Coordinator of Volunteers

MS Australia – ACT/NSW/VIC is a highly effective organisation supporting people living with multiple sclerosis (MS), their families and carers. Through a network of community based centres as well as live-in residential facilities and home support, MS Australia – ACT/NSW/VIC and its dedicated volunteers and staff are an essential element assisting Australians living with MS to maintain their quality of life

We now seek a Coordinator of Volunteers to join our experienced & highly respected Fundraising team. located in Blackburn, Victoria. You will be responsible for coordinating our volunteers who participate in various events and fundraising activities. This is a unique opportunity to develop a broad range of skills and to make a difference in the lives of people living with MS!

Your duties will include:

• Implementing and maintaining an efficient and effective volunteer program
• Recruiting, training, placing, developing, supporting and recognising volunteers
• Monitoring and evaluating program outcomes
• Coordinating the delivery of volunteer services, including sourcing resources, equipment and setting up timetables
• Promoting, raising awareness and educating staff, clients and the public on all aspects of volunteer services

We seek a self-motivated individual with:

• Previous experience coordinating volunteer programs
• Previous experience in providing support to volunteers
• Certificate IV in Volunteer Program Coordination or other relevant qualification
• Strong interpersonal, verbal and written communication skills
• Networking and relationship management skills
• Organisational, planning and time management skills
• Demonstrated ability to work autonomously as well as in a team
• Current drivers licence and own vehicle

The successful applicant will be offered a part time role (working 3 days/week), with a competitive remuneration package, including attractive tax free salary packaging options (which means more in your take home pay), as well as the opportunity to work within a high profile, highly respected, not-for-profit Australian organisation

Applications: Addressing the selection criteria and directed to Cheryl McGarvin at cheryl.mcgarvin@msaustralia.org.au

Position Description: Can be obtained via – http://www.mssociety.org.au/current-vacancies.asp

Closing Date: 4pm Friday 5 April 2013

Note: The successful applicant will be required to complete a National Police Check and where necessary, a Working with Children Check

Over recent years Tony has been doing a lot of thinking, writing and presenting on this topic and so we thought it would be good to stimulate debate through a Hot Topic column on this subject

Tony will also be speaking on this topic at this year’s Australasian Retreat for Advanced Volunteer Management. 

Thanks Tony!

Data will always give you the wrong answer when you ask the wrong question

Why volunteer hours are NOT the Holy Grail

If a nonprofit or charity truly values the time of their volunteer (and they all proclaim they do), why is there always pressure on Managers of Volunteers to continually increase the number of hours volunteered, without a correlated look at what outputs are generated with those hours?

“How many hours did we get from volunteers?” is the wrong question, but sadly it is the one on which the sector is currently focused. The right question is “What is the relationship between the number of hours of volunteer time that we consumed related to the value of what got accomplished?”.

Consider the information below about a hypothetical nonprofit. 

                                                                                                                                                                      
In most of the organisations with which I have worked, the reporting that is requested of Managers of Volunteers from senior management focuses on reports such as those above and in almost all of them, a Manager of Volunteers would be considered to be failing in their job if the number of volunteer hours decreased every year. In many cases those hours are looked at as time that would have had to have been ‘paid for’ or as associated with services that would not have been delivered had the time not been volunteered. Both can be false assumptions.

What if we add more data to the picture? (assume for now that all this organisation does is plant trees)

With some added information, it turns out this Manager of Volunteers has been a great job and should be congratulated for accomplishing more with less. How did she do it?

• Maybe she had been over-scheduling in the past and got better at it with more experience.
• Perhaps volunteers were provided with better training and they were then able to plant trees with greater ease and therefore planted more trees per hour.
• Maybe she bought better shovels.

The point is that from a resource management perspective, year 4 is far better than year 1.

When the right question is not asked, the answer leads us astray. 

Some of you may have raised your eyebrows on the point about “buying better shovels”, and if you did so because you recognised that the cost of those shovels needs to be included somehow in this analysis, pat yourself on the back: you are correct. If however, you did so because you thought it was wrong to spend money on better shovels when you had the option of letting volunteers work inefficiently since they are ”free”, get someone to kick you in the back-side! 

