Tag: nonprofit

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Engagement Marketing

Engaging Volunteers (6): Helpful Resources

Here’s a compiled list of resources I found in researching & writing this series on volunteer engagement and management. Since this list is far from comprehensive, I invite you to share additional resource links.

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Engagement Marketing

Engaging Volunteers (5): The Volunteer-Staff Connection

“Without a disciplined and respectful approach to recruitment, orientation, support, assessment, and recognition, we will have lower performance and a disenchanted volunteer.”
– Francis Hesselbein in Hesselbein on Leadership.

The same can be said of employees.

Staff and volunteers require:

  • an investment of time for training and ongoing communication
  • attention in terms of feedback and recognition
  • and the tools (applicable resources) needed to accomplish the organization’s goals and advance its mission.

The challenge for nonprofit managers is that internal issues regarding staff engagement also impact volunteer engagement. Like it or not, volunteers pay close attention to the staff they work with and are sensitive to employee satisfaction cues. As one frustrated volunteer told me recently: “The organization seems to expect the volunteers to be a subset of their staff and we know how they treat their staff. So in retrospect, why do we expect them to treat us volunteers any differently?!”

Volunteer relations “mirror” employee relations – if your employees don’t feel valued, neither will your volunteers.

Coming up: in my last post in this series I’ll share a list of resource links for volunteer engagement and management.

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Engagement Marketing

Engaging Volunteers (4): When Volunteers are Brand Partners

What I’ve shared up to this point in this series applies to volunteers in most nonprofits. In some organizations, however, volunteers serve multiple roles that require different engagement strategies.

I can explain with this segmentation model from the Drucker Foundation Self-Assessment Tool for Nonprofits that identifies two types of nonprofit “customers”:

  • Primary customers – the people and entities who benefit from a nonprofit’s services
  • Supporting customers – the people and entities who help a nonprofit provide its services.

For example, a Girl Scout and her parents are “primary customers” of the Girl Scouts in that they all benefit as the daughter develops new skills from her scouting involvement. If her parents participate as troop leaders, help chaperone troop events, etc., they are also considered “supporting customers.” This segmentation model helps a nonprofit understand and recognize who its “customers” are (in one or both segments) so it can engage them accordingly.

But don’t let the simplicity of this model fool you as volunteer segmentation can be extremely complicated depending on the organization. It is particularly messy in professional membership associations that offer professional development and networking opportunities through national and regional (chapter) affiliation; e.g., the American Marketing Association, Society for Human Resource Management, Public Relations Society of America, etc. While all members of such organizations are primary customers, some may also be engaged as supporting customers on one or more levels as:

  • Local brand ambassadors – recruiting and welcoming other members at the chapter level
  • Chapter volunteer leaders – serving on committees/councils/boards and providing member benefits at the local or regional level
  • National volunteer leaders – serving on national committees/councils/boards
  • Volunteer speakers – presenting at association-sponsored conferences & workshops
  • Volunteer instructors – training (for free or a small honorarium) at association-sponsored educational programs.

The important role these volunteers play in delivering member benefits at the local, regional, and national levels can be taken for granted. Beyond providing token recognition for their service, some associations overlook the fact that these highly engaged volunteers help generate revenues via new and retained member dues as well as from conference and program fees. That’s why these truly “supporting customers” need to be recognized, valued, and respected as partners in delivering the brand promise.

How do you engage and manage volunteers who are also your brand partners?

  • Make volunteer involvement a focus of attention by the Board and executive staff. (See my previous post on Intentional Volunteer Management.)
  • Recognize and acknowledge volunteer value. To truly appreciate the impact of their involvement, analyze your volunteers’ lifetime value. Note: most volunteer calculators measure this value in terms of manpower hour & benefit cost-savings. In addition, consider volunteers’ economic contribution to revenue generation. [If anyone has a formula or model for this, please let me know.]
  • Keep volunteers informed of the organization’s vision and direction. You can’t expect them to serve as brand advocates if you don’t keep them in the communications loop.
  • Be sensitive to how operational/policy changes impact volunteer efforts to deliver on the brand – you want to facilitate volunteer (and staff) efforts to deliver member value, not create extra work for them. Communicate all changes in operations or policy openly and honestly, sharing the rationale behind such changes.
  • Proactively seek and respond to volunteer feedback & ideas.

Keep in mind that besides their individual and collective value as volunteers, these brand partners have strong influence on the frontline with access to fellow and prospective members who are your primary customers. Treat them carefully and with the respect they deserve.

In my next post I’ll address the volunteer-employee connection.

