I began the day introducing some of the major resources that people who manage volunteers can turn to to learn more about this field, and when I mentioned that “volunteer management is actually a profession” there was at least one person in the room who had an “aha” moment. Some of the class had no idea that there are many people in this world who devote their careers to managing volunteers. (I’m glad I was able to enlighten them!)

Most participants had never taken formal training in volunteer management before so I suppose it’s not so surprising that this fact would be news to them. Although part of me still thinks, really?, because most people are aware that there are human resource professionals to consult about paid employment, so is the fact that there are human resource professionals to consult about people who work for free really such a stretch? In many ways I think the job of a manager of volunteers is even that much harder than that of an HR person. In our case, we can’t offer the person pay, so we absolutely need to find other ways to motivate them. It’s part of the creativity and craft of this profession.

Of course it takes professional development and training to learn how to do this well!

If you’re one of those people who is just getting your feet wet in volunteer management here are some of those resources that I mentioned earlier. These are a good place to start self-educating when learning about the field. (Maybe there’s an “aha” moment in store somewhere there for you too!)

Resources

From Volunteer Canada to the Canadian Administrators of Volunteer Resources to the Administrators of Volunteer Resources BC to sites like Energize and documents like the Canadian Code for Volunteer Involvement, we have a wide panorama of resources available to us.

And last year, the National Occupational Standards for Managers of Volunteer Resources were released for the first time by the HR Council for the Non-Profit Sector. It was a great recognition of the nature of the work that thousands of people across Canada in this field are doing.

At the very least, the National Occupational Standards can be used by anyone creating a job posting for a Manager of Volunteer Resources, undertaking a performance development process, or identifying ongoing professional development needs for those involved in managing volunteers. (And other uses are described in the NOS How-To Guide on page 3.) It is also something that can be referenced when reviewing current job descriptions to make sure they accurately reflect the entire role that the manager of volunteers is doing.

Feel free to leave a comment if you want to add in any more!

The work transition…

Some of you know that I’ve been at Royal Roads University as an Instructional Designer this past year – I had taken on a one-year maternity leave contract. Well, my time there is almost up. In early June I’ll be moving on to a new position at the BC Cancer Agency. I’m thrilled!

This new position will be a great intertwining of my two specialities: volunteer management and training. It’s a .6 position that will allow me to still carry on my facilitation business activities in addition. I’m excited that I’ll be back working with volunteers again directly after this hiatus year.

The conference…

Those of us who have been working for the past year and a half (seriously!) on planning this conference are very ready for it to arrive. It’s going to be a fabulous three days of activities, starring the international expert in volunteer management, Susan Ellis. Our committee has finalized a slate of other terrific speakers as well. I’ve been anticipating this conference for a while because it means that we professionals in volunteer management get to spend two and a half days with each other talking about our field. And since there are some really fantastic people in this field, I can’t wait to see them all!

The exam…

The last thing I’ve been preparing for is to write the Certification in Volunteer Administration (CVA) exam on May 22. Everyone all around the world who is applying for this certification is writing the exam on the exact same day. The study book is lengthy but entirely relevant. Wish me luck as I try to fit in study time around everything else that’s going on!

And some other stuff…

I just taught a 1/2 day volunteer management workshop, presented a session at a conference, am starting to facilitate Royal Roads’s Instructional Skills Workshop Online course, and am currently planning to co-facilitate the blended model Foundations in Volunteer Management course coming up with Volunteer Burnaby in June. It’s a lot (I’ll admit, and there are some nights I really just have to take a break and drink wine and eat chocolate) but it really feels right.

During the course, participants are put in teams and they take turns each week facilitating the week’s activities. In November, when I was a participant in the course, I was part of a team that facilitated discussions around work-life balance as an online facilitator. I found it fascinating, entirely useful and, truthfully, a bit of a wake up call. I was just finishing up facilitating a four-week online course for another organization and I had been burning the candle at both ends that month fitting everything in and around my day job and giving my all to the online course. I soon learned that, even though the course I had taught had been fantastic, I had fallen into some pretty standard pitfalls when teaching online.

The conversation in ISWO centred around the sheer amount of work that it can take to facilitate an online course as opposed to a face-to-face one. When interacting online, participant expectations rise about facilitator response timelines. We feel like we have to be constantly connected and available to them, even on evenings, weekends and holidays. If we’re not careful, it could be that we don’t get a single day of rest from the activity of the online class … the discussion posts and emails just keep coming.

