Non-Profit Employees and Volunteers
Submitted by martinfilter on Thu, 06/17/2010 - 05:48.
Non-profits are fascinating to me. You cannot lead by positional-style, that is by titles and tenure, but by true leadership skills and passion for the cause.
Any number of causes exist today and too many to count. Equally great is the need for competent managers, staff and volunteers. My hope in this forum is for experienced and novice managers juggling low paying staff worth their weight in gold to share battle scars. To share insight. To share victories and resources propelling them forward.
How do you balance retaining those golden team members, say "no thanks" to the weak links, and reward those volunteers while remaining sane.
So, pull out your iPads, top your mochas and share away.
the "flake rate"
We've been successful for two reasons:
1. We have people who are passionately committed to our cause (nature conservation, etc) and will volunteer no matter who is in the office.
2. Hiring some AMAZING staff who are able to create relationships with volunteers and keep them coming back.
The "flake rate" is a term one of my directs coined about how in of any group of new volunteers, some of them will inevitably drop out or dissapear. That's just the reality of people having unpredictable lives, or discovering that volunteering for you isn't quite what they had in mind. We don't have to say "no thanks" very often, since people just drop out on their own.
The majority of our volunteers are retirees, but we also have some kids doing court-appointed service, and people with disability leave from work.
Generally, we don't have to do much or any corrective feedback, other than monitoring to keep the kids on task.
The one thing I'm careful to do is to always say Thank You! and to make sure they know we couldn't keep our doors open without them.
(They also get to see little kids having a lot of fun outside, which helps :)