Social Innovation and the Coming Age of Volunteerism

It is said that we are at the dawn of a great, new age of Volunteerism in America. In the last couple of years, there has been any number of articles written about citizen innovators and volunteers engaging in grassroots-level social innovation initiatives—in areas ranging from public school education and disaster recovery to environment and green energy.

Two distinct sets (or generations) of volunteers have emerged: the first set includes members of the baby boomer generation who have retired recently and are looking for “meaningful civic engagement roles”; the second set includes young adults of the (Obama-inspired?) Millennium generation who increasingly consider volunteering for nonprofits as a way of life.

There is no better indicator of this volunteer fever in America than the number of young graduates from top universities who regularly sign up with the Teach for America (TFR) program. TFR is a nonprofit organization that recruits and places fresh graduates in challenging urban and rural teaching jobs throughout the country. Strictly speaking it is not a volunteer task – participants in TFR (called ‘corps members’) do get paid an annual salary, typically around $35,000. However, given that most of these graduates from top-tier universities could have pursued much more remunerative job opportunities elsewhere, it is as good as volunteerism. The program has become so successful that for the 2009 academic year the acceptance rate for new recruits is close to 15% (lower than that of most top-tier Wall Street firms!).

While these and other examples lend proof to the large influx of potential volunteers showing up at the doorsteps of the nation’s numerous nonprofit organizations, the critical question remains: How well prepared are the nonprofit organizations to engage with all these volunteers? Or, do the nonprofits have the ability to tap into and channel the creativity and expertise of this emerging volunteer workforce, to solve key social problems?

Based on my own ongoing research on social innovation, the answer, unfortunately, is No. 

Nonprofit organizations’ challenge of involving citizen volunteers in social innovation initiatives is not much unlike that of business organizations in partnering with customers in innovation and value creation. Customers act largely as volunteer innovators in the private sector; most often, they do not derive any monetary gains from their activities. As research shows, companies that are successful in engaging their customers in innovation activities are those that create “valuable experiences” for customer innovators and bring a lot of clarity and transparency to the innovation process. These and other lessons from the private sector imply three key issues for consideration for nonprofits confronted with the ‘volunteer challenge’:

• Does the nonprofit organization have a strategic approach towards engaging volunteers in its activities? (Identifying the organization’s expertise/skill gap, mapping out the roles that the volunteers will play to fill those gaps; etc.)

• Is the nonprofit organization structured to truly embrace volunteers as partners in its activities? (Establishing communication channels between volunteers and paid-staff; offering orientation and training programs for volunteers; implementing processes to integrate the inputs from the volunteers; etc.)
  

• Can the nonprofit organization offer “meaningful experiences” for its volunteers? (Assigning tasks that are aligned with the individual volunteer’s skills and interests; enhancing the transparency of the activities so that impact of the volunteer’s contributions is clarified; etc.)
  

Teach for America is a good example of a nonprofit that has been successful in addressing all of the above three issues. Hopefully, other nonprofit organizations can learn from TFR and prepare themselves to leverage the coming wave of volunteers.

If they do, then we will likely see a revolution in social innovation—one that is truly grassroots-driven and with enduring social impact!

Comments

[Terrance Moran]

In your experiences are there any examples of NPs who do a good job integrating volunteers and bringing them in closer for meaningful work or filling skill gaps?

My sense is that there's a social psychology un-discussable at play. The managers of the NP are on the hook to deliver programs that depend on volunteers. The volunteers come and go, do the work or not, with out any consequences. In essence the NP takes what it can get and struggles with how to work with curmudgeons and no-shows as the boomer volunteers don't feel as if they "must" produce or show if they don't feel like it. Given its volunteers the NP must manage around this dynamic.
I am curious how expectations can be managed and standards of performance can be integrated so that minimal and needed behaviors can be discussed at the front end.