By Anne B. Schink
Managers of volunteers are busy people, especially today with tight budgets and increased pressure to bring on new volunteers. In most nonprofit organizations, serving on the Board is a leadership role; consultants provide short term expertise; and traditional volunteers provide direct service or administrative support. Engaging pro bono and highly skilled volunteers requires setting aside some of these traditional assumptions.
What is a pro bono volunteer or a highly skilled volunteer?
A pro bono or highly skilled volunteer is someone who donates his/her professional level services as an “unpaid consultant” to the nonprofit organization. A pro bono volunteer is different from other volunteers in that they bring expertise to an organization on a project basis that includes clear guidelines, deadlines, and deliverables. Pro bono and skilled volunteers range along a continuum of technical expertise and experience in terms of skills, levels of commitment, and the types of projects they are interested in doing.
Pro bono and highly skilled volunteers bring experience, expertise, and perspective to the organization. They are valuable assets for creating an infrastructure. The most common areas are: human resources, marketing and branding, IT, financial management, and legal services.
Among the tools that the Corporation for National and Community Service has provided for managers of volunteers is a new Nonprofit Readiness Toolkit for Pro Bono Volunteers: How to prepare your organization for pro bono and highly skilled volunteers. Under a contract with CNCS I have had the pleasure of creating this toolkit over the past several months. The link below will take you to an online course that will help you prepare for those volunteers we have been talking about. It includes a narrative, a case study, and a checklist at the end to use to assess the readiness of your organization to receive these volunteers who are enthusiastic about putting their professional skills to work in support of your mission.
http://nationalserviceresources.org/news/non-profit-readiness-toolkit
You will need to create a user name and password, but don’t let that be a barrier to taking this course. Having that user name and password allows you to access many other valuable courses through the Resource Center that are designed to provide professional development opportunities at your own pace on your own computer.
For more on this subject, check out the next issue of the VolunteerFare newsletter. I will provide more detail about pro bono volunteering and the benefits to your organization. If you would like to learn about it in person, be sure to register for the Pro Bono Volunteering workshop at the Blaine House Conference in October.
Anne B. Schink is a volunteer management consultant and the author of the Nonprofit Readiness Toolkit.
This is fantastic, Anne. I know that I will use this toolkit and recommend it to organizations that I work with to help them think differently about utilizing volunteers. Thanks for sharing!