It is not every day that you get to work for a non profit and travel to Singapore to attend an affiliate meeting by Points of Light to learn more about Skill based volunteering.
I happen to have this huge experience along with my other asian counterparts who are as crazily involved with volunteering as me this May. Our conference was a one and a half day affair and made me up to date with a lot of interesting aspects of volunteering, corporate tie ups, fund raising and a lot more.
We started with a short training on Skill based volunteering, the important aspect I learnt was that scoping out projects through 5 Whys is a skill based volunteering project on its own. A volunteer if keeps probing an organisation and does a well structure ‘Root cause analysis’ is as capable of scoping and developing a project as me or any volunteer manager. Of course this doesn’t solve my problem of finding the volunteer!! A volunteer should be well oriented to understand the importance of the project handed over to him. At the end of a meaningful NGO-volunteer interaction, at least 20 projects can be scooped out with a competency map and the liaisons it will require to be successful. The skill based volunteering projects connect employee volunteering to HR Goals, talent management, cross functional team building and talent development of corporate as these projects need people from 2-3 different domains to come together to make the projects successful.
The second learning from the training was ‘Making of an effective EVP’. Effective EVP is a planned, managed effort that seeks to motivate and enable employees to effectively serve community needs through the leadership of the employer. Effective EVP will have a specific societal, employee and business goals with clear strategies, focussed efforts and tactics to achieve them. The plan should have:
– Purpose of EVP
– Identify and include societal goals and outcomes you’d like the EVP to achieve
– Identify and include business goals and outcomes in the plan that have quantifiable and measurable targets such as recruitment, team building or stakeholder relationship development
– Identify and include employee goals and outcomes in the plans that have quantifiable and measurable targets such as employee skills development, leadership development.
– Align the EVP with societal cause the CSR supports.
Skill based volunteering and an effective Employee Volunteering Program when put together will make the framework to a successful and meaningful NGO-Volunteer relation.
In all, It was a great experience to have learnt all of this through peer learning and through focussed group discussions. I am putting my learning into action and developing some great Skill based volunteering projects and Employee volunteering programs. I hope to share some models in the upcoming blogs.
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