12 Best Practices for Engaging Boomers and New Generations of Volunteers

1. Understand volunteers’ deep-seated need to have impact and use that understanding in all facets of how you involve them as volunteers.
2. Focus the volunteer interview on learning the prospective volunteer’s passions, mutually designing his/her volunteer role and helping the volunteer determine if your organization is the right place to realize the impact he/she wants to have.
3. Offer a wide choice of volunteer opportunities in all aspects of the organization’s operations.
4. Include some short term and seasonal volunteer positions to align with current volunteer availability.
5. Offer skills-based volunteer opportunities to maximize what volunteers can bring to the organization.
6. Develop volunteer position descriptions that are engaging and show impact.
7. Move volunteers into project leadership roles. Be open to project ideas that volunteers propose.
8. Develop appealing volunteer recruitment messages, working through your organization’s networks.   Cultivate prospects and be highly visible on the web.
9. Re-frame traditional volunteer supervision to leading volunteers and offering collegial support. Identify high potential volunteers and cultivate them to take on additional responsibility.
10. Also re-frame volunteer recognition to respond to the value current volunteers place on having impact and on being life-long learners.
11. Be an instigator for these organizational changes. Identify your champions for change. Start small in a part of the organization open to innovation and then market the success with colleagues in other parts of the organization.
12. Create systems to monitor changes in volunteer expectations and become a learning organization that adapts to changing needs of volunteers.

Why Change is Needed

Best Practices Just for Boomers or for All of Today's Volunteers?