Think Beyond Staff, Part 1: Empower Volunteers
How can volunteers be used as a critical partner in scale in ways that are mission aligned, high quality, and sustainable?
Many of the organizations we interviewed spoke of the essential role that community stakeholders acting in a voluntary capacity have in the success of their initiatives. Volunteers are often a force-multiplier for social enterprises, helping them reach deep into communities, create cost-efficiencies, and ultimately embed solutions locally. Yet many volunteer efforts fade in effectiveness over time, and some social enterprises are wary of using volunteers for activities that are critical to mission success. Our interviewees shared some of the ways in which they shape their engagement of volunteers to contribute to mission in important ways and help drive scale.
Advice from the field includes:
1. Ensure commitment by aligning interests and creating onboarding friction.
Ensuring commitment from volunteers is a commonly voiced concern for social enterprises considering if and how to leverage this workforce. To address the issue of commitment, our interviewees stressed the importance of finding alignment between the role a volunteer is given and his/her interests. Water and Sanitation for the Urban Poor (WSUP) kept this in mind as it embarked on an ambitious initiative to improve sanitation across Visakhapatnam, the largest city in Andhra Pradesh, India. It identified a large network of women engaged in the city’s Self-Help Groups, and mobilized them to take on activities fully aligned with their mandate and geographic proximity, such as informing households about subsidies and visiting open defecation hot spots to interact with community members. Similarly, CAMFED leveraged volunteers whose interests were aligned with the organization’s mission (and success) in tackling poverty and inequality by supporting girls’ education and empowerment: the women and girl alumni of CAMFED’s programs. This growing alumni network (called CAMA), which includes more than 138,000 members, is critical to CAMFED’s ability to achieve its goal of supporting one million girls through secondary school. As women who have experienced the power of the CAMFED model, these volunteers have a vested interest in supporting other young women who are lost within or outside of the school system. These alumni volunteers provide mentorship in local schools and provide follow-up to ensure girls are staying in school. For Crisis Text Line (CTL), the work of its volunteers (called Crisis Counselors) is mission critical, but there is not an obviously aligned group from which to draw. So, CTL has introduced processes to create friction in the volunteer sign-on process to ensure only the most committed engage:
- Volunteer Application: CTL’s volunteer application is approximately seven pages and includes clear expectations on the volunteer commitment (200 hours over a year, with some night shifts), a request for two reference letters, sample scenarios to measure instincts, and a background check.
- Volunteer Training: CTL requires future volunteers to participate in a 30-hour online training, which includes regular assessments and is completed either over a six-week period or an accelerated 15-day period.
Since its founding, Crisis Text Line has trained over 20,000 volunteers; as of the beginning of 2019, the organization had approximately 4,500 active volunteers (i.e., those who have been active within the past month).
2. Identify common points of volunteer drop-off and create interventions to address them.
Given the lengthy (and expensive) process to onboard volunteers and the significant length of the expected commitment, CTL uses data to home in on the points at which volunteers are likely to drop-out and designs interventions to address those points. Noting the drop-off between the end of training and actual start of the work (called “crisis conversations”), CTL decided to defer awarding the training certificate (deeming the individual a “Crisis Counselor”) until after the individual has his/her first crisis conversation. This shift provides incentive for the volunteer to move into the next phase of the work and to see the initial rewards of a crisis conversation as motivation to continue. CTL identified the next common drop-off point occurring between the first six to 20 conversations, so set up a process where the crisis counselor’s coach reaches out directly to the volunteer during that period. In that conversation, the coach provides feedback on the volunteer’s conversations thus far and shares what they would like to see more or less of in future conversations. The feedback is designed to increase the volunteer’s confidence in his/her own skills, continue to improve quality, and increase retention. In addition to these points in time, CTL has realized that resilience is key for volunteers to succeed and continue, so builds in trigger points where counselors will receive the appropriate support to process the intensity of the work.
Case in Point: Reinvigorating and Retraining Evidence Action’s Promoters
Evidence Action’s volunteer promoters’ enthusiasm for their role tended to wane over time. Evidence Action staff met with promoters to reinvigorate, retrain, and reinforce their confidence and engagement. Reeducation efforts equipped promoters with the tools and knowledge to address misinformation, such as the erroneous belief that chlorine causes infertility, and promote best practices in terms of water collection and chlorine use. While these reeducation efforts helped to stem the tide of promoter disengagement, the issue remains a challenge for Evidence Action. With 11,634 promoters as of November 2016, adding salaries or other financial incentives is cost-prohibitive; however, Evidence Action is actively working to determine other measures for maintaining promoter motivation, including increasing promoter pride through t-shirts and training and partnering with other organizations to provide products that promoters value, such as seeds for farming or phone cards.
3. View (and treat) volunteers as key shareholders in the work.
Volunteers must be seen as more than a free workforce of implementers. CAMFED CEO Lucy Lake shared that ensuring this happens in practice requires building this culture across the organization, including among leadership. “The way in which others engage with the CAMA volunteers and the respect that is afforded to them in recognizing their expertise has been the secret sauce to the level of pickup and activism we have in our volunteer networks. We’ve had the experience of individuals coming in from outside and treating this workforce as less sophisticated and less educated; treating them as an implementing workforce rather than recognizing the dignity, expertise, and contribution they were bringing. In that particular situation, we fell down and required a change in leadership to turn it around.” Engagement of volunteers in the planning, design, and evaluation of initiatives as exemplified by CAMFED and WSUP (whose Self-Help Group volunteers participate in the design upgrades to public and community toilets) is one way to recognize the value that these frontline experts bring to the table. From CAMFED’s perspective, semantics also matter. CAMFED does not call the many individuals who provide voluntary contributions to its model “volunteers”; rather it refers to them as “stakeholders” or “shareholders.”