 

 

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Engagement Marketing Training & Development

Engaging Volunteers (3): Intentional Volunteer Management

 

“Too many organizations are thoughtless when it comes to volunteers.”
– Susan Ellis, president of Energize, Inc., a volunteer training & consulting firm.

Sadly, many former volunteers would agree with this statement. That’s why an intentional and proactive (rather than passive or reactive) effort is needed to effectively engage and retain volunteers.

Here are some guidelines to help you get started with intentional volunteer engagement and management.

  • Focus at the Board Level
    Volunteer expert Susan Ellis recommends volunteer involvement be a regular part of the board agenda so it can proactively focus on how to effectively recruit, engage, and maximize volunteer participation. “Don’t allow volunteer involvement to be the invisible personnel issue,” she says. She also suggests creating a board committee on volunteerism.
  • Learn who your volunteers are, their interest in your organization, and their volunteer expectations (as described in my previous post).
  • Clarify and clearly communicate your organization’s expectations of volunteers and what they can expect from you. Here’s a great example: After meeting with a nonprofit organization’s leaders, I received a follow-up letter inviting me to serve on their advisory council. This invitation described council members’ responsibilities and stated what the organization promised them in return, including “Appreciation of your time and our commitment not to abuse your time or generosity.”
  • Find ways to connect your volunteers to:
    • your organization’s mission, strategic direction, and goals. (Note: You can even include volunteers in your strategic planning process.)
    • your stakeholders (if applicable) to see your mission in action
    • your other volunteers for mentoring and partnering
    • your staff, particularly those with whom they’ll be working.
  • Provide the mission-focused training and tools your volunteers need to best serve the organization; e.g., orientation, ongoing communication, recognition, etc.
  • Proactively listen to your volunteers – obtain their feedback, ideas, concerns – and respond appropriately.

Volunteers require more than a simple “recruit ‘em and recognize ‘em” approach. Nonprofit leaders need to invest time and attention to engaging, managing, and retaining volunteer talent.

Stay tuned for my next post that will explore the challenge of engaging volunteers who are also brand partners.

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Engagement Marketing

Engaging Volunteers (2): Understanding the Volunteer Experience

The second post in this volunteer engagement & management series focuses on the volunteer experience.

Workplace engagement applies to both nonprofit employees and volunteers. Like employees, volunteers are not immune to becoming disenchanted with the nonprofits they serve. Unlike employees, however, it’s easier for volunteers to leave when they become disengaged.

The Corporation for National and Community Service (CNSC) addressed the problem of volunteer turnover in a 2009 research brief:

“ … over one third of volunteers (35.5%) drop out of service each year and do not serve with any organizations the following year. While new volunteers may be walking through the door of an organization, they may not stay, or they may be replacing an existing volunteer. This high rate of volunteer turnover stunts the productivity of nonprofit organizations as they focus on replacing volunteers instead of maximizing impact.”

Nonprofits cannot afford to lose this talent in a down economy when they’re increasingly hard pressed to serve growing needs with fewer resources. That’s why the volunteer experience is receiving renewed attention.

To better manage this experience, you need to understand who your volunteers are, what motivates them to become involved and stay with your organization, and what contributes and detracts from the quality of their experience with you. Volunteer motivations vary by individual and intensity; reasons range from wanting to “give back” … to sharing skills and/or learning new ones … to needing to feel needed … to getting involved to stay busy. Regardless of their respective motivations, most volunteers choose to get involved in a particular organization because they share a belief in the cause/mission and wish to make a difference.

Nonprofits can learn about their volunteer talent through research and informal listening posts that include volunteer surveys, roundtables, staff and volunteer feedback, etc. Here are sample questions that will provide important insight on volunteer motivations and expectations:

  • What about this organization appealed to you to get you involved?
  • What about this organization keeps you involved? [for long term volunteers]
  • What do you expect to give and get from your volunteer involvement?
  • What do you enjoy most about your volunteer experience here?
  • What suggestions do you have for staff that can improve the volunteer experience?
  • Would you recommend this organization to other volunteers? Why or why not?

Also consider exit interviews with volunteers who leave your organization – whether through rotating volunteer service (fulfilling board or committee term limits), burn-out, a negative experience, or other reason. Sample questions include:

  • What do you know now about this organization that you wish you had known when you first became involved?
  • What did you enjoy most about your volunteer experience? (or) What will you miss most about your volunteer experience here? [ask only if the volunteer is leaving on good terms]
  • What suggestions do you have for staff that can improve the volunteer experience?
  • Would you recommend this organization to other volunteers? (Probe why or why not?)

