VolunteerMatch just received its 1,000th referral for the year. (VolunteerMatch the organization, I mean, not VolunteerMatch.org the Web site.)
That is, with the listings we ourselves posted to our own account at VolunteerMatch.org, we’ve inspired more than 1,000 individuals to want to get involved in various aspects of our work. This year alone.
But we’re VolunteerMatch! We’re the experts, right? Not necessarily. As a small nonprofit organization ourselves, we’re learning and growing with our program all the time. Just ask our volunteer program manager.
Granted, we’ve saved some money by not having to pay ourselves for some premium services (especially Community Leader and Multi-ZIP). But beyond that, the secret is that there hasn’t really been a secret at all. Just hard work, creativity, and diligent management.
If you’re like most of the volunteer organizations in our network, the big question isn’t what you could accomplish with 1,000 volunteers… the big question is how could you possibly manage them in an effective way.
How would your department need to be structured to support them? What kind of talents would you need to have on staff in order to support them? What kind of attitudes and approaches would need to be present in order to support them?
If you’re like most organizations, when it comes to your volunteer program, the number 1,000 might as well be a million. And to reach that number the changes that would need to happen might even leave the organization unrecognizable.
With 1,000 volunteers, your day-to-day work might involve more phone calls, Web updates, social networking and working with your staff — and less face-time with volunteers. The reports you produce for your boss or your board might be in a completely different format with line items that are different from what you report on today. And so on.
In fact, it’s safe to assume that just about everything you do in your work would be different if you were working with 1,000 volunteers.
But just for a minute imagine the possibilities. Then ask yourself: What can you do today, what small first step can you take, to start the process?
Let us know.
( Photo via Flickr / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
See related:
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
The Pass It Forward Movement http://www.aunitedworld.org is developing a website where volunteers (community service) will be able to recruit 1,000 mentors per day, or even per hour. In just 30 minutes online with your own personal volunteer mentor (www.30minutementor.org), the protege (mentee) will find their purpose, and devlop a passion so that they can put their “gift” (everyone has a gift) into action. In just 30 minutes a protege learns online how they can mentor others and pass forward too.
The website http://www.aunitedworld.org is everyone’s website. It is a resource of hundreds of thousands of people and organizations all over the world that are working together to help make the world a better place. Each person, group, club, family, school, nonprofit, and organization is in the process of creating their own PIF program based upon exactly what they are already doing, just not calling it PIF.
In other words, does your organization offer a free newsletter? If so, your free newsletter would qualify as a PIF program.
There is nothing for sale on this website, and there are no affiliate programs. Additionally, no one is asking anyone for any money, just a little bit of a persons time.
Our mission is pretty simple. We want to give every person the opportunity to have a volunteer mentor. We are accomplishing this now all over the world, all over the internet, and it’s all free with no gimmicks!
Yes, we too have created 1,000 PIF programs in a very short period of time http://www.aunitedworld.org/all.asp. We, The World, the 501 (c) (3) nonprofit has events going on in 60 countries, 600 cities from September 11th thru September 22nd during the 11 Days of Global Unity http://www.globalunitycalendar.org. If you have an event, I encourage you to place it on the calendar – This too is free!