I believe that if we truly value the time of our volunteers we should operate under the premise that we are spending their time, just like we spend cash. And further, in the sa,e way that we spend cash, we should spend as little of it as needed in order to accomplish our mission.

There is an economic principle to support my belief in this; it is the Principle of Scarce Resources. The important element of the Principle of Scarce Resources is not that something can’t be found, but rather, that a consumable resource can only be used once.  A single dollar cannot be used to make two separate purchases and a person cannot volunteer the same hour in two different places.  That we much choose how to spend that dollar or that hour of our time demonstrates the similarity between the two. As they are similar in nature we should treat them the same:

Consume as little as possible to achieve our mission.

I also recognise that sometimes money is harder to come by than volunteer hours so the option to purchase the “better shovels” might not always exist, but that does not break down the rationale of looking at volunteer time as something we spend and should try to minimise. Scheduling  volunteers in a manner that better aligns with needs and providing volunteers with better training can reduce the number of hours consumed with little or no increase in cost.

Simple financial reporting is a lousy management accounting tool – even more so in nonprofits

The adoption of the approach above can lead not only to the more efficient consumption of volunteer resources, it opens the door to better management across an organisation as a whole. Financial reporting in nonprofits only tells a portion of the story. By their nature nonprofits  more or less break even each year. The dollars spent are equal to the dollars they take in.

The following table represents the essence of financial reporting in the nonprofit sector (albeit simplified). It shows the two years of an organisation as working at similar levels financially in that they both have neither a profit nor a loss, but are seemingly underperforming on donations/revenue in year two.

Let’s look at how these two years compare if we add something new to the reporting.

All other things being equal, Year 2 has clearly outperformed Year 1 since the same job got done while consuming fewer resources.  If these were two different organisations rather two years within the same organisation, to which one would you rather make a donation? 

The financial records alone would not have demonstrated the differences in performance between these two years. In both years the organisation ran a balanced budget.

The path to the right answer begins with the right question

Because of the arithmetic simplicity of both of the examples above we can intuitively see which year had the better performance. The application of this in real world though needs some means of comparing the data along some similar element. The return on investment formula,

ROI = (Inputs-Outputs) / Outputs,

provides us with that common element. 

Key to this methodology are three things.

1. The value of volunteer time is treated as an input, along with cash expenses
2. The outputs must be tracked and we must place a value on those outputs
3. The outputs must be in line with the outcomes associated with the organisation’s mission

For some organisations, putting a value on the outputs can be fairly easy while in others it can represent the biggest challenge in putting this model into practice. For organisations whose outputs are similar to something in the for-profit sector, a monetary value for these outputs is easy to derive: use the same value the commercial sector uses. If your nonprofit does tax returns for people who need help with them but can’t afford it, use the price you would have to pay if you went to a commercial service for one. 

In other situations, putting a dollar value on something such as a friendly visit in a hospital is more difficult but it is possible (although outside the scope of this article). Where it is deemed that actual dollar values simply cannot be placed on the outputs of your organisation, the ROI model can still be used but the results have to be looked at slightly differently because dollars are used to value inputs and something else is used for outputs whereas the equation is designed to compare apples to apples. Rather than place a dollar figure on each output, place a Mission Points value where the various Mission Points assigned to the various outputs indicate the relative degrees in which each one contributes to you mission.

So let me invite you to add your thoughts and experiences to this topic.

Tony Goodrow – President – Volunteer²
www.volunteer2.com
www.tonygoodrow.com

Tony was the founding Chair of the Carpenter Hospice in Burlington. He has been recognized by the Ontario Ministry of Citizenship and Culture; received the June Callwood award for volunteerism; and is one of only three recipients of the designation of Patron of Burlington.

In 2000, Tony began to combine his experiences as a volunteer in a variety of organizations with his knowledge of the internet and data management. The result of this effort is Volunteer IMPACT software that helps in the management of volunteers in terms of communications, scheduling and reporting.

Tony has presented on a variety of topics at conferences on volunteerism, in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Guatemala, England, Ireland, Korea, Singapore and the United States.

Interestingly, time banking is one of the key strategies written into the NSW government’s volunteering strategy for the period 2011 -2021, and $300,000 worth of funding has been provided to Volunteer Centres in the Hunter and on the Central Coast to trial the project in those regions. You can read more at http://www.volunteering.nsw.gov.au/volunteers/timebanking/timebanking-providers

So what is time banking?

