Volunteer Screening Blog

Volunteers are just like any other staff member that comes into your nonprofit organization. They are usually unknown, unpredictable and will do the unexpected while working for your NPO. It’s important to know as much as you can about each volunteer before they can cause harm and it’s vital to the safety and strength of the organization to use the same background screening procedures you use for employees.

Why is it Important to Screen Volunteers?
To Protect the People You Serve: This is the most important reason to screen volunteers—to keep dangerous people away from your clients. Adults who work with kids or teens, elderly caregivers and home visitation volunteers should always undergo background screening.

To Limit Liability: If your NPO serves the public, the entire organization is at risk whenever and wherever a volunteer is placed—especially with at-risk populations such as children or the elderly. If harm is done to a member of the public, the NPO could be held liable for a volunteer’s behavior. Thorough background screening will weed out volunteers with arrests or other criminal activities in their pasts.

Because it Could be Mandatory: Nonprofits that depend on federal and state funding are usually required to perform background screening on employees and volunteers.

To Protect the Organization’s Reputation: Volunteer screening allows a nonprofit to enjoy a good reputation in the community, which can lead to more support. Having a “loosey-goosey” approach to placing volunteers can harm an NPO’s standing in the community.

To Discourage Predators: Often, just knowing your organization conducts background screening will be enough to keep away volunteers who might be seeking inappropriate contact with children. Conversely, a no-screening policy could look like an open invitation to offenders and predators to come right in and start working with vulnerable populations.
Volunteer managers and nonprofit organizations are vulnerable to financial loss and inappropriate or dangerous behavior of volunteers. Criminal background screening on all volunteers can protect your organization, staff, and clientele from harm.

Most salespeople know that it’s easier to sell more to an existing customer than to get a new customer. The same goes with fundraising for nonprofits. It’s easier to ask established supporters to give more than to sell a completely new individual on your organization—and get them to give.

Establishing long-term relationships with donors and supporters is one of the keys to successful fundraising. And like anything worth keeping, they take time to build. Each interaction with a potential donor is a chance to grow that relationship.

Potential Donors

• Event attendees
• Volunteers
• Friends of volunteers
• Community members
• Co-workers
• Board member friends and families

How to Grow the Relationship:
Ask questions. Ask volunteers why they’re there; what drew them to the organization. At events, ask attendees why it was important to them. You may hear that the cause wasn’t important, but they were there for the silent auction; or the food; or because they were coerced. Whatever the reason, you can build upon it. The idea is to get to know your donor base better—what they like; what’s important to them. And asking questions makes people feel valued, too.

Tell your story. At every opportunity, repeat the story of your organization, its mission and its accomplishments. And find new ways to do it. Keep the story short, and make sure it is meaningful. Give examples of real people that have been helped by your organization.

Make the ask—it’s as simple as that. If you don’t ask for donations, it’s not likely that donors will just send you money—but they will respond if they believe in the cause and know that you need support. And make it easy for donors to give. Include self-addressed envelopes with fundraising letters. Add a “donate now” widget to your website or blog.

Building real relationships with donors isn’t difficult—it takes time, but it’s vitally important to your fundraising efforts. And, it can be one investment of your time that really pays off!

It pays to plan before you send a group of volunteers out to accomplish a task. Project planning can make a volunteer’s job more efficient and successful. How do some professional volunteer managers seem to plan their projects with such ease? The answer can be as simple as . Keeping good records helps you establish good procedures for how to accomplish a task the next time.

1. Write it all down

First assess the areas you need help in. This will help you recruit volunteers with appropriate skills. For example, if you need to plan a fundraiser, you might need an auctioneer, an event planner, and a designer. For meal delivery to shut-ins, you’d look for empathetic people who are adept at making connections with others.

Next, look at the project itself. Ask why it needs to be done—that’s the goal that will direct every activity. Is it to raise money for operations, or to buy a needed piece of equipment? Is it to raise awareness of a cause? Or is the project something that falls under your organization’s direct work?

Then figure out the steps it will take to finish the project. Start at the beginning, at the end, or in the middle—you’ll fill in the rest of the steps from there.

Decide how many volunteers  each step will take. What skills are needed during each phase? For a fundraiser, you’d need a designer at the beginning, the middle and the end; you’d need the auctioneer just on the day of the event.

Time is the next issue—how much do you have overall and how much do you anticipate each step will take? If it’s a short-term project, like planting trees along a stream, then figure out how long it will take to gather enough volunteers, obtain the trees, get permission for planting, and pick a day from there.

Is the project going to involve volunteers working with children, handling funds or interacting with at-risk populations? Then be sure to figure in time for background screening for those volunteers.