“Within CAMFED we are challenged with the term ‘volunteer.’ The individuals we work with are stakeholders within the process and impact they want to see in their own communities. They are shareholders within that process.” — Lucy Lake, CEO, CAMFED
4. Ensure quality and accountability through formalized structures.
In order to ensure quality output, organizations that are scaling with volunteers need to ensure that systems and structures exist to provide them with clear direction and support. For Crisis Text Line, volunteers directly engage with individual texters who may be in crisis, so quality control is critical. CTL thus employs a combination of processes, technology, and staffing to achieve quality, including the following: rigorous training; coaches providing regular individual feedback; supervisors monitoring conversations; and technology (e.g., artificial intelligence) alerting coaches and supervisors when they may need to step in to help. Given all of these layers, CTL faces very few quality issues severe and persistent enough to merit letting a volunteer go.
CAMFED creates structures and tools to enrich the individual volunteer, create an intentional network, and ensure accountability. In each community, CAMFED brings together key stakeholders in formal committees that operate at the school and district levels. At the school level, the committees include parents, school leaders, and traditional community leaders; at the district level, they include local authorities from entities such as the education and social welfare departments. These two committees drive the work throughout the schools within that district and receive support from a paid CAMFED staff member at the district level (the District Operations Secretariat). Committee members are accountable to each other, and the CAMFED staff member can help ensure that things move forward. CAMFED has also created a team at the national level, composed of members of the community committees, which provides training, peer support, and monitoring to newer committee members (among other tasks). These layers, along with a mobile data tracking tool, help ensure that CAMFED’s work improving education for young women is sustained over time, delivered with rigor, and incorporates accountability at every level.
5. Retain volunteers with incentives beyond stipends.
One of the biggest challenges in working with volunteers is retention, especially after investments in recruiting, training, and infrastructure have been made. Questions often arise as to whether financial stipends are necessary to retain and motivate volunteers. While this is certainly context dependent, in the case of CAMFED, leadership has remained steadfast about not providing stipends to volunteers. CAMFED believes that the provision of stipends can be a limiting factor with respect to sustainability and scalability and that stipends can imply that the individuals are delivering an organization’s program rather than being recognized for participating in a collective effort toward improving community well-being and development. Instead, CAMFED works to celebrate individuals’ contributions through local and national events and acknowledgement by officials, to give the individuals confidence that their efforts are valued by the wider community. In addition, to ensure that volunteer inputs are recognized and incentivized, it has developed a “system of opportunity” as a non-salary incentive [see callout box further below].
Fundación Capital also uses a network of community leaders to facilitate access to its LISTA Initiative, with local leaders (i.e., low-income women who are themselves recipients of social welfare programs) helping to distribute shared tablet devices. While Fundación Capital initially tested monetary incentives (including monthly stipends and pay for results schemes), it did not find that the financial incentives dramatically increased reach. Moreover, FC has found that when scaling through government social programs, there can be restrictions on providing stipends or subsidies — as those could be construed as employment or favoritism within government programs. So, while FC has been successful in providing remuneration for travel and cellphone airtime costs, local leaders appear to be more motivated by supporting their communities and receiving benefit from the provided trainings.
Crisis Text Line has leveraged its volunteers’ clear commitment to the work and impact by offering incentives that recognize and celebrate their achievements. The organization introduced a ‘Leveling System’ where volunteers achieve increasing recognition (and giveaways such as logoed water bottles, backpacks, sticker packs, and other merchandise) as they complete more and more conversations. With higher levels, volunteers can gain opportunities for volunteer leadership positions and get the chance to be first to apply for internships and job openings.
Case in Point: Examples of non-salary incentives created by CAMFED
CAMFED is constantly evaluating the equity of its voluntary roles, particularly considering that they are mostly filled by women who are often engaged in unpaid labor. CAMFED considers how such roles can be positioned to improve women’s status and build their social capital and has developed creative non-salary incentives such as the following:Social Interest Loans. Through CAMFED’s partnership with Kiva, CAMA members can apply for financial interest-free loans in return for “social interest” (i.e., voluntary work in their communities supporting CAMFED initiatives). From 2013 through mid-2019, 4,884 social interest loans worth $2.8 million have been provided to 4,344 CAMA members. The loans create dual-impact by offering accessible financing for CAMA members while also ensuring a high-degree of commitment to their volunteer roles with CAMFED.
Formal Qualifications. CAMA members who act as Learner and Transition Guide volunteers with CAMFED are able to register for a Learner Guide Business Technology and Education Council (BTEC) qualification — an internationally recognized vocational qualification developed by CAMFED in partnership with Pearson. This qualification opens up new opportunity for CAMA members to go on to further and higher education, including teacher training, and create a livelihood for themselves.
Increased social capital. Through the CAMFED program, CAMA members and other members of local resource teams are given the opportunity to engage directly with policymakers and are represented on decision-making bodies alongside local authorities (including CAMFED’s national boards and other civil society entities). The volunteers gain credibility, clout, and a platform within their communities to influence local change.
Do’s and Don’ts of Empowering Volunteers
Read next: Think Beyond Staff, Part 2: Leverage Capacity of External Partners, or return to see all articles in People Power.
This article was written by Erin Worsham, Kimberly Langsam, and Ellen Martin, and released in July 2019.