Time banking is a volunteering scheme based heavily on the principle of reciprocity, whereby participants essentially earn – and then trade – credits of time with other registered members of the time bank.

For instance, I might join a time bank scheme and spend two hours of my time mowing lawns for other members of the collective. These two hours are then ‘banked’, that is, they are recorded as a credit for me which I can ‘cash in’ at a later time to retrieve services that I need from other members of the time bank (such as two hours of baby sitting or having a fence painted) – (See image below courteousy of http://www.helpdirect.org.uk/preston-south-ribble/other-projects/time-banks/)

In essence, time banking is a trading scheme in which ‘time’ is the currency – replacing cash.

First developed by Edgar Cahn in the USA in the early 1980’s, time banking has since grown to have a presence in more than 35 countries around the world, and is well entrenched in both the UK and the USA where more than 300 time banking schemes exist.

Interestingly, there is evidence to suggest that time banking attracts a greater number of low income earners to community participation that traditional forms of volunteering. A study of time banking in the UK found that time banks were successful in “attracting people who would not normally get involved in traditional volunteering”. The same report found that “while only 16% of ‘traditional’ volunteers had an income under £10,000, four times as many (58%) of time bank participants did”.

This was further illustrated with the following statistic which demonstrated that “nearly double the number of time bank participants were not in formal employment (72%) compared to traditional volunteers (40%)”    [The times of our lives research, UK, 2002]

So clearly, time banking is meeting a niche which traditional volunteering misses.

However the question I want to pose in this hot topic is whether or not time banking is truly volunteering at all?

Anyone who has read my hot topics over the last decade will know that I am the first person to rock the boat and advocate for greater ways to broaden the definition of what and who a volunteer is; but I can’t help feeling that time banks somehow overstep that fine line and are in fact something else.

I’m quite happy to be persuaded to another way of thinking, but there are a couple of key points that I just can’t get my head around at the moment.

I guess the first core question for me is the question of what constitutes reciprocity and what is payment for a service?

A young person volunteering in order to get their resume up-to-date is a good example of reciprocity at its finest. You give you get.

I’ve also been a big advocate for many years now of innovative program’s such as the 10,000 hours project (US) and Orange Rockcorp (UK), where volunteers who give a certain number of hours to local voluntary charities receive a free concert ticket in return for their time.

Susan Ellis of Energize fame recently responded to a post in the OzVPM Newsgroup, where she shared information about a UK project where volunteers received discount vouchers to local businesses in return for volunteer effort. Again, I have no problems with programs of this type.

So what’s the block in time banking for me?

Well essentially I believe it is more about an individual trading scheme than it is volunteering.

Some of my key concerns are:

1. It’s too self-centred

While innovative program’s such as those mentioned above provide tangible rewards in return for volunteering, the volunteering is being conducted to benefit community organisations and community causes. In the case of time banking, the recipients of the services being received are primarily individuals. Sure this builds social capital and helps those in need to help themselves (which is a great thing), but is it volunteering? It seems to me it is ‘informal volunteering with benefits’!

2. It’s a trading scheme

Most definitions of volunteering anywhere in the world have, as a basic tenet the idea that “volunteering occurs without any expectation of monetary reward”. When even the literature promoting time banking itself refers to time banking as being an ‘alternate monetary unit’, I think it treads dangerously over the line of not being a volunteering activity.

3. Who loses?

Another commonly held principle of volunteering is that it should never take away paid jobs. Now I know better than most that this is a huge grey area, but I wonder, for instance, how the local guy with a lawn mowing business in a small regional area suddenly fares when a vibrant time banking scheme emerges in that community and half a dozen members of the time bank are now mowing multiple lawns in exchange for other services?

4. It is not equitable

Time banking assumes all members have something to give and something to get. So where does that leave community members who require a service, but who, perhaps for health reasons, are not able to participate?

5. It’s government driven!

Call me glass half empty man if you like, but in NSW at least, the time banking scheme is being driven, supported and initially funded to the tune of $300,000 by the NSW government. One has to wonder what is in it for them?