I learned quite quickly that it’s important to set expectations with participants up front at the start of a course about what my online presence will look like over the duration of the course. What can they expect in terms of response times? Office hours? Weekday versus weekend presence? Our class came up with a possible strategy – for courses with assignments – about not making them due on Sunday nights so that the facilitator wouldn’t have to spend all weekend answering student emails about them! It is all about setting boundaries and maintaining that balance between our teaching practice and the rest of our busy lives.

Strategies like these are so important for an online facilitator to incorporate, especially if we are teaching back-to-back courses or several courses at once. It’s a matter of self preservation! As one of my classmates put it, students can put up with a breakneck speed over the duration of their course or program because it’s just for a limited time, but what about an instructor who spends his/her life teaching online? We either come up with strategies to maintain our work-life balance or suffer the consequences. Seasoned online facilitators think about work-life balance strategies not only just in determining office hours, but in considering facilitator and student workload in the very structure and design of the online course.

Experiencing the ISWO as a participant first was the best way to prepare myself for co-facilitating it in February. I was really able to put myself in the participants’ shoes – I had been there! And the strategies around work-life balance – and more – that I learned served me very well when stepping up as a facilitator. I’ll be co-facilitating this course again for RRU coming up in May and am really looking forward to working with another group of instructors in this way.

A couple of weeks ago I took a fantastic course through RRU Continuing Studies called The Practice of Council. It was a course held in council (what some people call “circle”), and taught us the basics of council process. We had two fabulous facilitators who modelled the way, showing us what great council facilitation looks like. They sat with us in council, participated in the process as much as led it, and opened up my eyes to bringing people together in a different way than we often do at our normal meetings and events.

I have been reading a lot about circle this year. From Jean Shinoda Bolen’s The Millionth Circle to Craig and Patricia Neal’s The Art of Convening to Christina Baldwin and Ann Linnea’s The Circle Way, these books have energized me about the process. It feels right and natural to be with others this way – and so it should I guess. Humankind has been meeting “in circle” since we came together around circles of fire hundreds of thousands of years ago. I like that it equalizes everyone in the room, that we can all see each other’s faces. I like that using a talking piece one by one allows me to focus on really listening to others when it’s their turn to speak (a tremendous skill to practice in itself), and feeling heard when it’s mine.

I haven’t always felt that I have been heard in my life. Those moments when you’re talked over, interrupted, or when you’ve said something but the next person to speak totally changes the conversation in another direction without acknowledging what you’ve said. As if you’re not there, as if you didn’t just lay yourself and your ideas out there.  I don’t feel this as much as I did in my younger days – is it my own burgeoning confidence or just others affording me more respect as I get older? – but it’s not totally gone of course. We all don’t feel heard at some point or another, those moments when you feel you might as well just step back into the flowered wallpaper as participate in something because of the result it’s having.

But council process changes all that. It forces us to slow down, to set aside the bubbling thoughts of what I want to say next, to stop the popping back and forth tennis game of conversation. In council we sit, we listen to others and consider their words. We wait our turn. We hold the talking piece. And thoughts come. We are lean with our expression (as our facilitators advised) because, we need to keep in mind, this is not group therapy and everyone has to have a chance to talk. But we hold that piece and we speak our mind and we are heard.

Council feels different and strange at first, and why? We are so used to hiding ourselves behind boardroom tables, struggling to make our voices heard over many others by coming up with something witty and important to say. We don’t slow down enough to really hear others around us. We are unused to having all faces turned toward us, listening intently to what we have to say. It’s time to change all that! I’m looking forward to stepping into my comfort with this process by doing it more and more.

Tell me, have you used circle process? Practiced council? I feel like a sponge seeking the experiences of others around this right now, and I’d love for you to share in the comments how it has worked for you.

Tell me about your organization. What purpose does it serve and who does it support?

Victoria Women’s Transition House Society, working collaboratively, provides shelter, support, counselling and education to women of all ages, with or without children, so that they can live free from the effects of abuse in intimate relationships. The Society strives to prevent and eliminate abuse through education, advocacy and partnerships.

What are your main responsibilities in your role?

As Volunteer Program Coordinator I am responsible for recruiting, training, recognition, reporting, and overall management of our program. We have a diverse range of volunteers helping out at the shelter (childcare, cooking, organizing, assisting the house manager), crisis line, special services (picking up donations, helping with our hamper program, or offering special services such as teaching yoga or chair massage or conducting a workshop), and we have recently added a speakers team.

