The Volunteer Management Handbook

Despite the challenges and pressures of the U.S. economy, Americans are still volunteering in record numbers. With nonprofits struggling to provide services that directly affect our quality of life, volunteers have become even more vital to nonprofit organizations. Now more than ever, effective management of our splendid volunteer resources is imperative if we are to evoke, focus, and sustain their motivation, resources, and skills into providing the growing array of human services offered by our people-helping agencies and organizations.

Covering all aspects of the management of volunteer programs, the Second Edition of The Volunteer Management Handbook has been completely updated to reflect the latest in volunteer resource management (VRM): best practices; effective policies and policy making; demographics and social evolution; planning and analysis (program and participant) in volunteer programs; recruiting, orienting, and training volunteers; volunteer evaluation (program and volunteer); ethics and professionalism; and state, national, and international programs.

Edited by nonprofit expert Tracy Connors, this practical volume provides useful perspectives and guidance for volunteer resource management issues, as well as highlighting and explaining the trends, issues, and developments that lie ahead. Contributions are featured from visionary nonprofit professionals, outlining the present and future of more successful volunteer resource management, to explain how to:

• Manage more effectively within dynamic, fluid organizational and program environments, including managing performance in both a strategic and tactical context to achieve impressive results.
• Use advanced information management technology and networking to change "technology walls" to "program bridges" at every stage of the VRM process--from recruiting, marketing, and orientation, to coordination, scheduling, evaluation, and recognition.
• Understand--and change--organizational culture to establish a growth-filled environment for volunteers and staff.
• Reassess your organization's volunteer resource management model and planning to develop VRM policies that help protect your organization from risk, yet promote involvement, quality programming, increased productivity, and greater volunteer satisfaction.
• Use creatively and effectively the growing number of potential volunteer options offered by social media, economic conditions, cultural and technological advances to expand and enrich your VRM program offerings.

Now available as both an online and print publication, this invaluable guide offers seventeen additional online chapters, exclusively through the new edition's companion website. Learn to get, develop, and keep the right volunteers for your nonprofit with the proven guidance found in The Volunteer Management Handbook, Second Edition, the must-read every nonprofit needs to create a volunteer-happy organization.