Finally, what transportation will be needed for volunteers? Whether they can walk to the site, or you’ll need a bus to get them there, don’t make the mistake of deciding you need transportation after all the volunteers have arrived. You’ll be wasting valuable work time—and valuable volunteer time.

2. Fill out a project sheet.

With the answers to the above questions clearly established, you’ll be able to fill out a simple project worksheet:

PROJECT WORKSHEET

Title:       Goal:

Start date:      End date:

Number of volunteers:      Hours per week per volunteer:

Project description:

Volunteer job title:
Volunteer job description:
Number of volunteers we need for this job description:
Background check:      yes      no

Volunteer job title:
Volunteer job description:
Number of volunteers we need for this job description:
Background check:      yes      no

Volunteer job title:
Volunteer job description:
Number of volunteers we need for this job description:
Background check:      yes      no

Total number of volunteers for this project:

Transportation needs:

Other needs (permits, event space, etc.):

There are more ways to solicit donations, recruit volunteers and spread the word about your organization than ever before. While non-profit organizations are still holding walk-a-thons and bake sales—although the latter has been in decline, due to food allergies and liability issues—the emergence of social marketing and online networking means it’s far easier to reach much wider audiences.

Online fundraising tools like GlobalGiving and ChipIn make it easy for charities to solicit donations right on their websites. No custom programming needed! Facebook and Twitter allow non-profits to gain followers and friends to help publicize their events and needs in a flash. Facebook even helps with Causes, which allows fundraisers to ask for donations from their friends and contacts. It’s good for finding volunteers, too.

Dozens of other sites have popped up to help non-profits publicize their missions and raise money. But before you jump in the social marketing pool, the first thing to do is ask yourself a couple of questions on behalf of your NPO:

1. How Well do I Know my Organization?
2. How Well can I Communicate my Organization’s Brand?

Before you take advantage of the remarkable tools that now exist for marketing through social media (in other words, social marketing), make sure you’re ready. That means knowing your organization inside and out—and communicating the brand quickly and clearly.

Do you Know Yourself?
You may think no one knows your non-profit better than you. But can you put it into meaningful words? Can you express your best-fit client, your ultimate goal and your organization’s place in your community? What are the strengths of the organization, and where do you need help? What skills are you looking for in volunteers? Knowing your organization backwards and forwards makes it easier to make connections with people who can make a difference to your organization.

Communicating the Brand
Think in terms of what your organization does to change something that’s wrong in the world—that’s the brand. It’s what drives the organization, what makes it different from others—and what would be lost if it didn’t exist. Every person involved must speak about the brand in the same way in order for it to be most effective. A well-written tagline helps.

Once you know the organization and the brand, then set up a Twitter account, write blog posts, share them on Facebook and send targeted emails. Social marketing is all about educating your volunteers, fans, supporters and followers about what you’re doing and how they can help you affect change.

For volunteer managers, recruiting volunteers is only step one in a successful volunteer program. The process that includes background screening, matching skills with needs, and training. Sometimes the important step of orientation is overlooked.

Why orientation is so important?

• Orientation helps ensure volunteers are productive and that they stick around. Learning their place, their job, and the meaning of their work helps facilitate a job well done. Feeling productive leads to higher retention, too.
• Orientation helps new volunteers learn your nonprofit organization’s (NPO’s) policies and procedures. It’s frustrating and unproductive for volunteers to find out the dos and don’ts as they go. It can also be stressful for staff to correct the missteps of volunteers who don’t know any better. Just knowing where to park and which restroom to use can be extremely helpful to newbies.
• Volunteer orientation gives new folks a sense of partnership. Feeling like you’re a part of something leads to buy-in. A sense of belonging somewhere is very important—and it’s a big reason people volunteer in the first place. Skipping orientation could lead new volunteers to feel adrift and more like an outsider than an insider.
• Proper orientation for volunteers means the organization’s mission is clearly communicated. Knowing clearly what the organization’s mission and goals are makes volunteers valuable spokespeople in the community.

A Few Quick Tips for Successful Volunteer Orientation

1. Be organized: prepare packets of information ahead of time. Scrambling at the last moment makes you and your organization look unprofessional
2. Recruit a fully-trained staff member or volunteer to lead it: Even worse than being unorganized is leaving volunteers with the thought that they are not being taught well
3. Consider compiling a list of acronyms your volunteers will hear being tossed around. It will help them feel like insiders—not outsiders who aren’t privy to the organization’s activities.
4. Group orientations are a great way to save time and introduce new volunteers to staff and more experienced volunteers.

While training volunteers to do their specific jobs is extremely important, volunteer managers should remember that skipping orientation to get to training could leave volunteers unproductive and heading for the door!

Costco is known to provide good values to its members and as a good place to work for its employees. Costco has also pledged to give back to the communities it serves—and not to build market share, but because it’s the right thing to do.

