Wednesday Buzz: A Double Dose of Volunteer Wisdom

Volunteer efforts are always appreciated. But one of the biggest hurdles is often the training and professional development required to turn eager volunteers into effective workers.

In a guest post for VolunteerMatch  (opens in a new tab), Alec Green, chief marketing evangelist at Cornerstone OnDemand Foundation, says online training can help solve those professional development difficulties.

“More and more, online training is becoming a popular solution to this challenge,” he writes. “That’s because it’s getting easier to do. Free e-learning resources such as NonprofitReady.org  (opens in a new tab) are available for nonprofits. (That particular open online learning site includes 200+ learning resources covering all the major job functions in the nonprofit sector!)”

But once volunteers are trained, you need to hold on to them. Isabel Williams, a human resource specialist at BizDb  (opens in a new tab), has her own post on VolunteerMatch that outlines the five ways your organization can easily lose volunteer interest:

1. Lack of clear organization
2. No concrete goals
3. Failing to recognize their contribution
4. No strong leadership
5. Lack of training or investment

For more on the subject, read her full cautionary tale  (opens in a new tab) of disorganized organizations and fleeing volunteers.

Study of the Day

Do marketers actually know which channels are netting them the best returns? Emarketer  (opens in a new tab) highlights a Webmarketing123 study  (opens in a new tab) that finds that despite the analytics suites available for digital channels, many marketers are still in the dark about how their efforts affect bottom lines.

Other Good Reads

“You can’t move a company forward on ‘tips and tricks’ — and that includes marketing,” B2B software solution consultant and analyst Julie Hunt writes in a guest post  (opens in a new tab) for CMSWire.

Already on Gmail, Gchat, and YouTube? Then maybe you should check out Google’s other helpful, but less familiar, offerings, which Jeremy Goldman explains on Inc.  (opens in a new tab)

If your association calls on consultants for help, you may want to review these three recommendations for optimizing your investment  (opens in a new tab) in their services, from Forbes Insights.

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