Now let me finish by stating categorically that I am not opposed to time banks. I think they are a great way to engage communities, and particularly those who are marginalised and have little to offer the broader workforce. My issue here is the fundamental question of whether or not time banking should be included in a strategy for the growth of volunteering by an Australian government or whether it belongs elsewhere?

OK, over to you!

I am a time bank novice and invite intellectual debate and the chance to be proven wrong by those who have direct and more practical experiences of time banking. I am of course always interested in broader thinking about the topic.

So do you agree or disagree with my thoughts?

Let’s hear from you

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I’m writing this hot topic as I holiday on the tropical paradise that is Fiji. If you have never been, you need to find a way to get here and experience the amazing Fijian food, weather and hospitality.

It’s the latter that I want to make the focus of my article this month, as one of the most endearing elements of Fijian culture is their gracious acceptance of everyone and their genuine happiness to welcome you to their Islands.

‘Bula’ is used universally to say hello or welcome in Fiji and everyone that you meet will greet you with this hearty expression. It is not put on for the tourists and is not a forced greeting which the locals feel they must comply with. It’s a genuine “hello”, and it makes you feel good!

Coming from a more western culture, one thing that really dawned on me during my vacation was the fact that we have really lost the art of communication and more importantly being able to connect with others around us. Even as I wandered around some of the resorts on Fiji, other westerners that I would come across would pass with their eyes downcast and barely a murmur of hello if you were lucky.

The most significant example of this that I ever witnessed occurred while I was attending the world volunteering conference in Singapore last year. As a friend and I emerged from a jam packed subway train in peak hour, and made our way amongst the thronging masses on their way to work, I suddenly realised that something was odd. No one was speaking to each other. No one! Instead all the other commuters were plugged into silent electronic devices, locked away in world’s that were miles away from the person walking right next door to them. It truly was a surreal moment!

So how does this all tie into a hot topic on volunteer management?

Well I believe that many volunteer programs have lost (or risk losing) the art of effective communication and connection with their volunteers, as we work in environments which continue to demand more and more administrative functioning within the workplace.

Historically, the role of volunteer leadership emerged as one which required a focus on the personal side of working with volunteers. I distinctly remember taking on my first volunteer program back in the late 80′s and the handover I received on my first day from the outgoing Coordinator.

It consisted of very personal instructions about how to get the most out of each and every volunteer. Instruction like “That is Ken and he will expect you to sit down and have a coffee with you when he arrives on a Tuesday morning” or “Mary really loves her handicraft and will often bring in samples to show off to you”. In short, it was all about the PEOPLE and volunteer leadership was at that time very much a ‘people profession’

As time went on, new and wonderful terms such as ‘liability’, ‘litigation’ and ‘risk management’ found their way into volunteer management vocabulary and organisations stopped employing volunteer managers strong on people skills and started to seek out volunteer leaders  with a much stronger skill set based in administration, policy development and human resource management.

I’m not for a minute suggesting that there has been anything wrong with this evolution, for the most part it was necessary and important for the effective development of volunteering and the protection of volunteers. However I have spoken for many years about the inherent risk that this evolution has posed for the field to become less focused on people and more focused on paper!

I’m often reminded of a piece of art work which my step-brother (and artist) David Archer* created which illustrates this concern beautifully. Dave creates ‘automata’ – pieces of artwork which move as you wind handles and push buttons. This particular piece features a large industrial looking box which has running through the middle of it a conveyor belt. On the left of the box, the conveyor belt enters the box and on the belt are small figures of artists, chefs, athletes and other gifted individuals. As the conveyor belt emerges from the industrial box on the right, it is filled with a line of robots – all exactly the same.

For Dave this is a statement about industrialisation, but for me it is a great visualisation about what we can sometimes do with our volunteer teams. We get so caught up in ‘processing them’ that we forget that that come to us with a wide array of natural skills, talents, knowledge and abilities.

So a reminder – as leaders of volunteers we are always working in a people profession FIRST and we have a responsibility to continue to find ways to connect with people on a daily basis.

There are many strategies for achieving this, but they all revolve first and foremost around us making time amongst the administrative tasks, to leave our desks and connect with our volunteers. One much talked about technique for achieving this is what is simply referred to as ‘management by walking around’. Quite simply, make time each day (in your diary) to wander around and say hi to your team, listen to any concerns and make notes about things that require your attention.