What drew you to the field of volunteer management?

It was a way to practice leadership skills with a very special group of people. People who choose to volunteer inspire me – they are vibrant, eager to learn, and want to contribute. Also, at heart I’m an educator, and developing and delivering training allows me to teach without having to mark papers! Also the diversity of tasks and opportunity to develop new programs keeps my interest.

What’s one of the most important things you have to keep in mind when working with volunteers?

You want volunteers to enjoy their experience and feel a sense of belonging. They want to know their contribution is valuable and valued. The relationships that they develop with the supervisory staff is crucial to retention. We have volunteers who have stayed several years because they feel valued and a part of something.

I also think of their safety – because of the nature of shelter work, they may witness something upsetting to them, and they need to feel there are people they can talk to and debrief.

How do you know a particular individual is suited to volunteer in your organization, with your client group?

We have been fortunate in attracting volunteers who want to make a difference in women’s lives and when I interview and train I listen to what their interests and needs are, and tell them about the range of ways they can get involved. They usually select the task that appeals to them. We also offer a range of possibilities – and we just developed a speakers team for long term volunteers to learn new skills.

I know you know a lot about mentoring. How do you think mentoring plays into working with volunteers?

We have many volunteers who come in for very specific training, such as the crisis line. Mentoring augments the training. During the training, they are mentored by experienced staff and volunteers as they do practice calls. They will get feedback on how they managed a call. Once they are ready to go on the lines, they are mentored by our trainer as they take actual calls. Once they can work independently, they continue to be mentored by staff – more on consultative base, but they also make notes about the calls and these are reviewed by their mentor. The relationships that are established are very important in retaining volunteers and ensuring an effective program.

In our speakers team, after training, volunteers are mentored by staff and they present together. Eventually volunteers will be able to do the training in small teams.

What’s one thing that you do very well, working with volunteers?

I am most proud of the training we provide. We use a variety of techniques to engage our volunteers so they develop understanding of the issue of abuse. We utilize video, discussion, small group activities, simulations, readings, role plays, case studies, guest speakers. We developed an interactive manual that has readings and personal activities to engage.

What’s one thing you’d like to do better?

I’d like to delegate more of my own work to volunteers – it could be a way for them to learn administrative and leadership skills. I recently had a practicum student help me and couldn’t believe how much more we were able to accomplish. There is some front end training time, but once they catch on, they can run with it. They also come up with new approaches or add their personal touch which enhances the program. This allowed me to focus my time on developing a new project.

If your organization had all the money in the world, would you still engage volunteers? If so, why?

Yes. Volunteers are our ambassadors. What they learn about abuse they take with them into their lives and future careers. We have young women who have become counselors, doctors, lawyers, government workers, teachers, artists, parents, community social service workers, etc. They have a deeper understanding of the role of abuse and its impact that will inform their practice. They also learn about healthy relationships, equality and child care – this is knowledge they can apply to their personal lives.

Where is your greatest need for volunteers?

We have a number of tasks which involve driving and pick up of donations that always seem a challenge to fill.

Do you see yourself as a volunteer management professional?

I am struggling with this question a bit. I take my work seriously and conduct myself professionally, and have produced quality training and developed a number of programs for volunteers. But I am not as sure it is recognized by others as a profession – think getting public recognition of it is a work in progress.

Why do you get up every morning and do this work?

I look forward to work every day – meeting new volunteers is always energizing and connecting with our ongoing volunteers is always fun – our staff love our volunteers!

I’m a life-long learner and there is always something new to learn – volunteer management involves so many facets. As well, I enjoy finding new ways to present our training – every time I go to a workshop, I’m always thinking about how I can adapt it for our training.

Dianne, you amaze me! Thank you for doing such wonderful work leading volunteers and supporting such a meaningful cause.

AVRBC is a professional association that has been a mainstay of my life since 2006, when I started working at Volunteer Victoria managing their training and outreach program and working with hundreds of community-based organizations. The people of AVRBC welcomed me into their fold with open arms and have been a tremendously positive influence on my work and career over the last seven years. In a field that is still struggling among the wider community to be seen as a profession and for a role that sometimes has been siloed within an organization, I’ve seen that this group of professional and knowledgeable individuals has often been a place for managers of volunteers to call home.

