There is no question that the proper use of technology can increase the efficiency and effectiveness of how assets (such as money or people) are managed an organization. At times it can even make those involved with the organization more loyal and happier to be involved with them. Consider how much banks save by reducing the number of branches they open because their clients bank online (efficiency). Consider how the banks’ online service improve the communication flow from themselves and their customers and their customers back to them (effectiveness). Ask anyone who banks online if they would ever consider switching to a bank that does not allow them to bank online (loyalty).

Nonprofits trying to integrate the use of technology are faced with burdens that they need to overcome. Barriers include cost, training and time. Professional grade software programs are often considered a luxury that the volunteers and the volunteer program don’t need. Despite the decrees made by most organizations that “our volunteers are our most important asset”, new investments in technology go first to the fundraisers and often run out before volunteer management is supported.

I am not so naive to not comprehend the importance of fundraising. The staff salaries, rent, phone lines and the means in which services are delivered are in most cases funded by the work of the fundraiser(s). If we are going to tell volunteers that they are important to the organization however, then the organization ought to actually treat them as important and reduce the amount of lip-service given. Organizations need to ensure that they have a qualified Manager of Volunteers running their volunteer program and that manager needs access to the right resources to do her job effectively and efficiently. This includes funds for training, books, recognition and technology and the time to engage all of these. If the volunteers are one of your organizations most important assets, treat them that way. This doesn’t mean just being nice to them. It means that you take the management of the volunteers’ contributions of their time as seriously as you manage the financial contributions to the organization.

The article below is reprinted from Charity Channel. I have chosen it as a topic here for a variety of reasons;

A. Far too often I hear intelligent people assume that when I speak of nonprofits adopting a business-like approach, they assume that I mean that bottom line is the only important consideration. Martin's views help explain how a business-like approach can help a nonprofit.

B. I am concerned by the number of times I hear, "But that's not how we do things here," as though the organization must feel it has no room for organizational improvement.

C. The world is changing at an ever-quickening pace and the nonprofit sector is no absolved from this pace. In the absence of the ability to change nimbly, organizations become outdated. This caused poorer service deliver than desirable and even complete closure.

(Also see 'Nonprofits Need to Think More Like For-Profits' for some of my own thought on the topic. http://tonygoodrow.tigblog.org/post/36494)

The Business of Volunteer Resources Management: A Conversation
by Celeste Sauls-Marks

Recently, Volunteer Management Review talked with Martin Cowling, the CEO of People First-Total Solutions in Melbourne, Australia, about his views on the application of business techniques and entrepreneurialism in the field of volunteer resources management. His responses to our questions follow.

1. You have said that volunteer resources managers should use a business-like approach to their programs. Why do you feel this is becoming more important?

On one level I am not sure it is becoming more important as this has always been my view…the mission of the VRM is to ensure the organisation’s mission is met whilst providing volunteers with the best possible experience.

To do this within the limited resources and budgets we have requires us to employ a business like approach. Having said that the following changes are impacting on our field:
In many places the resources available in the non-profit sector for volunteer development are being frozen or reduced…we need to do more with the same budgets we had …or less.
Funders are demanding that we demonstrate we are targeted, efficient and responsible. They are looking for “returns” that match the funds they are investing.

“Baby boomers and Generation X” are looking for programs that meet their needs to give in particular ways within their specific time fames.

We need take a business like approach to how and whom we target in recruitment. The “scattergun” advertising approach if it ever worked is not an efficient way to harness the community in our work.

My only caveat is we must not let the “business” of doing the work squeeze out the human element of volunteering. Business techniques should be about enhancing the human element not minimizing it.

2. What role does entrepreneurialism play in volunteer resources management?

I believe it is imperative for Managers of Volunteers whether paid or unpaid need to see themselves as “social entrepreneurs” marrying innovative approaches and standard business skills to impact on social issues. This is a very different role to the traditional volunteer manager who in some organizations is seen as a babysitter or entertainer.

3. How can volunteer resources managers be more entrepreneurial?

We need to be clear about what our own personal vision is for the volunteer program. This requires us to take the time to articulate it…planning time is something volunteer managers neglect in their haste to be maintaining programs.
We need to measure the effectiveness of what we do: e.g.… How does this program impact on the mission of our organisation?

We need to tell the organisation what the impact of our work and approach is. Organisational and government resources will only be available to us if we can demonstrate the return we make.

VRMS could recruit volunteers from the community who are entrepreneurial in their views and work to work with us in a “senior volunteer administration or management” role. This means exposure to entrepreneurial ideas and influences, the ability to multiply personal workload through deploying innovative thinkers and openness to developing or expanding entrepreneurial programs.

We also need to communicate what the impact of our work is on the organisation in terms people understand.