You’ll be amazed at what a difference this makes, how easy it is and how much more visible you will appear to your volunteers.

The other thing we often forget to do in the course of a busy workload is to say a simple thank you to our volunteers.

In the movie Hitchcock, Will Smith plays a dishevelled superhero with amazing powers to do good, but he has become so caught up in simply ‘getting the job done’ that he has forgotten the real purpose of using his superhero powers.

Throughout the course of the movie he is re-trained to be more socially acceptable and amongst other things, he is reminded time and time again to say “good job” to the police and others who are often at the scene of a crime before he arrives.

So as leaders of volunteers let us never to forget to say ‘Bula’ to our volunteers. To leave our desk, to walk amongst our teams and to make sure that each and every volunteer feels that they are truly valued members of your team.

Now if you’ll excuse me I am off for another cocktail!

Vinaka!

• http://www.archersarcadia.com/sculpture.htm

Let’s build 2012 as the year that we impacted on the professionalism around volunteer engagement. We invite you to think about what ‘lights your fire’ about volunteering, volunteer engagement and volunteer management and to create a presentation, paper or design a conversation that brings that to life in the context of our conference.

Our Goal is — To better understand the challenges and opportunities for 2013 and beyond for engagement of volunteers, volunteers themselves, and our wider community/corporate and government [local/central] leaders in promoting and building volunteering by ….

• providing speakers, workshops, presentations displays and      environments that inspire us to lift our game in improving volunteer      outcomes.
• creating space for leaders of the volunteer community to      provide thought leadership and context for the work of volunteers.
• bringing together from every facet of our communities,      leadership and stakeholders, to build networks and develop a shared      view of an active volunteer sector that makes a difference.
• providing case-studies of excellence in Community-Led      Development models, capacity-building practice, planning and      implementation that involves volunteers.

Our Guidelines for requests to present

Presentations must address one of the conference streams, as outlined here

1. Volunteer Recruitment and Management Success
2. Connecting with the corporate sector and CSR strategy
3. Life Span – The diversity of volunteer engagement across      all demographics – age, ethnicity, disability, etc
4. Making a positive difference – the keys to success in      community well-being through volunteering action.

Our Requirements

You need to provide us with:

• The theme of your      presentation/workshop (see above for details);
• A brief title of      your proposed presentation/workshop;
• A summary of the      presentation content – no more than 200 words;
• A summary of the      background of presenter/s – no more than 200 words;
• A picture of      presenter/s included for publicity and programme;
• Any relevant web      links.

For this key sector event, we are encouraging as many expressions of interest to present as possible, but we also reserve the right to accept or decline offers, based on criteria which include: balance in the programme, adherence to a key conference stream, broad representation from a range of locations and project/programme types, and relevance to the Conference generally.

Presentation needs

Presenters should plan for a keynote session of 30 minutes, or a workshop of 75 minutes including allowing for questions and interaction.

You must provide or make accessible to the organisers in advance, any materials, such as electronic presentations.  Similarly, you must also advise us in advance of your presentation needs, e.g. data projector, laptop, internet access, etc.

Selection guidelines

Please bear in mind that this Conference is about sharing with others what you are doing, would like to be able to do and/or have done and/or sharing skills, so that delegates can come away from the Conference with tangible, practical ideas and/or skills to assist them in their own projects and plans.

Therefore, please ensure your submission follows one or more of the conference themes and addresses the actual implementation of a project or programme.

We will not accept submissions based on academic papers, theoretical research or future projections that do not translate into practice (there are other forums for these). Papers presented should not overly emphasise specific technical details (except in skills-based workshops), but take a broader overview of the issues involved and illustrate how the initiative could or has benefited the project and its intended audience.  We are also keen to hear of those initiatives that have not worked well and how you may have addressed the issues these raise.

You must also refrain from directly promoting a particular product or business (you can contact us for sponsorship or exhibitors’ booths for this purpose).

Further Enquiries

Cheryll Martin, General Manager, Volunteering Auckland 021 296 6426 or email gm@volunteeringauckland.org.nz

Shaun Lines, Event Manager     021 751 932      shaun@grow.co.nz

Last date for submission of proposals     10 August 2012