When Good Will Overflows

Charities work to turn holiday volunteers into year-round help

A few days before Thanksgiving, Chicagoan David Cook decided that he wanted to spend the holiday helping to feed the homeless.

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But Mr. Cook, a management consultant, didn’t realize that it’s almost as hard to get a last-minute volunteering spot around the holidays as it is to get reservations at the city’s trendiest restaurants. He called 12 charities in the Chicago area and couldn’t find a single group that needed him.

“It really surprised me,” Mr. Cook said. “Every place in town was totally booked.”

Chicago is not the only city with a surplus of volunteers seeking to lend a hand to the needy during the year-end holiday season. Nationwide, social-services organizations — especially those that tend to the needs of the hungry and homeless — are being inundated with volunteers who want to help others. Nearly 1 in 10 Americans, according to a recent survey, say they volunteer during the holidays — and experts agree that the Thanksgiving-to-Christmas period is the most popular time to volunteer.

While most charities appreciate the altruistic gesture, the outpouring of good will can take its toll on charities and many already-overworked employees. Year after year, many social-services groups find themselves in the awkward position of being deluged with more offers of help than they can easily absorb.

Charity leaders say they don’t want to create jobs just to give people something to do. Nevertheless, they don’t want to turn away well-meaning people who might become dedicated long-term volunteers — or even major donors.

“It’s a major management challenge,” observes Peter Frumkin, an assistant professor of public policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. “You sit around all year waiting for help, and on Christmas and Thanksgiving everyone wants to come in and you have all these volunteers fighting over the gravy ladle.”

Not all kinds of social services are flooded with inquiries from volunteers. Charity leaders say the year-end holidays seem to inspire a special desire in people to hold parties, serve food, gather presents, and undertake other such activities to get directly involved in helping the poor and homeless. And, while organizations that provide such services often struggle to find enough work for volunteers to do during the holidays, other charities have the exact opposite problem.

Some museums, like the National Steinbeck Center, in Salinas, Cal., find that their docents want to take time off to visit their families — or even to ring a bell for the Salvation Army’s fund-raising kettle.

Finding substitutes to fill positions that require special skills or knowledge can get complicated — especially if they are only needed for a few days. The Cabell-Huntington Hospital, in Huntington, W.Va., for instance, requires volunteers to go through intensive preparation and training — such as being tested for tuberculosis and attending workshops on everything from how diseases are transmitted to confidentiality policies — in order to be sure that neither they nor patients are harmed. Such training makes it difficult and even impractical to accommodate short-term volunteers during the holidays.

Nobody knows for sure whether the seasonal bulge in volunteers at social-services charities is growing more intense. Interviews with volunteer leaders around the country suggest that they feel like they are under more pressure than ever to deal with an outpouring of interest from volunteers. Most say they try to encourage volunteering at other times of the year, but sometimes they just have to turn people down because of the abundance of helpers.

Some people don’t take that news well. They can get angry or pushy if their services aren’t needed, or if they are asked to accept a task other than the one they had in mind.

“People get turned off if they can’t do what they want,” says Ken Hall, executive director of Hands On Memphis, a volunteer clearinghouse that is one of the 24 local affiliates of City Cares of America. “Some people almost hang up when they find there is nothing on that particular date or nothing they are interested in.”

Experiences like those make some charity staff members wonder how many callers are volunteering more for themselves than the charity.

“Cynically speaking, the holidays can be a time when some people do their volunteer bit and then go on back to their busy lives,” observes Andrea John-Smith, who manages volunteers for the Salvation Army in Seattle. “I can tell these people from the rest because they treat me like a ticket agent at an airline: ‘Sign me up to work with the homeless — and do it quick.’”

Ms. John-Smith says she tries to tell such callers that their help is needed in other ways. In worst-case scenarios, she says, she turns the volunteers down out of fear that they will be rude to the Salvation Army’s clients.

But Ms. John-Smith and others say they usually try their best to accommodate those who show a deep-seated desire to serve. She says some lonely people practically beg to volunteer, telling her, “I just got divorced and I’m all alone,” or, “All my children have grown up and moved away.”

Juliet Orzal, who manages volunteers at Martha’s Table, a Washington community center that provides a wide range of services to the poor, says some callers have nearly broken down in tears when they hear that all the slots are full. She often finds herself assigning them a task even when she doesn’t really need the extra help.

“I have a soft spot for them,” she says. “I just say, ‘What time would you like to come?’”

Taking such steps to tend to the emotional needs of volunteers pays off year-round, experts say.

“Organizations that don’t manage their volunteers well or don’t know how to provide good customer service are the ones who wonder why no one comes to volunteer the rest of the year,” says Nan Hawthorne, who runs an electronic discussion list and Internet site for managers of volunteers.

However, creative non-profit leaders “make volunteers feel welcome during the holidays,” she explains, without making them feel guilty about not lending their services the rest of the year. Those groups are also typically the ones that succeed at luring holiday volunteers back on a regular basis.

Some of the most creative groups have even managed to turn surplus labor into cash. Several chapters of the American Red Cross devised methods for getting volunteers to raise money.

To make the most of the outpouring of holiday help, a growing number of charities designate a specific staff member to recruit and place volunteers.

At the Salvation Army’s Northwest divisional headquarters, in Seattle, leaders hired Ms. John-Smith as a full-time coordinator to cope with the flood of calls — three or four times as many as the rest of the year.

