Te enfrentas a obstáculos de comunicación entre los voluntarios y el personal. ¿Cómo se puede cerrar la brecha de manera efectiva?

Volunteers are the backbone of most nonprofits. So they are neither overlooked or taken for granted, it's a good idea to assign a staff member to act as the Volunteer Liaison. This prevents multiple staff members asking various volunteers to do things that have already been assigned, accomplished, or are outside of the volunteer's abilities. The volunteer liaison will be the one to understand staff needs and individual volunteer abilities. The volunteer liaison is also the one to ensure the volunteers feel seen and appreciated for their contributions so they want to continue to help.

In my experience, communication needs to be in multiple ways to reach volunteers. In my current position, we have an email, facebook page, meetings, and events to engage and share information with volunteers. After meetings, notes are shared with those not able to be present. Ensuring volunteers feel heard and valuable is key for them to return and be engaged.

To bridge those gaps, start by making an effort to understand the goals, priorities, and constraints of other teams. Put yourself in their shoes and try to see things from their perspective. This empathy will help you communicate in a way that resonates with them and finds common ground.

Experience shows that volunteer perspectives are often undervalued by the staff team because there is a goal divergence. While the mission may be clear, the approach taken by each group can be very different - and the feedback of volunteer perspectives against mission is often lacking. Trustees have a significant role in shaping internal communications but they often fall short of overseeing this important area of their responsibility - instead they rely on the paid staff team to manage those channels. This can lead to a focus on staff priorities such as delivery against targets, budget, pleasing funders etc. These are important, but often fall short of the volunteer perspective which can round out overall contributions to mission.

I think it is important to create a culture that welcomes and understands volunteers. You have to be a volunteer friendly culture. You have to recognize that they are taking their time to give back, that they more than likely have other obligations, and that sometimes your organizational needs are not number one. I think when you create a culture that keeps all of that in the forefront, then you began to understand the volunteers better, and when you share with them your common goal for your agency, you can work together through anything. If there is a gap in communication, you have to be willing to push through to gather understanding and that means understanding everyone's needs in the situation.

f there are communication issues between staff and volunteers, I place the primary responsibility on the backs of paid staff. Winning organizations ensure dependable and regular communication from the non-profit to all of its stakeholders, especially volunteers who are donating the most precious of all gifts -- their time. But if there are issues with volunteers, leadership should swiftly step in and actively listen to volunteers about their concerns and find out precisely what kind of information they would like to receive and how they would like to receive it. Then leadership should visit with staff and work on the implementation, depending on the reasonableness of the requests, as soon and as enthusiastically as possible.

Especially for volunteers that may be doing this work in addition to a full-time job or full-time responsibilities, it can be helpful to get an idea of which communication methods they are using most effectively! For example, if texts will reach the most people as opposed to a new app everyone needs to download, it may be work investing in a text communication platform. In addition to that, ensure that the channels you do use have all the information and updates for volunteers to access on any platform.