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October 2012
In This Issue
Featured Book: Strategic Volunteer Engagement: A Guide for Nonprofit and Public Sector Leaders
More Resources
Excerpt: "Envisioning a Place for Volunteers"
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"The single largest factor affecting the success of volunteer involvement is attention. When an organization plans strategically to accomplish clear goals for volunteers, allocates resources, prepares staff, monitors progress, and evaluates results, the efforts lead to success." --Susan J. Ellis, President of Energize, Inc.

resource Featured Book
Strategic Volunteer Engagement: A Guide for Nonprofit and Public Sector Leaders
Sarah Jane Rehnborg, et. al.

An Asset Builder's Guide to Service-LearningProvides a strategic framework and critical management directives for working effectively with both skill-oriented and mission-focused volunteers serving on either a long term and episodic basis.

 

It also offers guidance for executive directors interested in engaging volunteers to reach strategic goals in their organizations, including a worksheet for assessing current patterns of volunteer engagement, a chart of the volunteer management program cycle, questions to consider when hiring a volunteer manager, and additional resources about volunteerism.

 

This guidebook is a third companion resource to the Executive Role in Volunteer Involvement Set described below.

 

Read an excerpt from this book below.

 

This book is available in paperback (US$6.95).

 

Order Strategic Volunteer Engagement today!
resource2More Resources
Special Set: Executive Role in Volunteer Involvement 
Order two dynamic books for one low price and save! Build your organization's capacity to gain the most from volunteer participation and create a culture where volunteers are true team members.

From the Top Down: The Executive Role in Successful Volunteer Involvement, 3rd ed, by Susan J. Ellis
The only book to address what's needed from top decision makers to ensure volunteers contribute significantly to the organization's mission. Learn to articulate a vision for volunteer involvement, create policies and set expectations, staff the effort, budget and find funds to support volunteer engagement, handle legal and risk issues, and guarantee volunteer-employee teamwork. Learn more...
From the Top Down

and
 
Leading the Way to Successful Volunteer Involvement: Practical Tools for Busy Executives, by Betty B. Stallings with Susan J. Ellis
Put the principles explained in From the Top Down into action with step-by-step worksheets, checklists, idea stimulators, and other helpful tools. Find tools for developing a statement of philosophy about volunteers; developing a budget for volunteer involvement; writing a case statement to secure funding for volunteers; writing a position description for a director of volunteer involvement; asking good questions when interviewing candidates; integrating support for volunteers into every unit and department of your organization; and much more. Learn more...

Corporate Tango
Save money by buying both books together.
Resources Book Excerpt

Envisioning a Place for Volunteers  

Excerpted from Strategic Volunteer Engagement: A Guide for Nonprofit and Public Sector Leaders by Sarah Jane Rehnborg, et. al., RGK Center for Philanthropy & Community Service, The LBJ School of Public Affairs, The University of Texas at Austin, 2009.

 

After conducting an organizational assessment...[Executive Director] Mike Nellis and the [Austin] Children's Museum made a call he has never regretted: to pay much more attention to the place of volunteers in advancing the organization's goals.

 

In years past, volunteer coordination had fallen under the umbrella of the museum's fund development department, with the thinking that perhaps volunteers' key function lay in their capacity as committed, potential donors. This tactic, Nellis wryly notes, "didn't work very well." He adds, "Previously, the Children's Museum had an internal culture of believing volunteers were meant to be cultivated as donors and, otherwise, were sometimes more pain than they're worth."

 

Nellis set about changing that culture: by having the volunteer coordinator directly report to him, by asking high-level staff to model productive relations with interns and other volunteers, and by pursuing a grant to allow the Children's Museum to benchmark a sophisticated volunteer-engagement program in another city. "I saw huge potential to [engage] volunteers to improve quality of service," Nellis says. "Now instead of offering just feel-good opportunities, we have folks working in a way that's mutually beneficial to our organization and to the volunteer."


Permission is granted for organizations to reprint this excerpt. Reprints must provide full acknowledgment of the source, as cited here:

Excerpted from Strategic Volunteer Engagement: A Guide for Nonprofit and Public Sector Leaders by Sarah Jane Rehnborg, et. al., RGK Center for Philanthropy & Community Service, The LBJ School of Public Affairs, The University of Texas at Austin, 2009. Found in the Energize, Inc. Online Bookstore at http://www.energizeinc.com/store/5-234-P-1

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