Boredom, Not Rigor, Dampens Volunteers' Spirits

Championed by the Obamas, volunteerism is on the rise. Now nonprofits need to match volunteers with tasks that maximize their talents

By Rick Wartzman

Michelle Obama strode across the podium in San Francisco this week and, staring out at thousands of nonprofit leaders and volunteers assembled in front of her, took note of an unmistakable trend sweeping the country: These days, it's hip to help.

"You've done everything in your power," the First Lady declared at the start of the 2009 National Conference on Service & Volunteering, "to make giving back cool again."

Somewhere, Peter Drucker is smiling.

When I last wrote about the surge in volunteerism in America, a year and a half ago, I noted Drucker's influence in the field both as an adviser to numerous social-sector organizations and as an observer of people's hunger to find something in their lives that brings them fulfillment. "What the U.S. nonprofits do for their volunteers may well be just as important as what they do for the recipients of their services," Drucker wrote in his 1993 book Post-Capitalist Society. "Citizenship in and through the social sector…restores the civic pride that is the mark of community."

Today, propelled by this way of thinking, volunteering is fast becoming a full-blown cultural phenomenon. Surveys suggest that Millennials—those born between 1980 and 2000—are more civic-minded than any generation since the 1930s. The nation's 77 million Baby Boomers are also getting into the act, as more and more folks in their 40s, 50s, and 60s look to take up a so-called encore career that's centered on volunteering and public service.

A Wave of Doing Good

Meanwhile, technology is enabling people, in a click, to find a multitude of avenues to get involved and do their part in tackling some of society's most pressing problems. Among those leading the wave is All for Good, a new Web site hosted by Google (GOOG).

Nothing, though, has given the National Service Movement more of a lift than the words and deeds of the Obamas. From the President's signing in April of the $5.7 billion Serve America Act to his launching this month of United We Serve—an initiative designed to have all Americans make volunteering a part of their daily lives this summer—he has delivered on his campaign promise to make community service a centerpiece of his Administration.

Yet despite all of the momentum and the palpable excitement in San Francisco, nonprofits need to be careful or they'll wind up squandering the remarkable opportunity before them.

Earlier this year, the Stanford Social Innovation Review published a piece that noted how poorly most nonprofits manage their volunteers. As a result, more than a third of the 60 million-plus Americans who donate their time and talents one year don't do so the next—not only at the organization where they'd signed up, but at any nonprofit at all. Some call this "the leaky bucket of volunteerism."

There are a host of reasons for this pullback, according to the analysis, including nonprofits inadequately recognizing the contributions of their volunteers and a lack of training among volunteers and their managers.

But Robert Grimm, director of research and policy development at the Corporation for National and Community Service and one of the authors of the article, believes there's a more fundamental issue to grapple with: It isn't so much that volunteers have nightmarish experiences at nonprofits, he says; it's that they have "bland" ones.

Matching Needs and Skills

Nonprofits, says Grimm, must "find out what people's passions are"—and do a better job of meeting those interests. They also need to take far greater advantage of the skills that volunteers bring. There's no reason for an attorney, say, to paint a fence when the organization he wants to assist could put him to work on an urgent legal matter. Why have a retired marketing executive stuff envelopes when she could be helping to devise the nonprofit's new media campaign?

The ability of nonprofits to match needs and skills effectively becomes all the more critical as an increasing number of corporations, including consulting firms such as Deloitte and PricewaterhouseCoopers, donate millions of dollars worth of pro bono services to nonprofits.

The necessity of keeping workers engaged and bestowing upon them a feeling of pride is hardly exclusive to the social sector. Drucker taught that all managers must offer their employees a way to make a meaningful contribution. For it is this, even more than money, that motivates people.

"Personal satisfaction of the worker without productive work is failure," Drucker wrote in his 1973 classic, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices. "But so is productive work that destroys the worker's achievement" and his or her sense of having made a real difference. "Neither is, in effect, tenable for very long."

When it comes to volunteers, the instinct among some managers is not to demand too much from them for fear that they'll walk away if they're overworked. But, in fact, Drucker believed that volunteers are hoping to be pushed hard—as long as it's into something that can supply a big emotional payoff at the end.

"Volunteers have to get more satisfaction from their work than paid employees, precisely because they don't get a paycheck," Drucker wrote. "They need, above all, challenges."

Nonprofits must quickly begin to provide them. Or the nation's burgeoning ranks of volunteers will no longer feel cool. They'll simply grow cold.

Rick Wartzman is the executive director of the Drucker Institute at Claremont Graduate University.

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