Volunteers

Volunteers

What Good Will You Do Today?
Helpful Materials on Recruiting and Nurturing Your Volunteers

 

Rethinking Retention: Understanding Strategic Volunteer Relationships
     from VolunteerMatch

7 Ways to Re-engage Volunteers
     from The Lewis Center for Church Leadership

4 Reasons People Are Not Volunteering and What To Do
     from Ministry Architects

 Recruiting and Nurturing Your Volunteers
     A blogpost focusing on 5 effective tasks for recruiting, supporting, nurturing, and appreciating your volunteers.

Blogposts on Volunteers and Volunteering in Children's Ministry
     from Group Publishing


Highly Recommended:
Sustainable Children's Ministry by Mark DeVries and Annette Safstrom, Chapter 9


10 Seismic Shifts
 from The New Breed: Understanding and Equipping the 21st Century Volunteer 

  1. Family Dynamics: From Father Knows Best to Two and a Half Men
  1. Isolation: From community to individualism
  1. Flexibility: From rigid scheduling to volunteer availability
  1. Generations: From experienced veterans to novice Gen Y
  1. Technology: From face-to-face to cyberspace
  1. Professionalism: From skilled workers to knowledge workers
  1. Episodic Volunteering: From long-term commitments to short-term projects
  1. Slacktivism: From hard work to easy, “feel-good” tasks
  1. Micro-Volunteering: From bit-time commitments to bite-sized projects
  1. Speed: From slow movements to fast responses to change

The new breed of volunteer:

  • is very busy, has many obligations, and often volunteers for multiple organizations.
  • wants flexibility.
  • expects to be empowered.
  • won’t tolerate working alongside incompetent volunteers.
  • is tech-savvy.
  • doesn’t want to simply make a contribution; the new breed of volunteer wants to make a difference.
  • doesn’t want to be micromanaged.

Volunteer programs need to expand to include the new breed of volunteer or else they’ll face extinction. How will YOU manage these kinds of volunteers?

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