Entries Tagged 'volunteers' ↓

In You Don’t Have to Do It Alone, the authors share the following story:

Julie [one of the co-authors] once received an invitation to a garden party at Buckingham Palace hosted by the Queen of England. Yes, that Queen of England. Julie had to sign a receipt when the invitation was delivered. The envelope was stamped front and back with “Lord Chamberlain Buckingham Palace.” It was addressed in beautifully handwritten calligraphic script. The message on the card itself was embossed in gold. It began with the words, “The Lord Chamberlain is commanded to invite . . . ”

Talk about a special invitation. Julie still has it. The Queen, and the Lord Chamberlain, could be sure she would attend.

How different is that from the mass email “could anybody help with . . .”

This over-the-top invitation makes a point that you and I can learn from, even if we don’t have a Lord Chamberlain to command.

Your best chance of getting somebody to say “yes” is to make sure that the ask feels special to them.

There are many ways to do that: a personal phone call, a specially-printed invitation, a phone call from a big-wig. Even just personalizing your email so they know you wrote to them and not to fifty people at once.

You may not have gold-embossed stationary, but you can still make someone feel special.

And when you make someone feel special, they are more likely to say “yes.”

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bonus observation: Did you notice the specific, compelling details in the description of the invitation? Wasn’t that more impressive than a bland “Julie received an invitation from the Queen of England”? When writing, these kinds of concrete details help paint a vivid picture in your reader’s mind. It’s worth recording them.

Just a quick follow up to my post on who to invite: it’s downright dangerous to have decisions made by people who all think the same.

First, their decisions won’t have the strength of multiple viewpoints.

Second, the decisions will face more opposition when they come to the larger group.

I saw this recently when the City of Ann Arbor was considering creating a greenway through the city. In good municipal fashion, they convened a greenway committee.

Who signed up to be on the greenway committee? The people who are passionate about a greenway!

Now I’m not a greenway advocate, so when I look at their decision, it doesn’t have legitimacy to me, because I don’t think it really looked at the issue in a comprehensive way.

Another example: a local Catholic parish used to have a Life Committee (or some such group). In Catholic social teaching, the sanctity of life leads the Catholic Church to oppose many things, not just abortion and euthanasia but also war, poverty, and the death penalty.

But the Life Committee just cared about abortion.

They were a faction.

And they lost legitimacy for it.

So, if you want to create a faction that will promote a narrow perspective (and there is value in this, to be sure), by all means, only seek out the hard-core fringe of people who would volunteer themselves to be on that committee.

But if you want sound and balanced decisions that will have more legitimacy in the wider community, then you have a harder task ahead. Then you need to recruit not just people who already agree with you and think like you, you have to recruit people with different perspecitves.

And then the hard work begins…

you have to respect those different perspectives.

One of the things that I like about You Don’t Have to Do it Alone is that it invites us to be thoughtful about the things we often decide on auto-pilot.

For example, who we invite to participate in a project?

Often the answer is “whoever we can get.”

You don’t have to however challenges us to:

• include more people
• consider what types of people you need to include
• consider when in the project you need what types of collaboration.

In terms of the considering the types of people to involve, the authors identify six categories of people to include:

• people who care;
• people with authority and responsibility;
• people with information and expertise;
• people who will be personally affected;
• people with diverse points of view;
• people who are considered troublemakers

I have a board member who is an expert at this. She has an excellent grasp on the fact that difficult decisions need to include a variety of people: people with different perspectives, people who know the topic, people who can get it done.

She also knows that you can sometimes prevent a lot of opposition from troublemakes by getting their involvement as the start. That way they aren’t opposing you at the finish.

And as a bonus, you often get a better, more informed decision by including them.

Last month I took a personal mini-retreat and learned came to an important realization.

I don’t know how to ask for help. I tend to insist on doing everything myself.

So, true to form, I’ve started to read about how I can do better on this. Yes, that’s right. I’m not asking for help to learn to ask for help. I’m doing it myself when it comes to getting over my obsession with doing it myself.

And I’ve found the perfect book for me, or at least the perfect book title: You don’t have to do it alone.

The authors talk about how to create effective involvement in projects, and the first step the identify is to ask, “What kind of involvement do you need?”

They identify 4 types:

1. Know-how involvement: Somebody knows how to do something you don’t know how to do, or they know how to do it better, and you need their know-how.
2. Arms and legs involvement: Think of a barn-raising, or a park cleanup. You need help to carry out a task that is just too big for you. Or maybe it’s not the best use of your time to do it all yourself.
3. Care and commitment involvement: The other common phrase here is “buy-in.” This kind of involvement is to ensure that people are on-board and committed to a chosen decision, project, or endeavor.
4. Teaching and learning involvement: this is the king of involvement where people learn and grow and develop in their ability to complete a task or shoulder a responsibility. This kind of involvement is a big reason why I think it’s important for ICPJ to have interns.

