Our feature articles are sourced from practitioners around the globe and seek to encourage new thinking, highlight innovative practice and stimulate debate in the world of effective volunteer engagement.
Engage Library
Feature Articles
South Australia boasts the highest volunteering rate in Australia, celebrates a strong level of government support for volunteers and even has volunteer involvement featured in the state’s ‘strategic plan’. The northern suburbs of Adelaide, South Australia’s capital city, has…
October 2005
Building collaborative relationships with highly-skilled volunteers can gain huge dividends for your organization and for the volunteers who participate. Based on her research for the upcoming book, The Art and Science of Engaging Baby Boomer Volunteers, Jill Friedman Fixler…
October 2005
It is often said that volunteering is a great way to test-drive a career. But that premise is only as good as the opportunities we make available to volunteers. And with an increasing number of thirty- and forty-somethings expressing disaffection with their present careers, it…
July 2005
For years I have been encouraging managers of volunteer programs to function as in-house consultants; building commitment, capacity and competency of all staff that interface with volunteers in their organization. For too many years, I have seen the leaders of volunteer programs…
July 2005
Although South Africa has a long history of volunteering, employee volunteer programmes are a relatively new trend. Charities Aid Foundation Southern Africa (CAFSA) has been actively encouraging and facilitating employee giving for a number of years. They have recently embarked…
July 2005
Think about the communications methods you – and others at your organization – use with volunteers right now. Is your organization getting the information it needs about volunteers and their activities via these methods? Information such as:
Their accomplishments as volunteers…
April 2005
In March 2005, a pioneering 48-hour event was held in Canberra, Australia: The 1st Annual Retreat for Advanced Volunteer Management . The 50 participants came from all of the Australian states and territories, plus representatives from New Zealand, Singapore, and the US. The…
April 2005
Sabotage!
The very word conjures up images of old war movies – silhouetted black and white figures blowing up railway lines in the midst of the night to prevent enemy advance. Indeed, sabotage is in fact a very real tool of war. Sadly it has also been a tool of some corporations…
January 2005
Succession planning seems to be another of the ‘buzz words’ of late. I believe it is a relatively new concept to the voluntary sector, with many of us struggling to get our heads around exactly what it is. In my journey to discover what succession planning was, I found an answer…
January 2005
With the advent of more and larger data sets, research on volunteering is transitioning from pontificating to proving hypothesis about volunteering characteristics. The RGK Center for Philanthropy and Community Service at the University of Texas publishes the Investigator, a…
January 2005
Liz Adamshick shares her experience in soliciting financial donations from volunteers and her realization that volunteer administration professionals must work more collaboratively with fundraising professionals. She notes:
It took many conversations to bring us to the point…
October 2004
So much has been written about youth as volunteers, but most often by adults. Of course adults work with young volunteers, and teenagers and university students have been surveyed directly by researchers. Yet we rarely hear directly from young people in journals such as this one…
October 2004
Colleen Kelly suggests that volunteer management has taken the road more travelled – the easier road – because when we began the process of formalizing volunteer involvement we did so mainly from the point of view of organizations recruiting volunteers to “fill positions”…
October 2004
Whilst research and interest in all aspects of volunteering and the third sector generally have grown exponentially since the 1990s, both internationally and in Australia, Australian historians have been ‘missing in action’ – they have not generally been part of this explosion…
July 2004
Have you ever wondered where researchers find the statistical data that allows them to determine the long-term effects of volunteering on one's health or on one's career? Or questioned how frequently the Independent Sector or the Bureau of Labor Statistics conduct surveys on…
July 2004
A never-before published draft excerpt from Carol Weisman’s upcoming book, Raising Charitable Children: Kids Who Give as Good as They Get (anticipated for publication in late 2005). The chapter previewed here explains the concept – and how-to’s – of a “Joy and Sadness Meeting”…
July 2004
The Glenbow Museum in Calgary, Alberta, Canada has a dedicated volunteer corps that until recently was comprised mainly of adults who had been serving the Museum for 20 to 30 years. Little thought had been given to succession planning, although the volunteers were clearly aging…
April 2004
Most of us have seen board members separate their collective, decision-making role on the board from their individual, working role in other volunteer capacities. And we know that board members who fail to make or remember the distinction can be very problematic. The level of…
April 2004
Hong Kong has a long history of developing volunteer services. People from all walks of life are familiar with the concept of volunteerism while a wide variety of specific volunteer opportunities have been opening up, ranging from management roles to the execution of specific…
April 2004
Through several years of working in public relations (PR) and journalism, I've heard many publicity officers of social and sporting clubs and PR officers of non-profit organisations complain they are not getting 'enough exposure': 'I sent a release to The Times last week, and…
January 2004