Stop Treating Everyone Equally! How To Offer A Great Volunteer Experience (4 of 6)

Exceptional volunteer experiences account for the uniqueness of each person, and their reasons for volunteering in the first place. Whether you are managing your company's Employee Volunteer Program as part of the overall CSR mission, or you are coordinating volunteers at an NPO, you have to avoid one of the worst mistakes you can make - trying to treat everyone equally.



Quick Review

A month ago I began writing about How To Offer A Great Volunteer Experience. A month can be a long time in blogland, so here’s a little recap:

First, we established the need to automate as much of the volunteer process of recruiting, screening, job assignments and evaluation as possible. Most NPO’s don’t have dedicated Volunteer Managers and even if they do, standard Volunteer Management Theory acts as a bottle neck in many cases.

Next, we covered meeting the volunteer where they are at. Our positions require us to maintain the perspective of a realist and admit that if volunteers don’t ‘get it’ that’s not their problem - its ours. Provide experiences that create the space in people to learn. That’s the job, nothing less.

Finally, we covered the idea of meeting people at their Highest Level of Contribution. This means paying attention to who people are, rather than seeing them as a sack of experience and skill sets for the organization’s purposes. People are desperate for meaning. If you can align yours with theirs, the convergence of those horizons will transform your volunteer programs.

In the coming weeks we will discuss demoting your staff to grow your resources exponentially, and how to avoid becoming myopic by focusing too narrowly on your clients, or your “primary audience.”

But right now we need to talk about the problem of equality.

The problem of equality

The most destructive part of any volunteer program is not poor planning, unclear job descriptions, late emails, or even lousy recognition programs. Rather, it is the tendency to treat everyone equally. Giving each volunteer equal ‘say’, equal privilege, equal responsibility and equal recognition will kill enthusiasm and create insurmountable obstacles for people.

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Of course, the ideology of social equality is necessary for societies to achieve greatness. Offering equal rights to all people is essentially non-negotiable in developed nations today. Although here in Canada women have only been allowed to vote for the past 90 years, today the Charter of Rights and Freedoms (1985) is a formidable legal document ensuring equality under the law.

“Every individual is equal before and under the law and has the right to the equal protection and equal benefit of the law without discrimination and, in particular, without discrimination based on race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age or mental or physical disability. “

One of the best known proclamations of equality is enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, with Jefferson, cribbing a bit from British philosopher John Locke , stating,

‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.’

Unfortunately, nobody seemed to take the idea seriously until much later when slaves were freed, Native Americans were no longer massacred as part of Manifest Destiny, and again, women were allowed to vote as of the 19th Amendment in 1920. While these developments are encouraging, we find significant societal norms that show how far we remain from operating as a people who believe each other to hold equal value.

The Confusion of Equality and Sameness

The problem I have is not really with equality. The problem is that we often confuse the political and societal ideals of equality with sameness. We believe that everyone should be treated fairly (I agree), that each of us has merit and worth in our own right (I could not agree more) and therefore, everyone should be treated the same (wrong!). Most of the time, when we talk about treating everyone equally, this is the sequence of thinking that goes on in our heads. So when someone shows up to volunteer for the first time, we try to give them the same opportunities, attention, responsibilities and recognition that we do those who have been coming for years. This is a great mistake and here’s why: people are not the same. When it comes to volunteering in particular, they are at various stages of realizing the worth of the opportunity, the cause, and themselves.

The Stages of Realized Worth

There are basically 3 Stages that your volunteers fall into:

1st Stage - The Investigators. As this group investigates, they are generally uninformed and have loose ideas about what they’re looking for. They may dislike the work, they may stop showing up. No problem. They are some of the pool from which you will discover the best of your volunteers.

2nd Stage - The Investing. These folks are after something. They’re still not quite sure what it is, but they have an inkling that you might be offering it. They are beginning to invest in the cause. You may notice them asking asking questions or even complaining a bit (which is an encouraging sign that they’re connecting emotionally.) They need to be seen and heard. Discover them. What are they after? What meaning do they hope to find by volunteering with you? You can recognize them because they have a quirky type of commitment which is mostly dependable.

