Here's to the Vols!

Amazing numbers: 61.8 million people - over a quarter of our population- volunteered at least once in 2008!

Most of them were women. Most of them were between 35 and 44 years of age. Most of them did this through faith-based organizations.*

Watch your television sets carefully in October. Hollywood is focusing on the week of October 19 to promote volunteer service. The vols will be involved in at least 60 programs across the spectrum.

Elie Wiesel wrote a short, horrific, must-read book titled Night. For that amazing piece of history and much more, Wiesel won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. In his acceptance speech, he stated:

"There is so much to be done, there is so much that can be done. One person - a Raoul Wallenberg, an Albert Schweitzer, a Martin Luther King Jr. - one person with integrity can make a difference, a difference of life and death."

Today, when you look across town, one or two states over, or across the oceans, you see so much to do - so many who need help. It is overwhelming, especially to people who are thinking of volunteering.

If your nonprofit is not making maximum use of volunteers, you are not making all the impact that is possible. Make it easy to volunteer. Make it fun. Make it compelling. The script writers in Hollywood are trying to help in 2009.

Wiesel is right. One person can make a difference. Your nonprofit is the vessel in which the next Wallenberg, Schweitzer, or King may sail. Be sure you have it ready for more volunteer sailors.

*Bureau of Labor Statistics, "Volunteering in the United States, 2008"

Who's on Your Bus?

Voltaire said "the perfect is the enemy of the good." Collins said that "good is the enemy of great."

Most of you know of Jim Collins, management consultant, teacher, author, and rock climber. His books include Built to Last (1994) and Good to Great (2001). In the latter, he studied 11 companies that made the leap from being merely good to being truly great. Their performance greatly exceeded that of their peers and resulted in sustainably extraordinary results for at least 15 years.

Out of his 11 outstanding performers in 2001, two are pretty iffy right now. Circuit City, struggling to remain profitable, is closing 155 stores and laying off 17% of workforce. Fannie Mae was recently placed into conservatorship.

But the rest, Abbott, Gillette (purchased by Proctor and Gamble in 2005), Kimberly-Clark, Kroger, Nucor, Philip Morris (now a part of Altria Group), Pitney Bowes, Walgreens, and Wells Fargo, are at least hanging in there during these turbulent economic times. Getting it right on 9 out of 11 is not a bad grade especially in today's economy. The guy seems to know what he's talking about.

Back in the day - when times were good (2005) - Collins wrote an excellent monograph for those of us in the nonprofit world. Entitled Good to Great and the Social Sectors, he reemphasized principles that distinguish good (or mediocre) organizations from great ones. Note that he's not talking about business practices. He is talking about disciplines that benefit all organizations.

Today, in the nonprofit world, I believe one of his points is especially important. It's about getting the right people on the bus.

Unless you're living on another planet, you've already looked at your income and expense projections for the coming twelve months. You've undoubtedly looked at the sad prospect of making cuts. This is stewardship 101.

The tough choices get down to decisions on cutting programs or services (which will hurt your mission) or cutting staff (which is your most expensive cost). This is not a good time for anyone, but it is a vital time to ensure you have the right people on the bus, sitting in the right seats.

Nonprofits are often harder to reorganize than businesses for more complex relationship and emotional reasons. How do you tell an employee who's also a donor or church/auxiliary member that their performance is not good enough? What's the ripple effect among other volunteers if you eliminate a position or bring in a replacement volunteer?

Chances are you have some long-time, very nice, barely competent employees. Can you imagine not having that big smile and big heart around every day? But what if that wonderful person is not carrying the load? Or actually hurting the mission?

The bigger question is: during a recession, can you afford the luxury - the outreach to someone who's taking up a seat on the bus? This is the time when you have to be doing more with less. When the team has to be pulling together. When the paceline has to be working together to go further and faster with less effort.

Nonprofits are nearly always challenged by efficiency. This very difficult time may be the very best time to gently let someone off the bus, or move them to a seat they can share with someone else.

