Using Volunteers Wisely

Are we devaluing expertise?  While I have been pretty sure I knew the answer to this question, I’ve allowed it to roll around in my brain, unanswered, for some time now.  But this process came to a screeching halt when I read of Southern Virginia University’s search for volunteer professors.  Yup!  You read that correctly (probably because you were taught to read by a teacher certified as equipped with the right knowledge and tools needed to teach people to read).

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A small school with 800 students (my undergraduate school was also small with less than 800 students, but no volunteer faculty there, I assure you) and an endowment under $1 million that puts it at the bottom of American and Canadian colleges ranked by the National Association of College and University Business Officers.  So what?  Does small mean you forsake expertise?

To be fair, SVU has not led the charge in opting for volunteers over expertise; in fact, they are probably bringing up the rear.  The Nonprofit sector has been forsaking expertise for volunteers – read free – for a good 10 years.  Even before the economy tanked.

Nonprofits are problematically so concerned with not spending money on non-mission related efforts that they end up being penny-wise and pound foolish, time after time.

Have a brother who knows something about strategic planning in the corporate world?  He’ll volunteer to lead your planning process?  Great.  There’s a millennial who wants to use her newly minted MBA to win points at her place of work by helping a nonprofit, despite never having come even close to one.  Sure, she can design your marketing campaign, although she has no sense of scope, scale, resources, competitive market, etc.  Awesome!  And the list can go on and on.  As can the names of organizations that actually orchestrate the matching of inexperienced volunteers with hungry nonprofits who want something for nothing.

My favorite story is a client who was “forced” to use the for-profit strategic planners from the board president’s company who hired us to guide them on how to work with their planning consultants to ensure that the process was do well and right, do the pieces of strategic planning that the volunteers didn’t know should be done and to pick up the pieces dropped by the volunteers.  In all, they paid us more than if they’d simply come to us and asked us to help them with strategic planning.    Most of our cleaning up after non-experts doesn’t happen side-by-side, as in this example, but rather after the fact when we get called in to right things.

Recently, I heard a radio story on Netflix’s explanation for why they have no fixed number of vacation days for employees and why they have just changed their family leave policy to unlimited days the first year a new child joins an employee’s family.   According to Netflix, they only want to hire the best, most expert employees, treat them like adults, heap on the responsibility and expectations, and let them know that they either get the job done or they will be fired.  Netflix respects the expert to know what needs to be done, when and how, and rewards the accomplishment of goals, releasing those who don’t or can’t deliver.  Netflix understands the value proposition of hiring people equipped to do the job at hand and not wasting resources on those who can’t.  Nonprofits should take a page out of that book.

There is a very important place for volunteers in the nonprofit sector, but it is a very specific place.  Just as we must match our paid positions with the expertise we need employees to bring to the job, so we must with volunteers—those who out of the goodness of their hearts offer to help out with no expectation of compensation.

Just as there are many tasks that volunteers do at nonprofits that require no expertise, there are volunteer positions that do, such as a retired doctor serving a day a week in a clinic for the poor, a builder heading a crew on a house build or an English teacher who tutors in an ESL program.  While the doctor may also work on a house build, we don’t want the builder seeing patients, regardless of how many times he/s visited a doctor in his lifetime.  Nonprofits need volunteers; we value our volunteers to help us do the work for which they are equipped.  But when we start accepting volunteers with only tangential knowledge of the tasks at hand solely because they bring the right price tag with them, we jeopardize everything—our mission, clients, staff, board members, volunteers, etc.  Devaluing expertise devalues all that we work hard to do.