In a presentation I did a number of years ago, I had the audience stand in a circle. Each person passed a ball of yarn, holding one point and unravelling it, to another person in the circle with whom they had some sort of relationship. The relationships could be personal, work related, chatted with them while waiting for the presentation to start, whatever. I asked them to state what that relationship was. If they got the yarn a second time, they couldn’t pass it to the same person. By the end of about 10 minutes, the circle was filled with an intricate net of relationships.
The point of the exercise was to show people that our relationships create a safety net that can catch us when we start to fall.
Volunteer involving organisations have that same safety net. Think of the relationships that exist between the leader of volunteers and the volunteers themselves, between the leader and other staff, between staff and board, between board and funders, between staff and volunteers, and on and on and on. The stronger those relationships are, the safer and more resilient the organisation is.
But it’s not just the strength of the relationships; it’s the number of them. If there is only one line in your “net”, it won’t be much of a net! And it won’t likely catch anyone, no matter how strong it is. We need to build relationships with as many different groups as possible. In the model above, I have drawn in the relationship lines between the groups that I feel ought to have a strong relationship. To save time, I kept the model pretty simple. I could have split up the executive and other staff, and I could have broken out community partners into clients, corporate partnerships, collaboration partners, etc. Anyway, there are fourteen relationship lines, not counting the relationships within specific groups, such as volunteers with volunteers. The solid lines are those that typically exist; the broken lines are those that usually don’t.
It’s the broken ones that concern me.
This is what the net of relationships looks like without them:
There are very clear areas where I wouldn’t trust it to catch the organisation if it fell. It worries me that the weak points seem to be the board (leadership) and the funders (resources). Why does the board usually (and I know there are exceptions) not have a strong relationship with the leader of volunteers? How can it make good decisions without understanding how the largest part of their workforce is engaged? And if funders had a strong relationship with other parts of the organisation, they would have a better understanding of it’s needs and could support it better. And so on.
Really, the only two groups where I don’t see a need for a strong relationship is between the funders and the volunteers. And even there, some sort of relationship would be helpful, as many volunteers also donate money.
So why is it that those relationships don’t exist, or are only very tenuous?
I believe that it comes down to two main factors. First, I think a lot of boards or funders just don’t see the need for it. Second, and partly because of the first, they have trouble finding the time to develop those relationships. Let’s face it, if it’s not a priority, then the time won’t be found. So, how do we make it a priority?
We often lean on education. The better they understand the risks of not having those relationships, we think, the more likely it is they will focus attention on it. Cognitive experts, though, tell us that knowing something intellectually rarely changes our behaviour. If knowledge isn’t paired with emotion, it remains abstract. For someone to actually change their behaviour, there usually has to be a strong emotional trigger. It’s why I’ve “known” for years that I should floss my teeth daily, but it took an abscess before I actually started.
We need to add emotion to our facts.
That’s easier with boards than funders, of course. Most board members already have an emotional connection to the organisation and it’s cause. They care what happens to it. Or at least they care about not having it fail on their watch. You can leverage that.
Funders are harder, but not impossible. They care about return on investment. There are organisations that folded because they could only get funding for “project” or “client-facing” work, and they couldn’t make payroll. Remind the funder about them. Then invite their representative to an open house or your volunteer appreciation event so they can gain a deeper understanding what your needs actually are. It won’t solve everything, but it’ll at least be a start.
For volunteer involving organisations, and volunteer programs specifically, a strong safety net of relationships is the key to resilience.