Responses to these types of questions will enable you to build a knowledge base of volunteer motivations, expectations, and perceptions of your organization.

In my next post I’ll cover what nonprofits can do to better engage their volunteers through intentional management.

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Engagement Marketing

Engaging Volunteers (1): A Volunteer Story

This blog post kicks off a six-part series in which I explore volunteer engagement and management.

It’s a critical topic for nonprofits that need to capture the attention and availability of more unemployed and underemployed workers willing to volunteer time and energy.

But the match of nonprofits and able volunteers won’t work if volunteer talent is not effectively managed.

I was excited to be a first-time volunteer at a special holiday party for children and their families hit hard by the economy. When I arrived at the banquet hall I was stunned by the number of buses already in the parking lot and the constant stream of bus loads arriving from churches and community groups. I entered the fray and squeezed my way through the crowd to find volunteer registration.

The volunteer table was chaos central. I introduced myself, explained I had signed up to serve the dinner shift, and asked about the check-in process. After shuffling paper and unable to find the sign-in sheet, one of the volunteers handed me a volunteer button, pointed to the dining hall, and told me to just go in and help out.

The room was set up with rows of tables to accommodate hundreds of people, and there seemed to be hundreds more milling about. Two long buffet stations were set up at one end of the banquet room lined with volunteers dishing out turkey, ham, stuffing, potatoes, green beans, rolls & butter; other volunteers ran back and forth to the kitchen to replenish the serving stations. More volunteers cleared dishes while groups of guests waited to be seated. I attached myself to a volunteer who had worked the event before, then quickly learned the ropes to make myself useful. Fortunately there were more than enough – even too many – volunteers to help out.

At the end of my shift, I thanked my fellow volunteer for taking me under her wing. There was no official “sign out” of volunteers, so I just waved to the people working the volunteer table and left the banquet hall. It was my first and last time at the event.

As a long time volunteer involved in a variety of organizations, I was surprised by the lack of advance communications, on-site instructions, and post-event acknowledgment encouraging volunteers to return. The good news is the holiday party attracts an abundance of volunteers; the bad news is not all of them return. Note: the event is organized and hosted through the generosity of a private company, not by a nonprofit. Nonetheless, it illustrates that volunteer engagement requires more than a “if-you-build-it-they-will-come” approach.

“Sadly, most nonprofits do not view their volunteers as strategic assets and have not developed ways to take full advantage of them.”
– excerpt from Stanford Social Innovation Review article “The New Volunteer Workforce.”

I hope you’ll join me in this “Engaging Volunteer” series that includes:

Throughout this special series, I invite you to share your experience as a volunteer. Comments from nonprofit managers are also welcome.

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Engagement Marketing

Who is More Engaged: Nonprofit or Forprofit Employees?

An interesting question that I’m finding is a challenge to answer. My initial presumption was nonprofit staff would be more engaged because their work is mission-driven. However, I’ve also known nonprofit employees who are minimally engaged because their workplace situation turned out to be negative. So I started a quest to find research on nonprofit employment engagement and discovered there’s not much out there.

What I was able to find came from Gallup, and it surprised me. Jessica Tyler, Practice Manager in Employee Engagement, shared comparative data from Gallup’s global database with results showing employees in the nonprofit segment were actually less “engaged” and slightly more “actively disengaged” than employees in the overall database.

Commenting on this, Gallup consultant Bill McEwen noted: “It certainly appears that the employees of not-for-profit organizations, while perhaps attracted by a strong sense of mission, are often less (rather than more) engaged than the average employee. Of course, this varies by organization … as some of them are super in recognizing and energizing those who work for them, while others may pay great attention to their mission and relatively little attention to the people called upon to fulfill it.”

As Jessica aptly noted: “Connecting to the mission is just one of the [many] critical elements involved in a person or team’s engagement.” But it’s clearly not enough.

[Thanks, Jessica and Bill, for your help with this post.]

Special request

While most employee engagement research seems to include the healthcare and government sectors, I haven’t found data on other nonprofits that include social & human services, arts & cultural organizations, professional associations, education, and membership-based organizations. If you’re aware of any, please let me know.

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Customer service Marketing Training & Development

“Management Lessons from Mayo Clinic” That We Can All Learn

Every service provider is challenged with engaging employees and creating systems to deliver a positive customer experience, but none more so than those who work in healthcare. So what can be learned from the Mayo Clinic? This excerpt, from the book Management Lessons from Mayo Clinic by Leonard Berry and Kent Seltman, explains it best:

“Imagine what can be learned from an organization that serves customers who:

  1. arrive with some combination of illness or injury, pain uncertainty, and fear
  2. give up most of their freedoms if hospitalized
  3. need the service but dread it
  4. typically relinquish their privacy (and modesty) to clinicians they may be meeting for the first time.

