Recruit | Nonprofit Training and Consulting | Wendy Biro-Pollard

Volunteer Management Workshop for Stewardship

March 16, 2018 by Wendy Biro-Pollard

Want to recruit your neighbors and friends to work on a Stewardship Project? Want to learn more about how to recruit and sustain volunteer interest in your Stewardship Project? This upcoming workshop will do just that!

This workshop is organized into two sessions to help you learn best practices for volunteer managment and then apply those skills to your own project in a hands-on workshop. In the first session, we’ll learn from Wendy Biro-Pollard, a nationally known expert on volunteers and trends in volunteerism. Wendy will present the historical changes in volunteerism, and discuss how recent trends in volunteer engagement are relevant for planning your projects. She will offer strategies for volunteer retention and minimizing attrition.

The second session will be a workshop facilitated by Jo Gammans, TreeFolks Volunteer & Communications Coordinator. Concepts and strategies presented earlier will be applied to your individual projects in a supportive and constructive environment, and Jo will help you figure out the nuts and bolts of integrating volunteers into your project.

See more of Wendy’s expertise here: https://wendybiro-pollard.com/

Learn more about Urban Forest Stewards at https://www.treefolks.org/ufs/

Tagged With: Recruit, Volunteer, Volunteer Engagement

Southeastern Healthcare Volunteer Leaders Conference

January 30, 2017 by Wendy Biro-Pollard

Board Building Strategies: Finding and Keeping Strong Leaders

One of the most important responsibilities of a board is to ensure that it continuously adds qualified new members and keeps them engaged. Board building should not just happen when it is time to fill a vacancy–it should be an ongoing process with year-round activities.

This workshop will provide participants with tips and tools on how to identify, cultivate, recruit and orient new members; encourage active participation and commitment; educate the board; rotate board members; and engage in self-assessment.

This interactive session focuses on the key steps required to build an effective board.

Strategically Engaging Skills-Based & Pro Bono Volunteers

Success is more than being good at what you do. It requires that you embrace change, step out of your comfort zone and creatively meet your organization’s mission and strategic goals.

As the need for client services increase and financial resources remain tight, US nonprofits are increasingly engaging highly skilled volunteers.

Professional speaker and volunteer management expert, Wendy Biro-Pollard, CVA, will show you how to build an integrated approach to citizen engagement that will help you increase your Volunteer Department’s capacity and resources while attracting more volunteers.

Participants will
• Learn about volunteer management trends and how they impact recruitment and placement
• Discover techniques and resources for utilizing skills-based and pro bono volunteers
• Use a simple needs assessment to identify how you can grow you volunteer program infrastructure
• Create an action plan.

Tagged With: Board, Leaders, pro bono volunteers, Recruit, Skills-based Volunteers, Volunteer Management

Establishing Outcome Measures for Volunteer Involvement

April 25, 2010 by Wendy Biro-Pollard 3 Comments

Executives develop strategic plans with goals and objectives for all organizational programs, projects, and services and should expect volunteers to work toward those just as employees do. But it is helpful to consider exactly what you expect volunteer involvement to accomplish in any period. There is no reason to let abounding gratitude for donated volunteer time restrain an organization from setting standards of achievement. In fact, volunteers usually prefer to have some way to assess their service contribution.

In developing initial and then ongoing goals and objectives, bigger is not always better. Having “more” volunteers this year than last year does not self-evidently mean better service delivery or greater impact. Some organizations would actually be better off cutting their volunteer corps in half and holding those remaining to higher standards! The number of volunteers needed is a strategy determined by expectations of productivity….

Recognize, too, that the body count of how many people are in your volunteer corps does not translate into a standard number of hours contributed. Fifty volunteers each giving two hours a month provide the same output as five volunteers who can give twenty hours. The amount of effort necessary to recruit and support the larger number of volunteers is clearly much more intense, without the payback of more service. On the other hand, if your programmatic goal is community education, you may feel that getting fifty people to participate is more beneficial than just five. See? It depends.

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Filed Under: Blog, Volunteer Management Tagged With: Outcome measures, Recruit, Strategic Plan, Volunteer