During most of the year, Ms. John-Smith spends her days seeking out volunteers, training Salvation Army staff members to manage volunteers, and dealing with many other issues. But throughout November and December, she sits at her phone wearing a headset, talking to prospective volunteers from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

“The week before Thanksgiving it’s just a zoo,” she notes. She typically receives 50 calls a day from people who want to serve food to the homeless on Thanksgiving Day — even though the charity only needs 50 people to do that job.

So Ms. John-Smith comes up with other tasks for them. Among other things, she asks callers to bake pies for distribution to the needy during the year-end holidays and wrap Christmas gifts for elderly shut-ins.

The Oregon Food Bank, in Portland, has plenty of room for the holiday rush of volunteers — the charity just built a 5,000-square-foot work space.

“We were constantly turning volunteers away,” notes John Harris, the food bank’s corporate-relations manager, who until recently ran its volunteer program. The new center stays open on Saturday mornings and three evenings during the week so it can accommodate much larger numbers of volunteers.

But officials there say they are concerned that staff members, such as volunteer-center coordinator Ammi Ludwick, may be stretching themselves too thin during the holidays.

The food bank gets 20 groups of volunteers during the holidays rather than the usual 10, and the groups are often larger — some with as many as 100 people, compared with the typical group size of 15 to 30. That means that Ms. Ludwick must spend more time on day-to-day planning and supervision rather than on long-term efforts to recruit and educate year-round volunteers.

In addition, Mr. Harris worries about spending more than his budget permits if hourly employees are required to work too much overtime supervising volunteers.

“It seems like there is a perception we need people’s help more at this time of year, which is not really the case,” he observes. “We really wish we could shift some of that great support to other parts of the year.”

Social-services charities aren’t the only non-profit groups that get swamped. Across the country, local volunteer clearinghouses that match volunteers with charities also report a tremendous rise in interest around the year-end holidays.

Mr. Hall says that during Thanksgiving week this year, Hands On Memphis held five orientations for prospective volunteers, up from its usual one per week. And, despite Mr. Hall’s predictions that an orientation the night before Thanksgiving would be empty, it was so full that he added a second session.

In Washington, Greater D.C. Cares, another group that matches volunteers and charities, sets up a voicemail hotline to help handle the holiday influx. In November, the group received 600 calls, up from the 160 calls it typically receives each month.

However, say the volunteer clearinghouses, the closer it gets to the holidays, the more they find themselves struggling to find places to which to refer the callers.

“We get tons of calls, and we don’t even have anywhere to send them,” says Fran Loosen, the executive director of Hands On Portland, in Oregon. “There is just nothing for them to do.”

Some experts believe that the best way to deal with that problem is to educate Americans that volunteering is something that can be done year-round — and is often most needed long after the holidays are over.

“We have to get away from giving in to the spur-of-the-moment charity,” says Susan Ellis, who runs Energize, a Philadelphia company that advises charities on how best to manage volunteers.

Ms. Ellis and others offered suggestions on how to transform the seasonal surplus from a liability into an asset:

Plan ahead. The No. 1 problem most charities face is not planning far enough ahead for the predictable avalanche, experts say.

Managers of volunteers should view the holidays as a time to use surplus labor to tackle projects that otherwise never get done, Ms. Ellis suggests.

Some of the most-organized groups start as early as the summer, tossing about ideas for things people can do if they call in November and December.

“This is not a question of thinking about business as usual,” Ms. Ellis suggests. “This is your chance to do something you have never done before.”

Be responsive. At the Salvation Army in Seattle, Ms. John-Smith says she returns every call within 24 hours.

“Each one I call back and have a direct interaction with, because they deserve that,” she said. “That sets us apart from other agencies. If all I do is call them back, I am head and shoulders above my peers.”

But other charities say it’s hard to find the time to respond if they are already overburdened and understaffed.

One way to get around the problem: Ask volunteers to call back prospective volunteers.

Kara Kuehnel, director of the United Way of the Plains Volunteer Center, in Wichita, Kan., says one local charity even uses holiday volunteers to decorate personalized thank-you notes to its regular volunteers.

Offer specific alternatives. When charities have met their volunteer needs, some simply turn down anybody else who calls to offer his or her time during the holidays.

The most effective groups, however, will have a specific alternative ready to suggest, and ask the caller for a commitment, Ms. Ellis says.

Ms. Loosen of Hands On Portland advises charities in her area to mail out “rainchecks” to callers, thanking them for their offer to serve and asking them to sign up for a future workday.

Be willing to turn down volunteers. At some point, charity leaders need to draw the line, observers say.

“I think the volunteer manager who feels besieged needs to be given permission to just say No,” says Jan Poppendieck, a professor of sociology at Hunter College. “They really aren’t there to make volunteers feel better.”

Ultimately, non-profit leaders should use the holiday season as a tool for identifying long-term volunteers, says Karen Delaney, chair of the National Council of Volunteer Centers.

“We are trying to train people to look at this as a gateway into their organization,” she says. “There are incredible recruitment possibilities, but a lot of agencies don’t recognize this.”

However, Ms. Delaney cautions not to ask for too much too soon. “A lot of agencies say, ‘Oh great, can you sign up today to volunteer twice a week for the rest of the year?’ For a lot of a people that’s too much of a jump, especially if they really don’t know anything about you.”

Ms. Delaney, who also runs a volunteer center in Santa Cruz, Cal., recommends sending callers a follow-up thank you, adding them to a newsletter mailing list, and gradually inviting them back — perhaps once a quarter — for a specific activity.

“It’s almost like creating a career path,” she says. “Once you get someone in the door, build on that relationship, and give them more and more opportunities to give again.”