Archive: June 2017 - Sterling Volunteers

We recently hosted the third webinar of our three-part series, Enhancing the Volunteer Lifecycle. In Part 3, Engaging Volunteers for Impact & Success, we discussed how to track the impact of your volunteer program beyond counting the number of volunteers and the hours of service they provide.

If volunteering were an Easter egg hunt, skilled volunteers would be the rare but much appreciated golden eggs of the volunteer candidate pool. Regular volunteer candidates are amazing; they can help in a wide range of positions and are eager to learn new skills. That said, skilled volunteers come equipped with specific types of experience and are excited to immediately put that experience to use!

Ask a volunteer manager to name the single biggest concern they have about running their nonprofit’s volunteer program. More likely than not, they will name their budget. Too often, volunteer managers are tasked with running their volunteer program on a shoestring. Of course, they try to do everything they can to keep costs down while still doing incredible work for their local community, but there’s one cost-saving opportunity they might be forgetting: volunteer background screening costs.

Most nonprofit organizations try to take every possible precaution to keep volunteers and the groups they serve safe. When it comes to vulnerable populations like children, you can never be too cautious with your policies and procedures as they relate to the vetting of volunteer candidates who work alongside these groups. Though you would assume organizations working with any type of vulnerable population would maintain airtight screening and onboarding regulations, not all do…and persons with harmful intentions sometimes gain access to these groups.