Volunteer Management Case Study Summary

The importance of successful volunteer management is seen firsthand in this case study of the nonprofit. A new nonprofit, the Saxeville Community Project, forms in the town of Saxeville, WI that attracts many to come work for the popular organization, but then as a new volunteer manager, Emily Roberts, is brought in and new changes are made to how the organization is run, the nonprofit begins to lose the high number of volunteers that it was originally attracting. This paper will examine what happened to the organization to bring about the drastic turnover in volunteers, and then discuss future changes that can be made to the organization to better both the nonprofit and the community it serves. The first reason for the decline of the volunteer …show more content…
First, the board of directors for the organization were all mothers of the community with not a lot of experience on how to run a nonprofit. This lack of expertise and diversity meant that no one had solutions on what to do about volunteers which led them to hire someone with no experience managing people or nonprofit experience. If an organization is to run successfully, there board needs to have people of different backgrounds with experience in that field. Furthermore, the social ties that allowed them to quickly get many volunteers also hurt them in the long run because of burnout felt by the recruits. There are many different factors that relate to the burnout that volunteers can have when working for an organization. Negative and positive factors can cause workers to leave sooner or later because of their ability to decrease or increase the time before burnout. Research shows that there is a connection between burnout and social pressures to volunteer. “When one of the motivations to become a volunteer is social pressure from family and friends, the volunteer is not completely convinced of his or her involvement in volunteering, facilitating the appearance of burnout, (Moreno-Jiménez and Villodres). This research can be witnessed in the case of the Saxeville Community Project as …show more content…
Though, I do not agree with the decision to exclude Emily and her mother because this sends the message that their situation is all their fault and that they cannot help to change it, it was a good idea for them to come together as a board. Also, I do not believe that they should be excluded because they are important members of the organization and the board should be honest with them on how they feel about the current situation, as opposed to hiding them from it. Despite this issue, several recommendations can be implanted by the organization to improve their current situation at this meeting. As discussed earlier, I think it is important to modify the changes that Emily originally made to the organization, which include shifting the way that the training is done to shorten the process and allow those who have already worked with the organization to talk with those in charge to clarify any questions they have. Also, the twenty-one-age minimum should shift to a rule that requires youth to work under adult supervision to avoid excluding a large percentage of the original volunteers and to allow for these volunteers to experience all the benefits of volunteering. Furthermore, I believe that evaluations should be done for the volunteers they do have, so that “both parties work together to evaluate performance