Lineup’s Go-To, Best Practices for Effective Volunteer Management in Your Association
As many as 30% of association members have either volunteered in the past or are currently volunteering at their association, according to new research from the American Society of Association Executives (ASAE). The takeaway? Volunteers make up a significant — and valued — portion of an association's workforce at any given time.
When you rely on volunteers to advance your association's mission, effective volunteer management is critical. But there are also barriers to it, including finding the right people to contribute, fully utilizing their skills, interests, and availability, and measuring outcomes when committee assignments are complete. These challenges are further compounded by some of the broader trends impacting associations today, especially the need for greater representation and diversity.
As you think about how to increase the effectiveness of your volunteer management program, while also better representing the depth and breadth of backgrounds and perspectives in your industry or profession, here are three best practices drawn from ASAE's research and how Lineup can help you follow them.
Best practice #1: Emphasize competence
Of those members who have expressed an interest in volunteering, who should be invited to serve on a committee or task force? The answer will vary by association. But what's true for many associations is that the old ways of selecting and including volunteers based on who is familiar or someone's personal connections are falling by the wayside.
Instead, competence is a much better standard for volunteer selection since the emphasis is on the desired knowledge, skills, and experience that can drive positive committee results.
These are just some of the ways to emphasize competence in your volunteer management program:
Clarify the role of volunteers in your organization and define what it means to be "effective" or "high performing"
Create a transparent process of selecting volunteers and building committees
Strive to continuously improve volunteer performance, both at the individual and committee level
Offer ongoing development, training, and coaching that brings volunteers up to speed on new trends in the industry or profession and relevant social issues like diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)
Appropriately utilize volunteers' knowledge, skills, and experience, along with their time and availability
How Lineup can help
Lineup's volunteer management platform helps you track the skills, qualifications, and expertise of interested volunteers so you can see at a glance who is a great fit for a particular role or committee. Whether you're looking for deep industry knowledge, niche perspectives, emerging areas of expertise, or some other criteria, you can access a dynamically updated database of individual profiles where you can tag, search for, and filter the talent and experience you're looking for.
After a role or committee assignment is complete, you can evaluate the performance of each volunteer, with results that show up directly in their profile so you can see who may need coaching or training to more closely align with your association's mission and needs. You end up with a deep pool of competent volunteers who can contribute to your association in a variety of ways, and move away from less transparent, socially based methods of volunteer selection.
Best practice #2: Identify areas of improvement
You may want to change or adapt your volunteer strategy, but restrictive technologies, inefficient workflows, and built-in organizational biases in your current volunteer management program could hinder your efforts.
For example, you may need to revamp your committee selection process to ensure you're including a more diverse range of members, but your current tools don't give you a breakdown and visualizations of the data you need to understand the distribution of your pool or committees. Or you may need to build up your volunteer capacity to meet new association goals — but you don't have the visibility or insight into your current pool to know whether it's a matter of more training, creating more roles, or engaging the right volunteers for those roles.
To help identify potential improvements in your volunteer management program, consider the following:
Do you currently offer and provide access to a variety of volunteer opportunities that suit different areas of expertise, skill sets, and time commitments?
Are you currently making the best use of your volunteers' time and availability?
Are there outdated concepts or unconscious biases in how you design volunteer roles, or in your process for soliciting interest from and engaging volunteers?
Do you currently have an assessment process that allows for feedback and performance evaluation?
How Lineup can help
Lineup's software provides the relevant tools and automated, easy-to-use functionality you need to improve all aspects of volunteer management. You can create, customize, and update volunteer profiles in the database, manage information and communications, evaluate performance, and get comprehensive analytics and reporting to make informed decisions that help you build and strengthen relationships with your volunteers.
With broad visibility into your volunteer pool, you can see if, where, and how members are already contributing within the association and what their availability might be, utilizing them for certain assignments when needed or holding off if they're already assigned elsewhere. You also gain a deeper understanding of the wide variety of backgrounds and perspectives of your members so you can ensure you're nurturing diversity — or determine exactly where to take action if you're not quite meeting your DEI commitments.
Best practice #3: Evaluate performance and effectiveness
How well your volunteers perform impacts the volunteers themselves, association staff, membership, and the organization as a whole. But it's often difficult to objectively evaluate performance. And sometimes there's a stigma attached to volunteer assessment, with some feeling that the gift of their time is what should matter most.
It's undeniable, though, that when you understand what makes an effective volunteer or committee and can measure against it, you can then replicate positive results going forward. You're able to engage, include, develop, and retain enthusiastic, capable volunteers who benefit your association and feel rewarded in doing so.
Here are some ways to start determining how to evaluate performance:
Refer back to the shared definition of "effective" you came up with earlier
Determine what you'd like the outcomes of your volunteer strategy to be — for volunteers, staff, members, and the association
Define the relevant metrics to use to assess your volunteers
Identify how you can better support your staff in working with volunteers
Open up a feedback loop with your volunteers so they can share ideas, potential problems, and other helpful information from their perspective
How Lineup can help
Lineup's survey and evaluation capabilities allow you to collect feedback anonymously about each volunteer's performance — within the context of the particular role or committee. Whether there's a single staff person or leader conducting the evaluations, or every volunteer evaluates every other volunteer, you can customize how you want to collect data and measure performance that best suits your needs.
You're also able to send surveys to members when their volunteer role or assignment is complete so they can share valuable feedback about their experience. This helps you surface areas where they may be struggling and level up volunteer training or mentorship so you can help every contributor fully grow into their potential. With insight into volunteer performance and experience, you can create high-performing committees that advance your association's mission while engaging volunteers in positive ways that inspire them to stay active.
Ready to learn more?
Contact us to find out how Lineup can help your association create an effective volunteer management program.
