Keeping Volunteers Requires Leadership
October 5, 2000 | Read Time: 2 minutes
To the Editor:
The story on the UPS Foundation’s efforts to help nonprofits get more out of their volunteers (“Ensuring Service Delivery,” August 24) is timely and interesting.
The article does perpetuate, perhaps unintentionally, some ideas about volunteers that make for trouble in paradise if they are not recognized and altered. They are best addressed as 10 rules for working with volunteers:
1. You lead volunteers.
2. You manage programs.
3. You do not insult the efforts of a volunteer by paying a staff member to do the identical job.
4. You do not use volunteers to replace paid staff members and reduce expenses.
5. You recognize volunteers as a valued asset.
6. You manage programs in such a way that each volunteer can feel she exercised initiative and successfully carried out a plan which was in part, at least, her creation.
7. You provide experienced, professional trainers when training is needed.
8. You know your volunteer and her other commitments.
9. You mutually understand and agree to the tasks planned to be undertaken by the volunteer.
10. You develop a conscious understanding of your mutual strengths and areas where each may need help.
The devil is in those little details and they do take more staff time than you might imagine. Volunteers are not employees to be managed. They are viewed as partners, just as the most advanced modern managers treat their employees. The difference is that a volunteer tends to vote with her feet if the management isn’t as enlightened as she’d like to see it.
I would have liked to see more explicit acknowledgment of the worth of volunteers in the article and less on how they must be managed. Volunteers are community leaders — just ask your volunteer board members.
The key is leadership, that always necessary but somewhat indefinable attribute of a manager.
Walt Meares
President
National Writers Association, Los Angeles Chapter
Burbank, Calif.