3rd Stage - The Invested. This group is there for the same reasons healthy people go to the gym. It’s part of their lifestyle, their brand. They believe in your cause and will show themselves to be dependable quickly (just a caution here, it’s easy to get enthusiastic 1st Stage people confused with 3rd Stage stalwart.) Take every effort to hear their ideas and involve them in the work. If they feel they have permission, they are usually power-house recruiters, because they are includers. Depend on them, and they will find the kind of reward they live for. Oh, by the way, you probably only have one or two 3rd Stage people, if any. That’s just the way it goes.

So what does it look like to allow for people’s differences within your organization? What kind of space does each stage require? It may help to imagine yourself in each stage (we all go through them) and consider what your needs may have been at the time...

If you are in the 1st Stage: You require spaces of discovery where you are free to investigate. At this point, pressure and obligation will only hinder you, so long term commitments aren’t really what you’re after. You’re at your best when compelled to ask better questions and go beyond what you’ve always known and believed.

If you are in the 2nd Stage: You need permission to be a little angry and a little confused. You know that committing to this organization is akin to committing to a relationship: If you never get past the infatuation stage to start getting angry, hurt and wounded, then you probably never cared much in the first place. When things don’t matter, things are easy. You are ready for substance and you hope that the organization can prove to you that they’re ready for your investment.

If you are in the 3rd Stage: You need a space brimming with offers of high-level, contributing responsibility. You know they know you’ll take care of the ditch-digging every time, but they respect you too much for that. You need to be treated carefully because, like a long-term relationship, this kind of commitment is rare and fragile - not to be taken lightly.

Working with the Stages of Realized Worth

The 1st Stage is easy to develop and manage and offers tremendous benefits to your recruiting and screening process. It essentially automates much of the Volunteer Management Cycle. You can read more about it in detail in the article “Automatic Volunteer Management: How to Offer a Great Volunteer Experience”. At this stage you will spend a little bit of time with a lot of people. This is a place of discovery for you and the volunteer. Resist the urge to develop, recruit, or retain.

The 2nd Stage is tricky. It can go by quickly, or last for many years. Everyone has unique issues, questions, and reasons for coming to you. When they start asking better questions, showing up with regularity, making themselves more available, or getting a bit difficult to deal with, they are probably working through this stage. Offer answers to questions in the form or training, or further exposure to issues. Better questions are what we are after, so always provide answers knowing that they serve only to take us further down the road of discovery. Classes, assessments, time at a coffee shop, field-trips and introductions to broader networks of people are all helpful spaces for discovery.

The 3rd Stage will consume most of your time and energy, and it should. You will spend most of your time with the fewest number of people. A true 3rd Stage person will pay off in spades for every investment you make. They have moved beyond the need for external constructs like your volunteer program. Drop them anywhere on the planet, and they are such dyed-in-the-wool-sold-out-for-the-cause believers they will invent ways to do what they do. Facilitation is the key word here, along with collaboration. Use their ideas, partner with them, give them what they need, resource them and then let them loose. They will recruit, promote, network, fundraise, whatever - all the time. All. The. Time. And you know why? Because they are doing it for their own reasons - not yours. There is convergence between your needs, the required work, and their needs. All three horizons have merged and now they are operating at their highest level of contribution. The only thing you can do to mess it up, is treat them or talk to them like they are 1st Stage people.

Know your volunteers. People are not the same; they do not function within a formula and they are not children to recognize with gold stars on a chart. The more we treat our people equally, the more likely we are to lose our most valuable stakeholders without ever knowing they were there.

NEXT on How To Offer A Great Volunteer Experience: The most effective key to really take advantage of 3rd Stage people....

DEMOTE YOUR STAFF!

Re-write the job description of every staff member you have. In order to run an excellent volunteer program your staff must see themselves as facilitators of volunteers rather than “bosses” working to get a job done. Staff make it possible for volunteers to do the work, not the other way around.