Helping 1 Million Kids: How a Charity Plans to Reach Ambitious Goal

Becoming a volunteer at Big Brothers Big Sisters of Northern New Mexico used to be a lengthy, cumbersome process.

When people called to inquire,

the Santa Fe organization sent them a package of materials, including an application that ran up to three pages. After that form was completed, the group checked the applicant’s references, then called the prospective volunteer to schedule an in-person interview. The process was so frustrating that only a quarter of the people who expressed an interest in volunteering became a big brother or sister.

“You had to be darned determined as a volunteer to take all that time and jump through all those hoops,” says Andrea Fisher Maril, chief executive officer of Big Brothers Big Sisters of Northern New Mexico.

Since then, however, the organization has revamped its process. Now it immediately asks potential volunteers to come to its offices to discuss volunteer opportunities, with the goal that those interviews will take place within a week of an initial call. And the list of questions for volunteers is now much shorter.

The result has been a big increase in volunteers: Sixty percent of all adults who get in touch with the organization are eventually matched with a child.

Expanding Services

The changes in New Mexico are part of a broader effort to standardize many policies and procedures within Big Brothers Big Sisters as the charity seeks to help more children.

Last year the organization served 225,000 children nationwide, up from 118,000 in 2000. And Big Brothers Big Sisters has set an ambitious goal of helping to match 1 million children with an adult mentor by 2010.

“When you think about taking that kind of quality service to scale, to thousands of volunteers matched with thousands of kids in a particular location, you must have systems to enable that,” says Judy Vredenburgh, chief executive officer of Big Brothers Big Sisters of America, in Philadelphia. “Otherwise, you either won’t go to scale or you’ll diminish the quality.”

Establishing a common set of practices for affiliates to use in their day-to-day operations also represents a critical first step in designing a shared information-management system for affiliates, says Mack Koonce, the national organization’s chief operating officer.

“You can’t build a common system for the organization if everyone is going to do the important steps of service delivery differently,” he says.

The Agency Information Management System, which the organization introduced late last year, is designed to help staff members keep track of increasing numbers of children and volunteers and set priorities for their daily work flow. In addition, it helps affiliate leaders monitor their organizations’ performance.

For two years, 14 local affiliates of Big Brothers Big Sisters, including Northern New Mexico, participated in a pilot program to examine their procedures and find a common way to run their operations. The pilot groups examined the steps necessary to recruit and screen volunteers, match them with young people, and support those relationships. The groups then discussed and evaluated the best approaches to accomplishing those tasks.

Thorny Issue

Agreeing on the set of questions to use for interviews of volunteers proved to be one of the stickiest issues for the affiliates, according to Ms. Fisher Maril.

At Big Brothers Big Sisters of Greater Miami, for example, the list of questions numbered 144. At many affiliates, interviews lasted from one-and-a-half to two-and-a-half hours.

“With a program where you are matching an adult and a child and sending them off in an unsupervised environment, you can’t afford to sacrifice anything,” says Ms. Fisher Maril. “And if you look at the history of Big Brothers Big Sisters, what that meant was that we kept tacking procedures on.”

Because one of Big Brothers Big Sisters’ foremost concerns is screening out volunteers who might harm youngsters, the organization set out to learn which interview questions flagged potential problems with an applicant.

One of the pilot groups, the Phoenix affiliate, and staff members from the national office analyzed the interviews of volunteers against whom allegations of inappropriate behavior had been made. Officials looked for a correlation between the volunteers’ answers and the alleged wrongdoing. The organization kept questions that helped predict a reason for concern, and scrapped the ones that did not.

Agreeing on a final list of questions required a change in attitude among the pilot groups, says Sandra Louk Lafleur, who at the time was senior vice president of programs at the Miami affiliate and now works for the national office helping affiliates in the Southeast make use of the new technology system.

The pilot groups, she says, had to answer the question, “What is it that we need to know about a volunteer as it relates to the safety of a child and the possible impact that they can have on one?”

Ms. Louk Lafleur says leaders began to realize that they could shorten the interview and follow up later. “If there’s something that tells you you need to do further investigation, as a professional you are required to do so,” she says. “But let’s step it back and not make it so that everybody has to go through the extensive, extensive version.”

New Questions

The new list of questions for volunteer interviews has nine categories, with two to five open-ended questions in each section. It also includes potential follow-up questions for times when staff members feel further probing is necessary.

After two years of work, the pilot groups agreed to follow a common approach not just for interviewing volunteers, but also for matching volunteers with youngsters and providing support to adults and children who participate in the charity’s programs. They presented the new approach to other affiliates at the 2003 national meeting of Big Brothers Big Sisters, and since then, employees at 390 of the organization’s 460 affiliates have attended sessions to learn about the common practices.

But convincing all Big Brothers Big Sisters affiliates to adopt the new system hasn’t been an easy sell, particularly at an organization with a long history of local autonomy.

Ms. Fisher Maril of New Mexico says that some of her peers see the new way of doing business as another example of the national organization’s attempts to exert control over affiliates. They worry, she says, about Big Brothers Big Sisters losing “the local juice” and innovative spirit that built the organization.

Within her own organization, she says, one staff member left soon after the group adopted the new approach. The employee, who had previously worked for a large company, said she had taken the job at the charity because she wanted to do things her way; she didn’t want to work at “the McDonald’s of mentoring,” says Ms. Fisher Maril.

While she is sympathetic to their concerns, Ms. Fisher Maril says the new system has helped fuel the rapid growth that Big Brothers Big Sisters of Northern New Mexico has experienced over the past five years.

At the end of 1999, the Santa Fe charity served 150 children; it now supports mentors for nearly 800. The time it takes the organization to screen volunteers and match them with youngsters has decreased from an average of three months to one month. And while children used to languish on the waiting list for up to three years, almost all now are matched with an adult within three months.

Ms. Fisher Maril says so much growth in a short time put strains on her staff members, board of directors, and even the group’s technology infrastructure.

“It felt like you stepped onto a slow-moving train, and the train started going faster and faster and faster,” she says. “As it picked up momentum, everything that wasn’t tied down was shaken loose.”

But with time, additional staff members, and training for the board members of the New Mexico group, the organization has been able to absorb the growth, says Ms. Fisher Maril.

Mr. Koonce, the chief operating officer at Big Brothers Big Sisters of America, says any changes in procedures or technology have to be justified in the context of expanding and improving services to children.

“It would be really hard if we were trying to sell this based on standardization,” says Mr. Koonce. “Then it’s about us. But if you’re selling it based on results, it’s a different approach.”

Or as Ms. Fisher Maril explains, “It really is the only way I could be serving as many more kids as I am. If they’re better served, then what we’re doing makes sense.”