Volunteers

Watching the international match between South Africa's Springboks and the New Zealand All Blacks this week, it struck me just how many similarities there are between charities and rugby teams. I'll avoid the obvious comparison between boisterous team meetings and a scrum but here are a few observations that I think we could learn from.  What do you think? I'm stating the completely obvious but neither rugby nor being an effective charity is an individual sport.  The best single player is wasted if their team mates aren't getting the ball to them.  The effectiveness of an award-wining fundraising director can easily be hampered by demotivated staff who don't deliver to their potential.

Dear Trustees and Executives

The Sunday Times this week published its list of the top 100 third sector places to work, 76 of which were charities. Whilst the authors wouldn't pretend that the findings are representative of every single charity in the UK, they might help us (I am a Trustee too) as a collective of leaders to think about the factors which make our organisations positive places to work. It seems that there are still significant differences between the commercial and not for profit sectors in terms of what motivates people to work there (no kidding) so I recommend we start focusing on these:

• Charity staff value highly the opportunity to give something back. Perhaps we can make the results of their contributions more specific and more obvious? I'm thinking internal communications, appraisals and reviews... simple and sincere thanks?
• The vast majority believe their organisation makes a positive difference to the world - surely something that we should reinforce with evidence and beneficiary stories wherever relevant to ensure staff stay engaged with the cause.
  

Commissioner Gordon says : I never said thank you.

Batman replies : ... and you'll never have to.

- Batman Begins

But human nature doesn't generally work this way, right. We like being thanked for our efforts and there's no shame in that. And its been empirically established that charities and social enterprises alike are more likely to be successful when they thank supporters and customers (see the blogroll for numerous examples).

After the latest round of Christmas donations, however, I am starting to think that we need to find a better way of doing it. I keep my thank you letters and emails to learn from professionally, and in 2010 I've received nearly 50.

It has been too long since my last blog and I have no excuses other than that things have been incredibly busy helping charities and community groups meet some very tough objectives - apologies to regular readers. This week I've been part of a team delivering marketing and communications workshops to non-marketing people and its been a hugely informative few days for me, let alone the delegates (who, incidentally agreed via their feedback sheets that they valued the sessions). We've run into some interesting issues working with groups from a mixture of business, charity and public sector backgrounds and I thought I'd be open and share some of our learning to see if it resonates with others. Having taken a quick straw poll amongst the team, and in pursuit of improvement, here are the things we will be thinking differently about for future workshops. It would be great to hear your thoughts too.

• In the words of Dr. Gregory House, people lie! No matter how many times it is covered in pre-workshop materials, if you ask people whether they know anything about marketing, they say yes. I expect it's because we don't want to feel daft amongst our peers and other groups but asking people to self-select workshops based on their own level of knowledge coming into the event does not guarantee a base-level of knowledge on which you can build.

Wikifund like Wikipedia is a free resource, packed with knowledge about fundraising.

I meet or communicate with charities and voluntary organisations on a daily basis and there never seems to be a clear picture of how difficult or not it is to recruit volunteers.

Following the tweets from the Institute of Fundraising’s National Convention this week has reminded me just how fast the world of digital communications is moving.  There are still lots of sessions on using social media to support fundraising and campaigning as well as interest in specific areas like crowdfunding and using blogs and bloggers.

A recent Harvard Business Review article outlined 12 key beliefs that good bosses hold. The author, Professor Robert Sutton of Stanford University, added his own considerable experience to a variety of research to come up with his favoured dozen, but I think there are others to add specifically for charity bosses.

Nominations for new trustees for the Institute of Fundraising have now closed. There are now five candidates for the two available places on the board.

The team at BNET UK posted one of my favourite articles of 2010 so far, on this subject.  We all hear (and dare I say use) clichés and idioms every now and then and I'm sure most of us dismiss them as just that.  But how often do we think about the ramifications of some of these glib approaches in a real world context like work or volunteering?