How to manage volunteers

Volunteer management is about framing, management, handling and evaluation:

Framing is about designing the organizational, financial and political framework for the volunteers’ work. The leader should set goals and clarify the meaning of the volunteer’s efforts by developing, embedding, and spreading a sustainable idea for the volunteer’s effort. The challenge is to create a framework that facilitates, supports and gives direction to the volunteer without becoming a straitjacket.

Management is about managing partnerships and network-based corporation with and among volunteers and volunteer organizations by ensuring good, ongoing communication, formulating and revising vision, mission and goals, clarifying and allocating roles and tasks, creating knowledge sharing and common learning, and tackling those problems and dilemmas that arise.

Handling volunteers is about recruitment, motivation, education, visitation, retention, recognition, reward and protection of the volunteers, so they can provide a good and competent effort over a longer period of time, without burning out. The challenge here is to handle the volunteers with constant focus on the drive and ambition which makes them take part in the volunteer work. The volunteers can have many different reasons for wanting to participate, and if they do not feel that their motives for working are taken into account, their efforts stop.

Evaluation is about making ongoing assessments of the quality of the volunteer effort, with the purpose of preventing a breach, as well as creating ongoing improvements. Here, the challenge is that it is difficult to set precise criteria for measuring the efforts, but also the fact that it is often about delivering a charitable effort, which increases other people’s opportunity for expression and quality of life. Finally, it is important to avoid evaluations functioning like a form of control. Therefore, it may be an advantage for evaluations to be based on dialogue and followed up by collegial supervision, as well as formulation of role models.

The need for recognition