In my time working at the Historical Society of Long Beach (HSLB) I had a lot of responsibilities including office management, program and exhibit development, assisting visitors with research in the archive, managing photographic rights and reproductions and many more. My favorite and most challenging ongoing task was managing volunteers.
Since the HSLB has only three staff, volunteers are absolutely vital to their success. Managing volunteers was a small percentage of my responsibilities but our gracious volunteers donated their time and talents to the HSLB and it greatly increased the organization’s capacity to carry out their mission.
I want to share some of the wisdom I learned while managing volunteers in the hope that it will help other museum professionals and emerging museum professionals who are struggling with balancing volunteer management with their five-hundred-million other responsibilities.
Volunteers come in all ages and stages of life! The HSLB’s volunteers were retired professionals, high school students working for community service hours, university and community college interns and local history and collections enthusiasts. Some volunteers may be looking for an opportunity to give back to their community or a way to gain new skills. It is important to respect their willingness to donate their time and attention no matter how skilled or unskilled they may be. Treat your volunteers like employees-or better! When is the last time you asked a volunteer how they are doing and really listened to their answer? When is the last time you really thanked a volunteer for the work they’re doing? I made it a point to check in with my volunteers weekly. I loved to send each volunteer a handwritten thank you note in the mail when they finished a big project or we survived another event. Our volunteers need to know how much we appreciate them. I instituted annual volunteer appreciation day. The staff made dinner, we played board games together and each volunteer got a certificate acknowledging the amount of hours they had donated for the year. This was simple for us to plan and really made the volunteers feel like they make a difference in the organization. You don’t have to say yes to everyone! Not everyone is going to be a good fit to volunteer for your organization. Selecting volunteers should be a similar process to selecting an employee to hire. Volunteers are sometimes the face of your organization and can really help promote your organization. They can also spread the word if they had a bad experience volunteering with you. You want to select a volunteer that has similar goals as the goals of your organization. It is especially important to consider prior experience or the training necessary to make a volunteer a self-starter. It is possible that the best project to fit that person's needs and interests just hasn’t come along yet. All volunteers work differently! Some volunteers will need more direction than others. One of my greatest challenges was finding the best way to give direction to a volunteer who was openly struggling with a mental illness. They were happy to donate their time and their knowledge of local and regional history to work on a cataloging project but they were demanding a lot of my attention to answer questions about the cataloging procedure and the nuances of the project. This was taking away my attention from my other responsibilities and causing me to fall behind in my work. After consulting several volunteer management books and attending a local non-profit volunteer management roundtable session I decided to try only giving them instructions in writing with clear project dates, goals and checkpoints and a breakdown of the project procedure. Although this took a while for me to prepare, the result was a document in which they could refer back to if they had questions. Then, if their questions could not be answered in the document then they would consult with me. Managing volunteers is a wonderful experience. They really are the backbone of the HSLB and allow the organization to put on huge events such as the Annual Historical Cemetery Tour, now in it’s twenty-first year! I have had the pleasure of writing many glowing letters of recommendation allowing great volunteers to get their dream jobs and travel the world. I am so grateful that they’ve taught me so much about myself as a leader and as an emerging museum professional.
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ASHLEY FRANKS-MCGILLI will be updating this blog periodically with posts related to history, museums, collections and professional development. ARCHIVES
October 2017
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