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Staying Power – summary of the voluntary matters
3 TV programme
Once you've got good volunteers, how can you make sure
that they stay? To get the best from volunteers and
make sure that they're getting what they want, it's
important to understand that each individual volunteer
has different motivations and these will change over
time.
Staying Power features three organisations
that address the issue of motivation very differently.
Home Link, a befriending service for families with young
children, describes their volunteering roles as heavy
duty. Volunteers work independently and don't
have the motivation of teamwork. Home Link recognises
there are danger points in the life-cycle
of a volunteer, when they are more likely to get disillusioned.
Staff work particularly hard to keep volunteers involved
and feel valued at these times. It's also important
to encourage volunteers to focus on the process
of befriending rather than the results,
so they don't get disheartened if there's little change
in the clients' circumstances.
Taking part in an event can be really
motivating, because it makes people feel part of the
bigger picture. Friends of the Earth
(FoE) organised a big demonstration at the International
Climate Conference in Bonn (Germany) and FoE devised
a way of allowing lots of people to contribute. Volunteers
built a wooden 'boat', made of planks, on which they'd
written messages about the environment. This very visible
activity helped to enthuse the volunteers, and other
volunteers who couldn't attend also participated by
sending in pictures and postcards that were added to
the boat sculpture.
People have to fit volunteering into busy lives, and
new flexible ways of volunteering are
being developed. Fairshares Gloucestershire is a timebank
scheme. People spend an hour volunteering their
services, and then they can bank that hour and spend
it on an hour of another volunteer's skills. That could
mean an hour of tai chi, a guitar lesson, gardening
or a lift to the hospital. In the scheme everyone's
skills are equal, and, unlike some
traditional forms of volunteering, the rewards to the
volunteer are very clear since every volunteer gets
something back.
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Where to now?
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- Read the case
studies to see how other organisations motivate
volunteers
- Do the scenario
to explore how you would deal with a group of
unmotivated volunteers
- Check transmission details of the voluntary
matters 3 Staying Power TV
programme or order
the video
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