When Was the Last Time You Reviewed Your Volunteer Program?

Are you putting your volunteer’s talents to their best use? If you do not see the value you expect from your volunteer program, it’s probably time for a complete assessment. Once you know what parts of your program are working well, and which aren’t, you can act to improve the program for both your participants as well as your nonprofit! The following steps will help you dig deep into your processes so that you can identify areas for improvement and increase your results!

Build a Process to Review Your Program

If this is the first time that you’ve put serious effort and energy into reviewing your program, you will need to create a process for review. Break the program down into vital areas. What are your basic expectations for all volunteers? Are there positions that require specific skills and abilities? How does this impact your expectations?

Divide your expectations into categories, typically along the lines of exceeds expectations, meets requirements, and needs additional improvement. Once you have outlined your expectations, and benchmarks, create a template that you will use to review the work of your volunteers.

Create a Review Template

In this template, you will want to designate areas where you will measure items important to your nonprofit such as basic skills, punctuality and individual goals. When evaluating an individual volunteer with the template, you will then measure their performance for each category.

In addition to deciding whether they meet or exceed requirements, demonstrate their success with specific examples of how well they are doing. Another area that you may want to include in your template is one where you can gather feedback from individual volunteers about what they like about the program, and their suggestions for improvement. Use these suggestions to help you uncover ways that you can improve the program to make it better for your volunteers and the people they assist.

Increase the Frequency that You Offer Feedback

Once you have a process to evaluate the performance of your individual volunteers, decide how frequently you will offer feedback. Usually, it’s a good idea to decide on a probationary period for your newest volunteers as they are just beginning to become acquainted with your organisation and their role within it.

Once they are past this hurdle, quarterly or even monthly reviews aren’t a bad idea, although some nonprofits only conduct an annual review. The more frequently that you survey your volunteers, the sooner that you can help them take corrective action to improve their performance, as well as gain insight on how they feel about their work, and ways that you could improve your program.

Don’t Forget to Survey Your Stakeholders

Speaking with your volunteers about their work for your organisation is just part of the process. Review your program with your NFP’s stakeholders, including your donors, members and other service recipients, and any third-party partners you may have. What have they experienced in their encounters with your organisation’s volunteers? Are their needs being met? What are their suggestions to improve its benefits?

Analyse Feedback from Volunteers and Stakeholders and Act

Once you’ve evaluated the performance of your volunteers, received their suggestions for improvement and surveyed your stakeholders about your work, look at the information that you’ve received and translate it into data that can assist you in locating areas that need improvement. For example, you might be receiving a lot of feedback from volunteers that have a hard time using your existing software to capture member information. This could mean that your volunteers need more training on how to use your programs, or, it could also mean that your existing software needs an upgrade to something that’s faster and easier to use.

Your first action would be to investigate further to pinpoint the source of the problem, and once found, your goal would be to take the next action that best remedies the problem. You could decide to retrain your staff on the use of the software and then set a goal of reducing complaints by 50%. If after re-training the goal was met, you would know that your solution is on the right track. If, however, retraining did little to reduce the problem, then you would know that you would need to attempt another solution, such as upgrading.

Benefits of Reviewing Your Volunteer Program

Talking with your volunteers and stakeholders is the best way to gain valuable insight into which of your policies, practices and procedures are working well. It’s also the best way to give your volunteers the coaching and guidance that they need to learn more about your organisation’s work, how to fit in with the culture and how to stay focused and in alignment with your mission as they complete their daily tasks and fulfil their duties. Creating a formal review process for both individual volunteers and the program overall helps you to ensure that you are using the same standards during evaluations which increases fairness and transparency and decreases bias, improving the quality of the information that you receive so that you can set more realistic goals and better action plans to increase your results.