The entire corporation got behind the fund drive for the Children’s Miracle Network (CMN). Employees encouraged members to buy paper balloons and print their names on them—with all proceeds going to CMN. To promote more balloon purchases, a Seattle employee even wore them while working! And he alone was responsible for $10,000 in donations. Altogether, more than $11.5 million was raised this year through Costco’s employees and members.

Costco launched a company-wide Volunteer Reading Program in 1998. Interested staff are trained to tutor children who need extra help developing better reading skills. They meet weekly with their students, who range from grade school to high school age.

At Costco headquarters outside Seattle, WA, the employee-run Volunteer Center acts as a clearinghouse for identifying local needs, then promoting and tracking volunteer opportunities. The center has registered about 300 Costco employees. Each month, local charities can present their programs to the group, which finds ways to help. From soup kitchens to Toys for Tots; Outdoors for All to Gilda’s Club, volunteers from Costco are giving back in big ways.

The Costco Backpack Program is a nationwide program, started in 1993. Each warehouse identifies a local school to “adopt.” Employees then distribute new backpacks filled with supplies to each student in a chosen grade. Since 2005, more than 225,000 backpacks have been given away each year by Costco in the U.S.

Individual Costco employees also find their own ways to give back, from taking bakery items to the homeless to holding disc golf tournaments to raise money for Big Brothers Big Sisters. In Alaska, the Anchorage Costco warehouse manager helped the Alaska Air National Guard as they delivered Christmas gifts to needy families in remote villages. And in Maryland a Costco employee helps knit items for infants, soldiers and nursing home residents.

These are just a few of they way Costco and its employees volunteer in their communities, making them better for everyone!

Every non profit organization (NPO) needs a volunteer strategy. Whether it’s for recruiting board members or office helpers, a plan is essential to finding, retaining, and training volunteers. And, it can make the volunteer manager or executive director’s job much easier!

Why should NPOs have a volunteer strategy?

Volunteer strategies allow volunteer programs to run more smoothly. Planning is the first step to any successful endeavor. If your NPO is embarking on a volunteer program without a plan, it could fail, putting the entire organization further behind on its goals.

• They make recruiting volunteers much easier. A volunteer strategy should identify the best-fit volunteers for the organization, including demographic information (age, gender, occupation, residence, etc.), level of involvement and needed skills. Once the various groups of potential volunteers are identified, it is much easier to find them, reach them, and recruit them.
• To help focus orientation and training efforts: A well-trained volunteer is a better volunteer. Defining roles, supplying job descriptions, and identifying staff or volunteer trainers is essential to properly orienting and training volunteers. How can training be accomplished correctly—and replicated—without planning?
• To keep volunteers engaged and help avoid burnout. Another important aspect to volunteer strategy is retention. It’s usually not a good idea to recruit volunteers and then ignore them. Keeping them interested in the mission of the NPO, demonstrating appreciation, and soliciting their feedback are all vital pieces to the retention puzzle. And there are many more—which should be explored when creating a volunteer strategy.
• To enable NPOs to develop leaders out of volunteers. If an NPO’s executive or volunteer director is not focused on the volunteer strategy, there is a huge potential for loss, both in the simple numbers of volunteers (who are not being successfully retained) and in the loss of potential leadership. When a strategy has been established, everyone is more focused. Seeing the leadership qualities in volunteers becomes an everyday thing. And those who could help take the NPO closer to its goals will not fall by the wayside, unnoticed and underappreciated.

Every businessperson knows the importance of planning for the future and strategizing on how to get there. The non profit sector can take this page out of the business playbook and use it to successfully run volunteer programs!

Since 1877, The Fresh Air Fund has been providing a respite in the country and suburbs to inner-city children from New York City. At no cost to their families, boys and girls from six to 18 get to experience green trees, rambling rivers, bar-b-ques by the lake, and of course—the fresh air they don’t get much of in the big city.

In 2009, close to 5,000 kids were hosted for up to two weeks by volunteer host families in 13 northeastern states and Canada. The generous hosts often form bonds with their guests, and more than 65% of Fresh Air children are invited to stay with their host families year after year. Fresh Air Fund is all about building relationships.

Host families can be of any size, ethnicity or background. There are no financial requirements, and hosts can request a specific age group and gender for their Fresh Air child guest.

Fresh Air children are six to 12 years old their first year; children can stay in the program through age 18 when re-invited by the same family. Most visits are one or two weeks, but repeat guests can stay for longer visits. Most Fresh Air children are from low-income communities, and families who lack the ability to send them to camp or go on summer vacations together. They often grow up without access to parks or open play areas.

Riding bikes, feeling the grass beneath bare feet or running through the woods are experiences that remain with Fresh Air children for their lifetimes. Host children and Fresh Air children often form friendships that last long beyond childhood.

