How to Fix the Disconnect Over Volunteer Effectiveness

Volunteers are crucial to an association’s success: Board members are typically uncompensated, and bylaws usually require the creation of several standing volunteer committees. But despite building volunteering into the core of their work, associations are often uncertain about what role volunteers are supposed to play and how to measure their effectiveness.

One piece of evidence to that effect comes from a new ASAE Research Foundation report, A Holistic Approach to Association Volunteer Management  (opens in a new tab), which reveals a disconnect between association staff and volunteers. While nearly half of association volunteers (46 percent) rated their fellow volunteers as “highly effective,” less than a third of association staffers (29 percent) gave their volunteers the same ranking.

Part of the challenge, says Mariner Management President and Executive Director Peggy Hoffman, FASAE, CAE, is a lack of clarity about what “effective” means.

“If you ask volunteers, many will tell you that they’re doing everything and that the organization couldn’t exist without them, when in fact what they’re doing is perhaps not moving the needle,” Hoffman said. “Without valid, objective metrics, there’s no meaningful accountability, and ‘effectiveness’ remains a purely subjective assessment.”

Lindsay Currie, CAE, executive officer of the Council on Undergraduate Research (and chair of the foundation study’s research advisory council), has been working on this challenge with her own association’s volunteer pool. One issue, she says, is that CUR’s volunteer structure hasn’t been substantially updated in the 45 years since its founding, and its organizational policy focuses more on board governance, with little guidance on other volunteer roles.

“We really needed to reevaluate our programs to make sure that we were actually clear about what being a volunteer meant,” Currie said.

To that end, CUR has a task force that is working on retooling both its board governance and its general volunteering model. Some things have become clear through that process, she says. Requiring committees to be subject to the bylaws is a roadblock to change. CUR also has a large council of elected members that define volunteer roles—more than 300 people serving three-year terms, with no term limits. That structure has closed off opportunities to younger members and has further limited flexibility.

“What we’re trying to do is diversify the number of volunteer opportunities and establish clear roles and responsibilities, so we can leverage different talents and interests,” Currie said.