I do see the irony that immediately after writing a post advocating for non-traditional professional development I now write about a formal conference learning opportunity! But attending a conference in volunteer management is a rare event, so it deserves to be shouted from the rooftops and somewhat revered! AVRBC holds a conference only once every two years and we know why – it’s a lot of work! But our planning team has come up with a fantastic event, one that features internationally-known volunteer management “guru” Susan J. Ellis of the fantastic resource site Energize, Inc. If you manage volunteers and haven’t come across Susan or her site yet, you’ve been missing out on a pivotal resource in our field. This is one woman dedicated to the cause of professionalizing our profession. She alone will be well worth the price of admission!

But as the conference’s Workshop Program Chair, I’m also pleased to tell you that we have other great speakers lined up for this event. Tracey Gibson and Diane Lloyd, Christopher Geater, Randy Kennett, Stacy Ashton, Elizabeth Backman and Denise Lloyd will all be leading sessions relevant to the field of volunteer management. I’ll be leading a session as well. All workshops fit into the conference’s theme of “Professionalizing the Face of Volunteer Leadership.”

The early-bird registration deadline for the conference is coming up on March 15 so check out the conference program and register soon! Send this on to colleagues you may have in the field, or people who may be considering that this field is a future career opportunity for them. There will be networking opportunities and site visits to local organizations with volunteer programs as well as opening ceremonies and a gala dinner during the three day event.

See you there!

the learning process, by rubyblossom on flickr, creative commons attribution

In January I presented to The Victoria Business Moms at the invitation of the group’s organizer, Heather Solomonson. The topic I spoke about was non-traditional ways to create professional development opportunities for ourselves.

At the delightful Crumsby’s cafe in Victoria – the schoolhouse site up near Royal Oak – a few of us got together for the session. I led participants through a discussion about how we can and do learn – both face to face and online – in informal ways. We then talked about how we can reflect upon and record our learning to show others if we wished.

One of the things I highlighted is that we all have many options available to us for professional development that don’t involve going to a traditional workshop or course. Don’t get me wrong, I love formal learning opportunities and see real value in them, but I also think we need to place more emphasis and value on engaging in informal learning. It’s something that we do without even realizing that that’s what we’re doing!  Having Skype meetings, reading blogs, or following Twitter hashtags, Learnist or Pinterest boards – these are all examples of how we can learn online according to our own time schedule. And we can’t of course forget face-to-face meetings with mentors, forming Mastermind groups or becoming a member of professional associations. (These are just a few of the things we discussed that night – there are many more options of course!)

As Jane Hart says, if we spend just ten minutes a day engaged in informal learning over the course of a year that amounts to eight days’ worth of professional development. A few conferences’ worth! Surrounding ourselves with a personal learning network of people both in person and online is a way to keep abreast of things in this world where knowledge is increasing exponentially every second.

It was from a class with Jane Hart that I learned more about the concept of professional learning portfolios. If you are interested in recording and reflecting on your learning – both formal and informal opportunities – there are numerous applications out there that you can use to develop an online portfolio. Course participants were experimenting with Mahara, WordPress, Folio for me, FolioSpaces, Portfolio Communities and more. We spent time discussing the benefits and drawbacks of showing our learning plans and achievements online. Fascinating.

Thanks again to The Victoria Business Moms for allowing me space to bring these ideas to others. It was another informal way to learn for all of us there – myself included.

finding my path by rhys moult on flickr, creative commons attribution

In 2011 the Canadian Administrators of Volunteer Resources went back to the drawing board with their professional certification process for individuals who manage volunteers and last year decided to partner with the Council for Certification in Volunteer Administration out of the States and roll out a new certification process. We’re now coming up on the deadline to apply for certification in 2013 if you want to be part of the inaugural Canadian contingent going for this credential this year. I’ve decided to be part of that contingent!

Since I’ve been working in the volunteer management field for the past ten years and now train others in the field, I thought it was highly important to apply for this credential. It’s no small process: study materials to prep for a two-hour, 80-question online exam on May 22, 2013, plus creation and submission of a professional portfolio (consisting of a philosophy statement, an ethics case study and a management narrative) by the end of this year. The deadline to apply for certification is March 1, 2013. Once certified you can enjoy a five-year certification period. More details here.

I’m keen to help raise the profile of our work in volunteer management by being a part of this new certification process. It’s one more layer of professionalism to add on to an individual’s career path in this field. Individuals who choose to seek out education opportunities, join together with others under a professional association such as AVRBC or other provincial or local networks, and bring their most skillful selves to the complicated and rewarding work of managing volunteers.

