04/17/2018

How to Engage and Assess Your Volunteers

New volunteers thrive when they’re given ad hoc opportunities

This week marks National Volunteer Week, an annual opportunity for associations to celebrate the work that volunteers do. And it is indeed work: According to the 2017 ASAE Foundation study “Mutually Beneficial Volunteerism,” volunteers contribute up to 25 percent of an association’s total work hours.

According to Peggy M. Hoffman, FASAE, CAE, president and managing partner at Mariner Management & Marketing and one of the study’s coauthors, that places a responsibility upon associations to think carefully about two aspects of volunteering: How to engage volunteers so they’ll start a relationship with your association, and how to give feedback that will sustain it.

On the engagement side, Hoffman said, associations will be more successful thinking about necessary tasks that volunteers can be recruited for, instead of just slotting them into preset committee niches. “Rather than just automatically say, ‘OK, we’re going to have all these jobs,’ they take on a new issue or opportunity and they build it differently than they would have in the past,” she said.

Please select this link to read the complete article from Associations Now.