Those are the 4 involvement types listed in the book. To them I would add a fifth: Leadership involvement. Sometimes there’s a project that just won’t happen unless someone else takes the reigns and says, “I’ll make sure this moves forward.”

At ICPJ, as a volunteer-based organization, many of our projects depend on volunteer leadership involvement.

I find this taxonomy useful because it helps me thinks more clearly about what kind of involvement do I need in various projects. In fundraising, it’s a bit of all of them. With structure changes and strategic planning, it’s less about arms and legs and more about care and commitment. Knowing that helps me fine-tune how I approach getting involvement in each of my projects.

And yes, so far I still figure that out on my own.

“Overall we’re very satisfied with your work…”

Even when this statement is true, it sounds hollow and vague.

But the critiques that follow it are always specific, and often painful to hear.

I know, I often use variations of this line myself.

But when it’s used on me, I realize how it comes off as an empty platitude.

How should you respond?

One way is to avoid giving criticism or corrective feedback. There are some who advocate this path. They say you’ll get farther with only praise than you ever would with only criticism.

If you look through my blog posts, you’ll see I’m far too opinionated for that approach to work for me.

There is another alternative, though. You can make your praise just as specific as your criticism.

Instead of saying “you did a good job chairing that meeting (followed by the inevitable “but…”),” you can say, “I thought you did an excellent job giving the group time for informal discussion and then gently bringing us back on topic.”

Yes, it takes more thought to pick out specific examples of what to praise, but it’s much more meaningful for the person who hears it.

And if we want their continued support, we owe them this extra work.

And we especially owe it to them if we’re going to offer corrective feedback.

Last post (I think) on Allison Fine’s book Momentum: Ignititing Social Change in the Connected Age. She writes:

To reach the broadest possible audience, organizations should present a continuum of opportunities and ways for people to participate from lot to high intensity.

True.

Except when it isn’t.

Too many opportunities can overwhelm rather than empower.

Consider the Paradox of Choice.

Consider the Big Red Fez.

Consider Discovering the Activation Point.

Consider Don’t Make Me Think.

In a world where people are overwhelmed by choices, sometimes the best way to help a potential supporter take action is to give them a single simple path to action.

Sign this petition.

Donate $25 dollars.

Click to send a letter.

When I volunteer at a food bank, I don’t want to be asked to plan nutrition plans or to analyze the opportunities and dangers of the corporate food system to both cause and alleviate hunger. I want to be told, “put those cans from that pallet onto this shelf.”

Allison Fine is right, you need to have the door open to higher levels of involvement. It also helps to spell out what these higher levels could be.

But it’s also important to save your supporters from the load of always playing “choose your own adventure” when it comes to getting involved.

——————–

Since this is my last post on Momentum, let me also share a few final words of overview. It’s an excellent book that will make you think about how the hyper-connectivity of today’s world affects the social sector.

Allison Fine is a true believer here, and as such she sometimes goes overboard. In particular, she tends to overplay the power of connection technology and underplay the continued relevance of existing tools. For example, when she says “throw out your direct mail handbook,” well, that’s just plain foolishness. For most organizations online giving is a small fraction of direct mail giving, and that will be the case for some time to come.

This over-zealousness may be vital for her to make her point. A less enthusiastic book would be less thought-provoking, not to mention less interesting.

Often we plan program and events thinking start to finish. But the real work takes place after the finish, with the follow-up.

For example, our Disarmament Working Group recently had a movie showing. Did the event end when the last guest had left and the last dish was washed?

NO.

(Okay, you saw that one coming.)

After the event, we had thirty people who expressed an interest in nuclear disarmament. Now the real work begins. How will we follow up with them so that they stay involved in the organization and in the issue?

For us, the first step means getting a follow-up email to them  within 24 hours to remind them about the issue, reinforce the message, and reiterate what actions they can take.

Getting this follow-up email out is an important development here at ICPJ. Now, just like a chess aficionado, we need to plan three steps ahead.

Take home message: Plan your follow-up just as much as you plan your publicity and your logistics. It’s in the follow-up that you win or lose new members, new donors, and new activists.

“I start with the premise that the function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers.“ Ralph Nader

When we talk about building a movement for peace and justice, a large part of what we need to be talking about is building up the people who will lead the movement.

This is an area where I have a lot of growth to do.

So, I’m working to recruit more chairs and leaders in the committees I’m working on. A chair doesn’t have to do all the work, nor does the chair need to set all the plans. But the chair does need to ensure that all the work gets done and all the plans are made.

In the ICPJ Wiki  I’ve posted some information about what it takes to be a good committee chair.

Of course, it’s easy to write about it–the work ahead is to

• Recruit people to be chairs
• Train them so they rock as chairs
• Support them in their work.

It’s never as easy as writing a wiki entry or a blog post.