Joe Saxton from nfpSynergy delivered the keynote address at AVM 2016, challenging volunteer managers to heed the lessons and good practice examples of other sectors when developing their volunteer engagement practices.

1. Ten things volunteer
managers can learn
from the outside
world
Joe Saxton
AVM Conference
October 2016

2. 2
Whose got the monkey?
Source: Oncken, W., Jr., and Wass, D. L. 1974. Whose Got
The Monkey? . Harvard Business Review.

3. 3
Whose got the monkey?
• Think of responsibilities for doing something as like a monkey sitting on
your back
• The monkey keeps sitting there till you pass it to somebody else (Hey
Rachel – could you just look at this report for me and tell me what you
think?)
• Or you do the task that’s required (finally wrote this presentation for Abi 10
days late: monkey has now disappeared!)
• So who has the monkey for making volunteering happen in your
organisation?
• You or your colleagues? Or the senior management? Or everybody?
• The danger is that volunteer managers are hired, so everybody can pass on
their ‘we need more volunteers monkeys’!

4. 4
Learning from failure like an
airline
Source: Syed, M. 2015. Black Box Thinking: The Surprising
Truth About Success , London: John Murray

5. 5
Learning from failure in the right way
• After every airline accident or major incident an investigation team
analyses every aspect in great detail
• They publish a report which analyses the incident and makes
recommendations
• Deaths from airline crashes have decreased massively over the last
50 years even though miles flown have increased dramatically
• The airline industry treats failure as a learning experience
• Think: learning from every missed target, or every initiative that
doesn’t work

6. 6
Don’t learn from failure like
medics
Source: Syed, M. 2015. Black Box Thinking: The Surprising
Truth About Success , London: John Murray

7. 7
Learning from failure in the wrong way
• When things go wrong its easy to blame everybody else
• Medics are often good at this
• ‘There isn’t a problem at all’
• ‘It was the nurses fault’
• ‘If we do more of the same operation we will perfect the technique’
• The legal profession is often the same: Birmingham Six, Guildford
Four, Central Park Five.
• A systematic ability to ignore the evidence
• Does your organisation think the right way about failure – or do
people assume they know what’s wrong irrespective?

8. 8
Think about your strategic
options for increasing
volunteering
Source: nfpSynergy. The New Alchemy . March 2015.

9. A model for strategic-decision making in
volunteering development
Increase volunteer hours
Recruit more
volunteer hours
Reduce volunteer
hours lost
Objective 1: Increase
hours by increasing
no of volunteers
Objective 2: Increase
hours by increasing the
lifetime hours of each volunteer
Strategy 1: Increase
no recruited by
finding more
of the same
Strategy 2: Increase no
recruited by finding
new volunteer
audiences
Objective 3: reduce
lapsing volunteers
Strategy 6:
Reduce volunteers
who leave
Strategy 3:
Keep volunteers
for longer
Strategy 4:
Get volunteers to
do more each time
Strategy 5:
Get volunteers to
help more often
Strategy 7:
Reduce volunteers
who do less
Product and brand-building activities

10. 10
Freemium
Source: Kumar, M. 2014. Making ‘Freemium’ work .
Harvard Business Review.

11. 11
Freemium
• Offering something for free as a taster or basic services in the hope
that users will pay for more, or become avid users
• Used to be called to be called ‘try before you buy’ or ‘free trial’ and
then got a fancy name!
• Examples include Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox, Google, Linkedin, etc
• Sometimes its works well: Dropbox, Facebook, Twitter
• And other times not so well: who pays for Linkedin Premium?
• The key for volunteer managers: how can you offer a volunteer
experience that people can use or have a go at before committing?
• Think open days or taster days

12. 12
The ageing population will
affect every part of society

13. Society ages as boomer generation reaches 60s...
UK population in 2012 and 2022, by age | Thousands
0-15
+1,358,000
16-26
-698,000
27-38
+1,553,000
39-49
-1,131,000
50-64
+1,508,000
65-89
+1,973,000
0
200
400
600
800
1,000
1,200
0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55 60 65 70 75 80 85 100
+
2012 2022
The Future Demographic Landscape
90+
+327,000

14. 14
Frictionless payments
Source: Media coverage and continuous online shopping

15. 15
How do we make it as easy as possible to do
something?
• The Mayor of London’s recent Pennies for London failed because registering
was quite complicated
• We live in a world where everything takes less and less effort – who has
been put off for registering for something because it needs another
password (hence the Twitter, Facebook, Google+ sign ups)
• I can buy a product from eBay in about 15 seconds (and give to charity in
the process)
• So, in a frictionless world how does your volunteer sign up process look?
• Frictionless or like wading through treacle? Next day delivery or 28 days?

16. 16
How do we motivate
volunteers?
Source: Herzberg, F. 1968. One More Time: How do you
motivate employees. Harvard Business Review.

17. 17
The two factor or hygiene-motivation theory of
employee satisfaction
• Some things make employees or volunteers motivated and enjoy
their jobs or roles: achievement, recognition, the work itself,
responsibility, advancement and personal growth. These are called
motivation factors
• Some things make people unhappy or dissatisfied: crappy
managers, poor working conditions, miserable work colleagues,
poor pay. These are hygiene factors
• The key point is that hygiene factors can make people unhappy, but
the lack of them rarely makes people happy at work. That is the job
of motivation factors
• So how do you manage motivation and hygiene factors for
volunteers, particularly when pay and often promotion is not a tool
available?

18. 18
Nudge Volunteers
Source: Thaler, R. H. , and Sunstein, C. R. 2009. Nudge:
Improving decisions about health, wealth and happiness,
London: Penguin

19. 19
Nudging
• Nudging is all the rage, especially in government
• The idea is that people can be nudged towards better behaviour
• We are now nudging people towards better pension provision
through auto-enrolment and opt-out
• We can nudge people to organ donation via opt-out not opt-in
• Legacy marketing has already used nudging effectively
• And US fundraisers have nudged with great effect on the phone
(‘We just got a really generous donation of $100 from somebody in
[named suburb]’)
• How can we nudge volunteers? Total volunteer hours rewards?
Certificates for job hunting young volunteers?

20. 20
When it all goes pear-shaped
-remember Epicurus
Source: Evans, J. 2013. Philosophy of Life: And other
dangerous situations, London: Rider

21. 21
• At the end of a long hard day
• When not everything has gone right
• And the volunteers aren’t coming, or your colleagues are dragging
you down
• And everybody wants miracles on a tiny budget
• Remember Epicurus: he said we’re only on this planet for a few
years before we disappear, and while we’re here there’s nothing we
have to do and there’s no one we have to please
• So enjoy Epicurean delights and remember that tomorrow is
another day

22. 22
Any questions?