professional talents."

2. "Failing to Recognize Volunteers’ Contributions"

3. "Not Measuring the Value of Volunteers. "

4. "Failing to Train and Invest in Volunteers and Staff."

5. "Failing to Provide Strong Leadership."

* "Why isn’t volunteering more respected? Why aren’t more organizations investing in volunteering? One problem may lie with the term itself. The word “volunteer” doesn’t say anything about the nature of the service provided, except implying that it is free. It is often assumed that something free is not valuable. Maybe we should use different words—like fundraiser, project manager, or legal counsel—that describe the work performed and help erode outdated ideas about the value of the volunteer workforce."

* "If nonprofit leaders want highly skilled volunteers to come and stay, they need to expand their vision of volunteering by creating an experience that is meaningful for the volunteer, develops skills, demonstrates impact, and taps into volunteers’ abilities and interests."

* Their research showed that the primary difference between volunteers and non volunteers is the amount of TV watched! Back to quote: "People do not volunteer because nonprofits do not provide them with volunteer opportunities that interest them enough to pull them away from their television sets."

* need to rethink the role of volunteer and make it more hybrid with "worker"

CAPITALIZING ON VOLUNTEER TALENT

* Rethinking Work Roles.

* Assigning Appropriate Tasks.
"CNCS research found that volunteers who engage in less challenging activities tend to be less likely to continue volunteering the following year. Only 53 percent of volunteers who did “general labor” activities or supplied transportation continued volunteering the following year. By contrast, 74 percent of volunteers performing professional or management activities continued volunteering."

* "Creating Bonding Experiences. "

* "Supporting and Training Volunteers"

* "Using New Technology"

* "Developing Strategic Plans"

* "America’s young people are increasingly interested in making a difference. One recent study revealed that 68 percent of people between the ages of 18 and 26 prefer to work for a company that provides professional volunteer opportunities....The UCLA Higher Education Research Institute reported in 2005 a 25-year high in first-year students’ belief that it is “essential or important to help others.”

* "Nonprofits can also use religious organizations to expand their reach into the African-American, Hispanic, and Asian communities. Each group does more than one-third of all their volunteering with religious groups."

* A "surge in professional people interested in putting their skills to good use creates a tremendous opportunity for nonprofits."

Comments

[SJ]

Nice blog, great ideas, great reading links. Have you considered posting a weekly recap of links you've been browsing?

In my experience every truly great collaborative work has a simple goal which is independent of the survival of the core group (whether it is a founding social group, a non-profit, a religious body or something else).

Take your line of thinking here one step further: what is the purpose of a given non-profit? If you manage to gather a team of 10,000 or 500,000 contributors working towards your original goal, is the precise structure of the original concept (a non-profit, incorporated in such and such a place, led by this governance structure) important? Can it change?

What happens when the new growth of voluntary collaboration has more experience and better connections than the small core of staff? How are the next level of strategy, challenges, programs, processes defined?

If the answer remains "the non-profit defined the community in the first place, all else is valuable but subsidiary", you are losing what may be the greatest value of any really successful entity or network: its capacity to transcend its origins.

Great networks can spawn new focused clusters (which may or may not have any of bylaws and directors, corporate status and budgets, and staff). They can dissolve or reshape the form of the original seed without disturbing the growth of the whole.

When you explicitly work with contributors to pursue a greater goal, they have an extra opportunity to develop their own strategic plans.

As an example, consider what is happening now to the parts of the democratic party machine that were entirely directed by the presidential campaign until seven weeks ago... the development of separate Red Cross agencies in different countries [note the grandfathering and loopholes in international law that make some of these things possible for RC and UN works]... the genesis of national Wikimedia chapters.

[Ben Rigby]

Excellent points - and a reminder to stay focused on the broader issue of social change rather than organizational continuity. Although, it's often the case that you need the former to achieve the latter. But overall, I'm 100% behind the sentiment of this comment. It seems that many orgs get lost in running a nonprofit for its own sake...

As a follow-on question - does it make sense to evolve an org after its founding objectives have been met, or do you call it a success and move on? I suppose this begs the question: is there inherent value in an organizational infrastructure dedicated to a social purpose - even if it there is no immediate social purpose.