The Fresh Air Fund also provides summer camp for 3,000 New York City children at five upstate New York camps, other educational opportunities, and a Career Awareness Program for New York City adolescents.

Since 1877, more than 1.7 million inner-city kids have enjoyed summer vacations with host families—all funded through the generosity of thousands of contributors. It’s not too late to sign up to be a host family for 2010. By offering some fresh air and simple fun to an inner-city child, your family could have a life-changing experience, too.

Now is a great time for recruiting top-quality volunteers. With the employment picture (unfortunately) remaining less than rosy, management-level talent is finding its way to more nonprofit organizations (NPOs) than ever before.

Whether you find yourself as a volunteer manager trying to tap into these new volunteers’ developed skills, or helping other volunteers develop their leadership skills, you’ll probably find a core leadership group can be quite an asset to your organization, with growth and sustainability not far behind.

How to Identify Potential Leaders
Analyzing volunteers as they work, as well as their skill set coming in, is the best way to determine if they’ll make a good leader. Make sure your volunteer application is set up to gather information like work experience, education level, areas of expertise, specific skills and areas of interest. Also, the application should give potential volunteers the opportunity to express themselves by asking open-ended questions. This way, you can judge communication skills.

What Qualities Do Leaders Possess?
Reliability: Volunteers who show up when they say they will, on time and ready to work their tasks, are potentially the dependable type of leader you want. Other volunteers will not follow a leader who they cannot depend on.

Natural Leadership: Watch your volunteers to see who exhibits natural leadership qualities. Teaching others, listening well, performing duties without much supervision, and a positive outlook are all traits that leaders possess.

Team Players: Leaders are seldom the loner type. They enjoy being around people, and others are naturally drawn to them. Often, leaders have groups that tend to gather around them at every event. If you have a volunteer like this, you’d better take advantage of their charisma and ability to attract more people to their cause!

After you Identify a Leader
Conduct an informal interview with all volunteers who posses the leadership skills you want. Ask how they see themselves contributing and growing with your organization. Identify the leadership qualities you see, and ask if they are willing to take on a leadership position. Have the new job description ready to clearly communicate expectations. You might be surprised to see how enthusiastic your new team leaders are!

Follow Up
Give your new leaders plenty of time to become accustomed to their advanced duties. Don’t pile on too much at once. And follow up often to see how they’re doing, what questions they have, and what assistance they need. If it’s not going as well as expected, cut back on their responsibilities and see how they handle a reduced workload.

When it comes to advancing volunteers to leadership positions, easy does it. You don’t want to scare anyone away, but rather bring them closer to help achieve your organizational goals.

Last week’s Volunteering in America report showed an increase of 1.6 million in volunteers serving in 2009 versus 2008. Managing all these volunteers—new and old—is the job of a volunteer manager or volunteer coordinator.

During the economic downturn, non profit organizations (NPOs) all over the U.S. have had no choice other than cutting staff to stay viable; many volunteer managers and volunteer coordinators have seen their positions eliminated.

Since volunteering is increasing, it makes sense that a position to recruit, train, and retain the right volunteers would be a high-priority position at most NPOs.

What does it take to be a successful volunteer manager?
Planning: Assessing the needs of the organization and the numbers and types of volunteer positions needed to meet those needs is key.

Goal Setting: Often, state and federal mandates must be met to receive funding. Setting goals for volunteers and comparing to actual outcomes is often the only way to keep funds coming in.

Defining Roles: Volunteers need to know why they are there, what is expected from them, and how they’ll know when they’ve been successful. Volunteer coordinators determine what work needs to be done, and ensure a safe, qualified volunteer is in each position.

Acting as liaison between staff and volunteers: This is a tricky and important task. Volunteer managers work with paid staff to encourage their support of volunteers, make sure communication is clear, and that toes aren’t stepped on.

Recruiting: Finding volunteers can be an endless job, depending on the size of the organization. Good volunteer coordinators always have their eyes and ears open for “new blood” to replace volunteers who quit, move, or want short-term commitments. Creative thinking is a big part of successful recruiting.

Volunteer Screening: It’s vital to have one knowledgeable person in place who can ensure the safety of clients, staff and other volunteers by screening volunteers’ backgrounds.

Placing: Matching the right volunteer to each position is vital to keeping him or her happy, productive, and retained.

Following Up: Constant check-in with individuals who’ve shown interest in volunteering but haven’t signed up, current volunteers, and former volunteers is a big part of successful volunteer management—and it takes time.

All of these factors point to the need in most NPOs for a dedicated volunteer manager or volunteer coordinator. Especially when times are tough, a volunteer manager saves an organization time and money by helping things run more smoothly with fewer paid staff.