Change With Your Change

Volunteer management is very much about people and sometimes you never know what's going to work for a certain group of people. In many instances, volunteers have been around longer than you've had your job (or even started a career path). This can make change challenging for someone with brand-new ideas that sound great on paper, but don't go anywhere in reality.

http://www.ideachampions.com/weblogs/archives/2011/04/1_it_is_not_the.shtml 

 

In my case, I have attempted to introduce a peer-to-peer recognition system for the volunteers at the museum. Despite heavy marketing on my part (weekly e-mail reminders, feature in the newsletter, talking it up to volunteers, fliers, etc), the volunteers were not participating in this program. Maybe they haven't seen a volunteer do something good (highly doubtful) or they just aren't ready to try out the new system.

As this program wasn't working, I decided to expand to staff. At first, nothing but a few comments about how cool this program sounded. Then after a big event at the museum, the recognition cards came pouring in (12... that's quite a bit for a new program). Due to this response,  I'm focusing this program more on staff recognition of volunteers rather than volunteers recognizing volunteers and hoping that they go with the flow.

http://www.quiddlebee.com/comics/go-with-the-flow/