What's a Serendipitous Volunteer?

Volunteer management is no cookie-cutter task.

Different volunteers respond to different management styles.  But how do you know what management style will allow each volunteer to thrive at your organization?

Good thing there is a volunteer manager professionals who constantly study exactly this issue.  This aritcle by Nancy MacDuff explains a Multi-Paradigm Model of volunteers: who Social-Change, Traditional, Serendipitous, and Entrepreneurial volunteers are, how those different types of volunteers like to serve, and what management styles they prefer.

Do you work with volunteers who fit into MacDuff's categories?  Have you discovered any best practices in managing these different  types of volunteers?  Let us know in the comments!

Groupon... for Nonprofits

Are you one of the hundreds of thousands out there who subscribe to one of the many different "daily deal" websites?  Well, this new website is an interesting spin on daily deal sites - with a philanthropic focus.

While deal sites like Groupon, Living Social, and Google Deals feature a new sale product from a new company every day, Philanthroper.com features a new nonprofit every day.  Instead of purchasing a product, subscribers to their website can choose to donate $1 if the featured nonprofit of the day moves them to do so.

It's great to see the nonprofit world staying on top of trends like this.  Wouldn't it be interesting to do the same for volunteering, rather than just donations?  What if every day there was a new volunteer opportunity in the area on a subscription website, and members could sign up to volunteer their time when a position that interested them popped up?

Perhaps that's just where volunteerism is heading.

Want to check out a little more about sites like Philanthroper?  Check out the Idealist Blog about it.

VIP Impact: Gleaning Hope

VIP Fellow Ronald Ortizo has spent this year serving at Inland Valley Hope Partners.  He has played an instrumental role in developing Gleaning Hope, a project that utilizes volunteers to harvest produce donated by community members to supply Inland Valley Hope Partners food banks.

Check out pictures and stories from some of Gleaning Hope's big volunteer projects from the year on the Gleaning Hope blog.

Congrats on a successful year, Ronald!

How to Write a Great Recommendation for a Volunteer

Have you been asked to write a letter of recommendation for a volunteer?  Service is a great résumé builder, and most volunteers know it.  It is common for VIP AmeriCorps members or staff at our nonprofit partner sites to be asked to write recommendations for volunteers as they seek out jobs or spots in schools.

Here are some tips for writing great recommendation letters:

• Make it professional.  Address it as a business letter and write in complete sentences and paragraphs (unless you’d like to include a few bullet points among your paragraphs).  Check here for some advice on writing a business letter. 

• Explain who you are, confirm the volunteer's position, and state the amount of time they’ve been volunteering with your organization within the first paragraph of your letter.

• Include the volunteer’s strengths, skills, and talents.

•  Be truthful.  Lying won’t help you, won’t help the organization you’re writing to, and it won’t ultimately help your volunteer if you’ve made them seem to be a different individual then they actually are.  Lying will reflect poorly on you and your organization.  Boast of facts and traits you know the person to possess, just don’t over-embellish.

• Be concise.  Try for no longer than one printed page.  Interviewers are often short on time and will not take the time to read through a lengthy letter.

• Be specific.  Use specific examples of the individual's successes or how they live out the character traits that you list.  If you want an even better idea of what the volunteer's achievements have been outside of your organization that back up the character traits you address in the letter, ask them for a copy of their résumé to look over.

• If the letter is for a specific position, make it reflect that position.   Ask for the position description from the volunteer.  In your letter, explain how the characteristics you know the volunteer possesses will fit well into that specific position.  

• If the volunteer is asking for a general letter, include many of their skills.   This will help the volunteer as they may use the letter for a wide array of positions.

• If you don’t know the person or their work well, it’s okay to politely decline.  Recommend instead that they ask someone who they work more closely with – someone who could give them a reference that is more special.