At last!  Steve and Rick have updated and expanded their chock-full book, a best-seller since 1996.  This second edition remains a thorough examination of every facet of a successful volunteer program, from planning and organizing through measuring effectiveness.  It’s the most-utilized text in the world on the theory and practice of managing a volunteer program.

Volunteers can be an effective resource for program operation, both supplementing and extending the work of paid staff. This, however, requires the application of management principles different from those utilized in managing employees. Volunteer Management is not a book about managing “a program”; instead it focuses on the element of connecting volunteers with an organization, concentrating on those unique aspects of working effectively with staff who do not receive a monetary salary. In many ways the managerial expertise required to involve these unpaid employees is far more sophisticated than that required to work with paid ones.

It can also be far more creative, and Volunteer Management is designed to provide the new and the experienced volunteer program manager with both basic knowledge and state of the art information, based on the more than 50 years of experience the authors have acquired in their work with thousands of volunteer programs.

Highlighted throughout are insightful quotes by practitioners and consultants in the field.  There’s also an extensive bibliography, resource list, sample volunteer management policies, and numerous forms and worksheets.

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Supervising the “Invisible” Volunteer
One of the biggest challenges in management is supervising those volunteers who work outside the normal office setting. These workers may be separated from their supervisors in a number of ways:

• assigned to a field office, which is geographically separated from the headquarters;
• in a job which requires them to work alone in a field setting, perhaps matched with a particular client; or
• working in a different timeframe from office staff, perhaps an evening or weekend assignment that doesn’t overlap normal office hours.

This separation, while small in appearance, is quite significant in practice. Anyone who has ever worked in a separated environment realizes the increased potential for frustration, inefficiency, dissatisfaction and occasionally even outright revolt. . . .

A Volunteer Program Manager in a long-distance system must work hard to reduce this distance, and to establish a working environment that offers a sense of bonding and teamwork, better communication, and a feeling of control for all parties involved in a long distance work relationship. There are three key areas in which to concentrate efforts:

• Bonding
• Communication
• Control

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