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 

1. Family Dynamics: From Father Knows Best to Two and a Half Men

2. Isolation: From community to individualism

3. Flexibility: From rigid scheduling to volunteer availability

4. Generations: From experienced veterans to novice Gen Y

5. Technology: From face-to-face to cyberspace

6. Professionalism: From skilled workers to knowledge workers

7. Episodic Volunteering: From long-term commitments to short-term projects

8. Slacktivism: From hard work to easy, “feel-good” tasks

9. Micro-Volunteering: From bit-time commitments to bite-sized projects

10. 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?