During planning of a lesson I often can “see” how a particular activity or element is going to work out, but then other times I’m not so sure but just want to try it anyway based on something I’ve read or heard about. Sometimes I’m lucky enough to have seen a particular activity being run by another facilitator which gives me a better idea of how the same activity could play out when applied to my own contexts and topics.

An activity that I used this past week was one such thing. Last year I attended a graphic facilitation course and participated in a “resistance/response” activity (my words) around the class’s feelings toward making art. The facilitator led us first through capturing the negative stories we tell ourselves about creating art – which she recorded (not surprisingly) on large chart paper at the front of the room, and then next led us through an exercise to talk us down from that scary little negative response ledge. We were to focus on the positive stories we would tell ourselves instead of the negative ones. She used the word “resistance” for the first part and “response” for the second. The activity worked brilliantly and I immediately saw that I could use a similar type of activity in my own work.

It wasn’t a month later that I was able to do so, in facilitating Camosun College’s Fundamentals of Event & Conference Management course. One night of the class we talk about budgeting and I thought that the resistance/response exercise might work perfectly to start our discussion. I had often heard from colleagues in the nonprofit field that they were freaked out about budgets (because nobody had ever taught them how to do one) so I wondered if this activity would help alleviate perhaps similar fears of people who wanted to manage events.

It totally did. I used the activity during last year’s event management class and this past week used it again. (My friend and I are currently teaching the second offering of this course through Camosun.) We asked the class to take a couple of minutes of self-reflection to think about where they felt resistance to budgeting and then we captured their comments on large chart paper at the front of the room. Right away the class was able to share – using “I statements” – their hesitations and downright fears about creating budgets, using Excel, and having tough conversations with supervisors and clients about money, and especially the limitations of it sometimes and its impact on events. And then we talked about our “response” – what we were going to tell ourselves instead of those negatives stories. That having a budget gives us a plan, that we can draw on resources (people, books, websites, courses) to educate ourselves more, and so on.

I’ve decided I love this exercise because it gets at emotions instead of numbers, first and foremost. It’s a great way to ease into the topic and perhaps get past some of the “icky” feelings (ie. “I’m not good enough” sort of feelings) that can hold us back when learning something new. My only regret is that we could have used more time to delve deeply into the positive, solution-focused pieces, but alas, we did have to talk about revenues, expenses and all the other good bits having to do with the nuts and bolts of the topic. But I think it was a good start and it was because we had planned it that way.

As always, every time I facilitate something I learn a little bit more about this craft, people and the way they engage and learn, and my own role in the whole shebang. (And that timing of lesson plan activities is an art in itself!)

As people who work with volunteers, how do we engage this typically hard-to-engage demographic? Well, our discussion yielded a great idea that  I think will actually work for volunteers of more than one generation.

Create a list of 15-minute volunteer jobs.

You know those times when you are waiting in line or waiting for the kids to be done their (insert sport here) gymnastics, swimming, skating practices? Or the small snippet of time you have while dinner is cooking on the stove? These are times when those of us who are connected via mobile devices – and maybe even those of us who are not – may be able to knock off one or two 15-minute volunteer jobs. It’s more productive than just surfing the web, checking our Facebook status, or just standing there with a wooden spoon in our hand, and it actually means that we could make time to fit volunteering into our life.

So what can be done in 15 minutes? Here are some initial ideas:

• Craft an email to a distribution list
• Make updates to a website
• Research grant opportunities for your organization
• Promote your organization with a few tweets on Twitter or a post on Facebook
• Start writing a blog post, or edit or contribute to a blog post that someone else has written
• Make phone calls
• Brainstorm ideas about how to get the word out about your upcoming event
• Start crafting some survey questions
• Put together a Doodle to invite committee members to your next meeting
• Watch a YouTube video to learn something relevant to your organization that you can share with others
• Have a short Skype or Facetime meeting
• Email another volunteer and ask them to do a small job

And these are just the ideas that I brainstormed myself in less than 15 minutes! No doubt you can be more creative thinking up some more. (Feel free to comment to let us know what they are.)

So don’t give up on us Generation X’ers just yet, just think of all the ways that you can try to engage this generation that is already pretty engaged. For the right cause and the right organization, committed volunteers from this demographic can be found on a time schedule that works for everyone.