Please tell me that I don't sound like Dwight K. Schrute.

Collins concludes with some simple reminders: "The right people can often attract money, but money by itself can never attract the right people. Money is a commodity; talent is not. Time and talent can often compensate for lack of money, but money cannot ever compensate for lack of the right people."

What a remarkable opportunity exists now to strengthen your team for the long haul.

Twitter Your Nonprofit ?

Do you "tweet?" That's the language of Twitter.

Twitter is the relatively new micro blogging service offered by our friends at twitter.com. These guys let you send very short (up to 140 characters) updates (tweets) to anyone that signs up to get them. Those people are called "followers." You can also restrict delivery just to your circle of buddies...or coworkers.

Followers can receive these updates on a variety of web sites or via email, instant messaging, text messages to your cell phone, etc. It all starts with a simple question: "what are you doing?"

Think of it as simple social networking on a small scale. Then again that small scale has nearly a million users right now. Some are just teenagers standing in line for a movie sending updates to friends. Others are much more sophisticated and frankly, more interesting. (Don't tell the teenagers.)

Whole Foods Market, Comcast, and Dell are using Twitter at an enterprise level. If you're having trouble with your Comcast service, blast a tweet of your frustrations to the world (the default delivery option). Customer support at Comcast monitors Twitter 24x7 for "damage control." See more on this at TBR (The Bivings Report).

Whole Foods is giving Twitter a serious try. They use it as a means of marketing and customer support. It's another way to enhance relationships with its customers. Hmmmm ..... seems like I've mentioned the importance of relationships somewhere else on my blog.

Universities, government agencies, news organizations, and significantly, the Obama campaign are all starting to use Twitter to keep people informed. Can your nonprofit make this work? Sure you can. But do you want to?

Think of two things. Who will be tweeting for your cause? Who will be the followers (the ones interested in your updates)?

If you Twitter just for internal purposes - to schedule or announce visitors for a tour, prepare for the arrival of volunteers, make a late change to an internal function - your followers will just be your staff. But if you plan to Twitter to the board, volunteers, or donors, you really need to have your act together.

Your "tweeter" needs to be informed, interesting, and able to find the balance of being consistent with new tweets without flooding the followers with drivel. Depending upon your cause, you may also have to be sensitive to certain privacy needs.

Your followers need to not be afraid of new technology. That probably means they'll be under 30, but not necessarily, and they may be some of your best candidates for volunteers and new donors.

Will it work at the nonprofit level? Why not? It's a free service, and chances are you want to improve your communications and you're looking for more volunteers and more donors. It's worth a try.

A caveat. Twitter is not especially fast. Look for competitors to get into this game soon.

Help From The Vols

So you've got a bunch of volunteers showing up to "help" in a few weeks. What are they going to do? What are you going to do?

Which of those questions is more important?

If you just wait for them to arrive, hand 'em a bottle of water and a t-shirt, point them to the tools, and show them where to go to get started, you can get some pretty good stuff done.

Sometimes free labor is just worth what it costs.

You're competing for volunteer time with other organizations who love to use volunteers. If the time is well spent, the vols will want to come back to you.

If you're not ready to efficiently make the most of their time or if they feel like their contributions are minimal or just a band aid for what's really needed, you may not see them again.

Depending upon your staffing, you might not always be able to prepare much in advance. You may not even have a process to hand off to a temporary volunteer coordinator. It is what it is.

That just means you spend more time recruiting new volunteers...re-inventing the wheel for your next lalapalooza. What are you going to do?

It's your choice. Spend the time before the vols show up so that they make real progress, learn to love your mission, and want to come back as experienced volunteers (and recruiters), or spend the time recruiting the next batch of vols so you can throw something together and make things look good. For a while.

It's your choice. What are you trying to accomplish?

O yeah. Did I mention that good volunteers often turn into good donors of things besides time?