4. The work that volunteers engage in is changing. For instance, we are seeing an increase in episodic volunteering and youth engagement. How does this impact volunteer resources managers?

The not for profit sector is facing one of our biggest challenges. The people who founded many of our institutions and have kept them going in the west are aging, and retiring form volunteer work. The attitudes being brought in by younger people who are living in a 7 day a week work environment, with more entertainment and study options than at any other time in history and the most incredible communication technologies ever seen have a completely different attitude to how they want to volunteer. How non-profits will delver services in this new environment needs to be considered urgently as it will not be the same in the 21 st Century.

The key thing is we need to understand that our community is as passionate about the world as any other generation has ever been but they want to engage in a very different way. For example, kids under 25 in Australia are passionately concerned about the environment yet membership of conservation organizations in that country is at low ebb. We have to find a way to bridge this disconnect. For example in the wake of Katrina in the US and the Tsunami in Asia, millions of people sought to find ways to engage with helping people in need. How do we harness this passion?

We have been talking about episodic volunteering and corporate volunteering since Nancy Macduff coined the phrase in the early 1990s but we are acting as if it’s a new trend now.


5. If volunteer resources managers change their approach to their programs, what results do you anticipate they will see?

They will be seen as the lead part of their agency and a powerhouse.
They will have a more rewarding job.
They will not have a shortage of volunteers
"Copyright © 2005 Celeste Sauls. All rights reserved.
This article is reprinted with permission from CharityChannel.com and the author of this article. The author holds the copyright to the article. To receive the entire issue by email each week, visit http://charitychannel.com/enewsletters and use the subscription form. To seek permission for reprints, visit http://charitychannel.com/enewsletters/reprints. For more information, contact CharityChannel at http://charitychannel.com/rapid-reply."

Thank you to all that helped. More than 100 donors contributed before the deadline so the project will now receive another donation of $5,000. I really approciate everyone who helped make this happen.

______________________________________________________________________________

This article is to ask a small favour that will have a great impact on a project that will help nonprofits in Colombia. In the end, I am asking for a $10 contribution and if 100 people make a donation before November 30, a leveraging donor will kick in $5,000! You know how the internet can help in recruiting volunteers. We are trying to make this possible in Colombia.

Here is a summary of the project.

· I am working with Partners of the Americas (www.partners.net) to provide Colombia with an infrastructure that will connect Colombian volunteers with the organizations that need them.

· Outcomes of this project include the launch of a Spanish version of the recruitment (not ongoing management) portion of MyVolunteerPage.com throughout Colombia and training on its implementation. Columbian nonprofit organizations will be able to advertise their needs for volunteers for free in MyVolunteerPage.com and from there, in offline promotions as well.

· The project has been featured on the Global Giving website and was selected as one of only five projects to be included in their launch.

· Global Giving is like a marketplace for project donations. Think of it like a wedding registry for doing good. It is one of their supporters that is providing the $5,000 to each the five pilot projects that have 100 donors contribute to the project.

The leveraging of this makes it a great giving opportunity but please do not assume that others will make it happen. Please throw in your few bucks to help the project get an extra $5,000. Go to http://www.globalgiving.com/pr/1600/proj1566a.html

Thank you, thank you, thank you!

In my home town of Burlington Ontario Canada there are four Rotary clubs. Like most service clubs there are principles to the organization that are common in every club around the world and unique characteristics that make clubs even from the same community different from each other. Like other services clubs, Rotary clubs are recruiting new members and one measure of success in a club is its membership growth. Despite the inherent competition for new members though, a philosophy exists that in the words of one of our past club presidents in Burlington, “We are like one club with four doors.” In the end it really does not matter to which individual club this new member’s dues or volunteer efforts are channeled. Rotary’s international projects such as the eradication of polio have a new ally regardless of which club it is. Local projects that support local nonprofits too have a new ally regardless of the specific club. Rotary, and all that it supports, benefits by having more than one door into its organization.

United Way understands this concept. Their innovative approach to fundraising creates a significant number of doorways to donating through the workplace community. In the big picture, does it matter if I give though where I work full time, where I work on a temporary contract, where I volunteer or directly to the United Way? No. But when their campaign is on I cannot help but to notice the number of opportunities (doorways) I have to donate.

For those of who live in Canada or have visited Canada, you can easily see how Tim Hortons understands this concept. When the goal is to get a coffee and a donut, Tim Hortons has door for you just about everywhere you go. And even though one location competes with another, they all win with each new customer because the customer who buys in one store will very likely then buy in another.

So when it comes to welcoming volunteers into new ways to get involved, can there be too many doors? A former chair at a prominent national organization in the volunteer sector put it quite succinctly “It is incumbent upon all of us to encourage and support volunteerism”. If we all do what ever we can to encourage new connections between volunteers and organizations, even if it is not our own, we all win. The corollary to this is of course is that, like the experience one has as a member of an individual Rotary club, donor to a nonprofit or customer at Tim Hortons can influence future decisions, we need also do what ever we can to ensure a good experience for the volunteer. That topic will have to wait for another blog. For now, no, there is no such thing as too many doors.

