The Touchwood Project

I’ve been having several people ask me what Touchwood is up to these days, so thought I’d write a quick post on my latest research project: how to get volunteers involved with Touchwood and make sure they have a great time.

A lifesaver for those of feeling trapped in meetings

Since I only have a little experience with managing volunteers from back in the days when I ran a door-to-door environmental campaign, I’ve been looking for advice from Getting It Done: How to Lead When You’re Not in Charge and learning a lot (hopefully) about how to make groups work more happily and more effectively.

Here are two key points I thought I’d share:

Tip #1: Make your volunteer role meaty and challenging

Personally, I’ve always thought I should ask a volunteer for as little as possible. I hate feeling like I owe someone something, and asking them to do things for free feels a lot like asking for a favour.

But then I think about how I love when someone asks for my help with something I enjoy doing as long as I feel they appreciate my effort and let me do things the way that works well for me.

So here’s what they suggest a volunteer role should be:

• active
• has something interesting to do
• commands respect from self and others
• demonstrates their abilities

Commands respect, huh. I mean, asking the bare minimum of someone isn’t going to give them a role they feel commands respect, so I’m starting to come round to the idea of offering more of a challenging opportunity, at least for some volunteers.

Tip #2: Empower your volunteers

Getting It Done also recommends that you empower your volunteers by helping them feel they:

• are making a difference
• have a measure of control over what they do
• have some control over where group is going
• are improving their skills

It’s a tall order. It requires that we invest a lot of time and effort in developing and supporting volunteers in exchange for their giving a lot.

Putting the tips into practice

I understand best when I try to put a new lesson in practice, so let me try here.

Example: I’m thinking about how we want to set up a library of books for Friends of the Touchwood Project, and I’ve had someone volunteer to help.

Rather than just give her some small task to do, such as catalogue the books, and then try to do everything else myself, why don’t I create a Chief Librarian role, one where she has the primary responsibility for the books and setup. With input from Directors, she can figure out how we’re going to organise the books (use software like Delicious Library or Shelfari or something else perhaps), if we should charge something, which books we should look into buying.

In creating this role, I’m also thinking about this person’s skills which, as she’s a phD, will most likely include strong research, a love of books and at least moderate organisational skills.

So this librarian role will hopefully appeal. It should be big enough and interesting enough to deliver on the expectations above.

Creating a Volunteer Welcome Pack

Part of supporting our volunteer will be making sure she knows what we’re doing, where we’re at, and is developing her skills and unique role in the team, so we’re putting together a kind of Welcome Pack that includes StrengthsFinder and a Personal Development Plan.

For StrengthsFinder, (see my post about SF previously if you want to learn more about this talents-based survey and personal development tool) I think we’ll see if we can buy the book for each volunteer and then perhaps set up a discussion group with a few volunteers and some of us Directors together. We’ve learned that you get a lot more from StrengthsFinder if you discuss it regularly afterwards.

We’ll also have an overview of Touchwood so she understands where we’re heading and look for opportunities to have her feedback on where we’re going next.

Online survey to assess how we’re doing

Finally, we need to regularly check in to see how we’re doing and where we can improve. I’ve created a very brief survey courtesy of Survey Monkey for volunteers to rate their volunteer experience. I’m sure over time we’ll grow and change this, but it’s a start.

I’m asking volunteers to say how much they agree or disagree with statements like “I feel like I’m making a difference” and “I have influence over where the group is going.” These statements are taken almost verbatim from the Getting It Done book.

You can have a look here if you think you might want to do something similar, though unless you’re a volunteer, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t take the survey since that will skew the results!

Here is the link: http://tinyurl.com/touchwoodvolunteersurvey

Making working with Touchwood fun, rewarding and part of developing yourself and what you bring to the world motivates and inspires Jenni, Malcolm and myself. I can’t wait to see how we get on!

Tags: social enterprise, Useful books

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