“Mayo Clinic and other well-run healthcare organizations serve just these kinds of special customers who are called patients and still earn high praise and fierce loyalty from them. Yes, indeed, a successful healthcare organization offers important lessons for most business organizations.”

Inside Mayo Clinic

There’s quite a story behind the powerful and enduring brand that is the Mayo Clinic with its emphasis on patient-first care, medical research and education, an integrated approach to healthcare, and a strong partnership between physicians and administrators (an adversarial relationship in many hospitals). Co-authors Leonard Berry, Distinguished Professor of Marketing at Texas A&M (one of my mentors), and Kent Seltman, former Marketing Director at the Mayo Clinic, studied Mayo Clinic’s service culture through in-depth interviews and observing patient-clinician interactions.

Their book paints a fascinating picture of the history and culture of Mayo Clinic, including how it engineers its internal systems to support its patient-first mission. Best of all, the book contains great lessons on creating and managing a brand that has achieved incredible growth in a difficult and challenging industry while staying true to its core values. The story is even more amazing given ongoing medical technological advances and the financial and political pressures placed on the healthcare profession.

Listening to the Voice of the Customer

Berry and Seltman share numerous quotes and testimonials from patients, their families, doctors, nurses, administrators, and their families, to illustrate the Mayo Clinic story. (Some of the anecdotes brought me to tears.) Even with Mayo Clinic’s unique position in healthcare, the authors do a great job discussing lessons applicable to other service firms in the “Lessons for Managers” section throughout the book.

One of my favorite chapters describes how Mayo Clinic manages the different types of clues that positively impact the customer experience:

  • demonstrating competence to instill customer confidence – e.g., with a collaborative team approach to patient care and integrated & timely access to medical records.
  • influencing first impressions and expectations – such as the design of physical space to convey a sense of healing and calm to reduce the stress of patients and staff.
  • exceeding customer expectations – including extraordinary sensitivity to patients and their families.

I recommend Management Lessons from Mayo Clinic to all service management, marketing and branding professionals … and everyone who works in healthcare.

Caution: the only downside after reading this book is the possible dissatisfaction with most healthcare institutions. If my family or I need critical care, my first choice would be Mayo Clinic!

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Engagement Marketing

Engagement Can Be Tricky in Association Management

A colleague recently wrote about not taking employee engagement for granted based on his experience working for nonprofit associations.

Here’s another reason to be concerned with staff engagement – loyal members who have strong ties to their professional associations, particularly those who are strongly committed to and passionate about their participation. These members tend to work closely with the association’s professional staff and develop strong collegial relationships with them. As a result, they become concerned with – even protective of – how staff are treated in the organization.

For association management, the staff-volunteer relationship can be tricky, especially in instances where volunteers overstep their bounds to interfere with personnel issues. The relationship works both way, however, as many professional staff enjoy working with the members and volunteer leaders; it’s one of the perks that compensates for working in a professional association at nonprofit wages.

For association management, the bottom line is that internal issues regarding staff engagement can also impact (and be impacted by) member engagement.

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Marketing

The Ultimate Gift Card: The Good Card

For personal and corporate holiday shopping, consider the ultimate gift card – The Good Card, a gift card for charity that allows the recipient to donate to his/her charity of choice. The Good Card is the brainchild of nonprofit Network for Good, the leading online charitable resource that’s approved by the Better Business Bureau Wise Giving Alliance.

Good Cards can be purchased online at Network for Good and can be sent via mail or email (the latter as an electronic gift card). The Good Card recipient goes to Network for Good’s website, selects his/her charity of choice from over one million charities registered in the U.S., and enters the donation amount using the code indicated on the card. Network for Good then sends to the donation to the chosen charity. And get this – 100% of the card’s value goes to the charity!

A wonderful gift from individuals and any-size business

Each card costs $5 plus the donation amount (ranging from $10 to $250). Both the donation and fee are tax deductible for the purchaser. (Remember, 100% of the donation amount goes to charity.)

For corporate gift-giving, companies can get logo placement on bulk orders of the physical cards for an additional charge. This unique charitable gift card allows a company to reinforce its philanthropic image without limiting its support to a single cause.

The Good Card – it’s the perfect gift suitable for anyone.