Volunteers
Volunteers

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