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March 2013
In This Issue
Featured Title: The Abundant Not-for-Profit: How Talent (Not Money) Will Transform Your Organization
More Resources
Excerpt: "A Focus on Talent"
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The featured resources this month focus on how organizations can achieve their goals by changing the way they think about engaging volunteers in first place. Is volunteer engagement thought of as a "program" on the side or are volunteers woven into the fabric of your organization? These resources are ideal for an organization's leaders or for those striving to influence those leaders.

resource Featured Title
The Abundant Not-for-Profit: How Talent (Not Money) Will Transform Your Organization
Colleen Kelly and Lynda Gerty

Newly Released from Vantage Point!

The Abundant Not-for-Profit

Put old-fashioned views of volunteering into a new light and discover the untapped wealth of "knowledge philanthropists" - people who will donate their expertise to causes that matter to them, if invited to participate in significant work. From organizational culture to planning, from great governance to excellent people processes, The Abundant Not-for-Profit offers leaders a new road map to transform their organizations with talent, not money.

 

 

Read the an excerpt from this book below.

 

This book is available in e-book (PDF) format for immediate download. (US$24.99)

 

Order The Abundant Not-for-Profit today!
resource2 Other Resources
A People Lens: 101 Ways to Move Your Organization Forward
Vantage Point

A People LensSprinkled with true stories of innovative volunteer engagement, best-practice tips, and perspectives from agency leaders and volunteers, this book will change how you think about engaging highly-skilled volunteers.

 

This book is in e-book (PDF) format for immediate download (US $8.50)

 

Order A People Lens today!
From the Top Down: The Executive Role in Successful Volunteer Involvement, 3rd ed
by Susan J. Ellis

From the Top DownOutlines the key executive decisions necessary to lay the foundation for effective volunteer involvement: vision, policies, budgeting, staffing, employee-volunteer relationships, legal issues, cost and value of volunteers, and more.

 

This book is available in print (US $24.95) or in e-book (PDF) format for immediate download (US $18.00)

 

Order From the Top Down today!
Leading the Way to Successful Volunteer Involvement: Practical Tools for Busy Executives
Betty B. Stallings with Susan J. Ellis

Leading the Way to Successful Volunteer Involvement

A set of checklists, worksheets, idea stimulators, and other practical guides for senior-level leaders to incorporate volunteer involvement as a key ingredient in the overall strategy of an organization.

 

 

This book is available in print (US $19.95) or in e-book (PDF) format for immediate download (US $15.00)

 

Order Leading the Way to Successful Volunteer Involvement today!

Or order both From the Top Down and Leading the Way at one special price as the Executive Set!
e-Volunteerism: The Electronic Journal of the Volunteer Community

  • Journal subscribers can log in here to read all the articles below.
  • Non-subscribers can read all the articles and more with affordable 48-hour access to the journal.

"Planning and Executing Successful Large-Scale Days of Service"

For this e-Volunteerism Training Design feature, HandsOn Network has generously shared the training toolkit they developed to prepare volunteer leaders to run successful days of service.

 

"Volunteer Management Lessons Learned from an Organic Vegetable Garden"
 This creative, delightful feature article for e-Volunteerism asks an important question: "Could the basic principles of an organic approach to gardening also serve us as approaches for organizing and supervising volunteers?"

"Organizational Factors Affecting Strategic Volunteer Management"
e-Volunteerism Research to Practice Editor Laurie Mook shares insights from two researchers from the Centre for Philanthropy Studies at the University of Basel in Switzerland who synthesized academic literature relevant to volunteer management from 1967 to 2011, looking for evidence to help explain how nonprofit organizational factors supported or restricted volunteer management.

 

Subscribe now and get immediate access to all of the above articles, plus everything in the current issue of the journal and its 13-year archive.

Resources Book Excerpt

A Focus on Talent

Excerpted from The Abundant Not-for-Profit: How Talent (Not Money) Will Transform Your Organization by Colleen Kelly and Lynda Gerty (Vancouver, Canada: Vantage Point, 2013).

 

People Lens Volunteer Role

 

A people lens view imagines organizations could work with people in a different way. Many organizations could begin to take advantage of the high-level skills that exist all around them. Not-for-profits could become equipped to utilize peoples' brains in a new way. This takes a whole new way of planning for people, planning the flow of the work and planning how it gets done.

 

A Focus on Talent

 

At Vantage Point, we have been in the business of volunteerism for more than 70 years. We see many people every week who want to volunteer. Many of these people tell us the roles organizations are offering are not the roles they want. For example, a woman with a background in business planning told us she approached a well-known organization offering to examine and evaluate any aspect of their operation. The administrator of volunteer resources asked her to knock on doors in her neighbourhood and canvas for money. She could do that. However, she would contribute much more to the organization than knock on doors, if only the organization would engage her in that way. She's looking for a more meaningful experience that capitalizes on her skills. She did what they requested, because she cares and she does want to contribute. Canvassing was not the role she had in mind, so she didn't do it for very long. She would have been much happier if she could have given them her time and her talent.


The first step leaders can take is to embrace the concept of first focusing on people and their talent to deliver the mission. The talent is available. It can be done. Executive directors can present people plans to their board of directors that outline all the skills their organizations require to deliver the mission in the next year. This is a different, and also more effective, way of working with volunteers. It is possible to create new and different processes and really begin to examine the whole community as our potential workforce.

 

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

Excerpted from The Abundant Not-for-Profit: How Talent (Not Money) Will Transform Your Organization by Colleen Kelly and Lynda Gerty, (Vancouver, Canada: Vantage Point, 2013). Found in the Energize, Inc. Online Bookstore at www.energizeinc.com/store/5-261-E-1.

  

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