I was at a fundraising gala recently where someone commented that, “non-profits need to think more like for-profits”. It created significant discomfort with a few people in the group who worked in the nonprofit sector. Their comments centered on the premise that thinking like a for-profit meant putting their own needs (profit) ahead of the greater good and therefore thinking like a for-profit is the last thing they should do. I found myself at odds with their comments for two reasons. Firstly, the self-above-the-greater-good position they were attributing to businesses exists in many non-profits, subconsciously in some and quite consciously in others. Secondly, while it understood that not-profits most certainly need a vision and set of goals that are different than those of a for-profit, the strategies and techniques used to reach those goals should in many cases, be similar.

There are a variety of areas where this is the case but this posting will focus on the art of collaboration.

While some non-profits like to think they are good collaborators, many hold back from the full possibilities. Quoting from Community Visions, Community Solutions by Joseph Connor and Stephanie Jadel-Taras, “While they (nonprofits) may embrace the message ‘You should collaborate’ they also hear another message, ‘You are in competition with each other for a piece of a small pie. Being told to collaborate and compete simultaneously is, to say the least, confusing for non-profit leaders.” Because participants of a collaboration carry a concern about protecting their own turf, their collaborative efforts do not lead to solutions that are greater than the sum of their parts.

For-profit organizations don’t seem to have the same difficulties comprehending the value of collaboration among competitors. Businesses strive to general a profit. If collaboration with other businesses will generate more profit then they collaborate, even if the others around the table are their competitors. Trade associations are made of business that all provide similar good or services and compete with each other, but still work together for purposes of education, advocacy, strategic planning etc. Car dealerships form auto-malls together because in making it easier for consumers to shop at competitive dealers, more consumers go to auto-malls to shop. I have shared a conference presentation stage with competitors in a mutually advantageous effort to education the audience on the benefits of automating some of their processes and sharing other processes with their volunteers. Yes, as a result of this, some chose to buy our software and some our competitor’s, but by collaborating together we were able get on the conference program to educate volunteer managers about the benefits of implementing such systems and we were all better off because of it.

As non-profits strive to accomplish their particular mission, many choose to stop short of this pursuit if the result would reduce their revenue stream. How would you suppose a non-profit whose mandate was to deliver prepared meals to shut-ins would approach a community collaborative effort that in the end would reduce the number of shut-ins requiring the delivery of prepared meals, and in doing so, reduce the number of clients that they serve? What if the number of clients served has always been part of the non-profit’s grant applications as a measure of effectiveness? And to add another dimension, imagine the same scenario except that the organization’s funding is tied directly and proportionately to the client numbers. How committed to collaborating do you think this organization would be? How committed do you think it should be?

As a second example to consider, what if the collaborative process led to a second agency in the community offing the same services as yours? Assume that the group as a whole has determined that in such a scenario there would be an overall increase in service delivery quantity, quality and/or cost effectiveness. How would your organization approach a collaborative effort where the community would benefit but your organization, as an organization, would somehow suffer?

In my experience, collaboration seems even more difficult for a non-profit when the others around the table are a mixture of non-profits and for-profits. A general and misguided distrust in the non-profit sector of the motives of business is one of the reasons for this. Perhaps a greater obstacle to good collaboration though, is the feeling of some people in non-profit organizations that the delivery of the services that they provide could only be done appropriately by a non-profit. In some cases, this is of course true, but certainly not all. There are many types of organizations that exist in both the for-profit and non-profit arena such as festival organizers, recreation facilities/services, education and physical or mental health care. In most cases, particularly where non-profits charge a user fee, consumers of the services offered by these organizations don’t see the difference between for-profit and non-profit. They see the service delivery and how satisfied they are with it.

Branching out beyond an organization’s core competencies is another obstacle to productive collaboration. Non-profits and for profits alike struggle with finding the right balance between outsourcing and doing everything themselves. Too often the soft costs such a salaries, the longer term commitment of reinvestment and the costs of diversion of attention from core competencies are not properly factored in when considering the use of outsourced solutions.

Non-profits need to look at the big picture and weigh in all of the effects of the collaborative process and their anticipated results. In collaborating one may have to make compromises. The important consideration though, is a question of whether these are compromises to the shared goal or compromises to your organization and how it has operated in the past. I think the difficulty some organizations have separating these two is the biggest barrier to collaboration. One lesson that non-profits can learn from for-profits is that having identified the mission driven goals of the organization, one should go boldly into collaborations if they will bring about the attainment of the goal. Be as focused on that as businesses are on profit.