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Bring us your Volunteers- and we’ll give you a way to manage them!

By Lindsay Bartlein posted Oct 26, 2015 01:00 PM

  

We’ve been talking about the awesome new upgrades that Higher Logic’s made to the Volunteer Manager module since August and last week’s Super Forum was no exception! 

We just can’t contain our excitement for the way Higher Logic’s Volunteer Manager successfully reflects our goals to increase volunteer engagement and provide admins with a way to recognize volunteer activity from the local to the national level. 

Higher Logic CEO Rob Wenger got the conversation started at Super Forum on Wednesday afternoon during the State of the Company address, where he highlighted the importance of volunteering and its impact on member engagement and retention. 

The volunteering discussions continued on Thursday with two sessions- aptly named Volunteer Manager- Parts 1 & 2. 

In Volunteer Manager- Part 1: Getting the Board of Directors Excited about Bake Sales, speaker Liz Messner, Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE), talks about how she was able to successfully restructure and ignite SPE’s volunteering initiatives with the help of Higher Logic’s Volunteer Manager.
She recounted the business strategy sessions that went into SPE’s adoption of Volunteer Manager and provided some excellent takeaways for others looking to do the same. Liz recommends that those implementing a volunteer program-

Get early buy-in from everyone- especially board! Volunteering needs to be considered a primary focus of the association, with attention to recruiting, retaining and rewarding volunteers at the forefront. 

Define your volunteer lifecycle and build a campaign around it. Much like launching a Higher Logic community site, implementing a new volunteer management system requires marketing. 

Reward and Recognize Volunteers! And Higher Logic’s volunteer manager helps with that by giving members a unique volunteer profile where they can display past volunteering activities, earn badges and sign up for new opportunities. 

Continuing the conversation in Volunteer Manager – Part 2: Engaging Members from Bake Sales to the Board of Directors, Higher Logic CEO, Rob Wegner, and Implementation Project Manager, Lindsay Bartlein, led an interactive session that prompted audience members to come up with volunteer opportunity types and individual opportunities that could be classified under those types. 

In my session, I was able to reiterate the fantastic new features of HL’s Volunteer Manager-  

Increasing engagement in volunteering

Ease of creating numerous opportunities

Tracking and Reporting volunteering at all levels 

Usability

Recognition and Rewarding Volunteers 

And in addition to that, Rob and I were able to field questions and involve the audience in a brainstorming session where we discussed different categories of volunteering activities known in HL’s Volunteer Manager as opportunity types

This brainstorming of volunteer opportunity types is one of the first steps in the implementation of Higher Logic’s Volunteer Manager because these types provide the foundation from which all individual opportunities are created and managed. 

In listening to the participants in the session, it was very apparent that volunteering means something a little different to everyone, and ultimately it is an untapped resource that can lead to a wealth of member engagement opportunities. 

Through the use of HL’s Volunteer Manager, we at Higher Logic are striving to help clients maximize and track volunteer opportunities, and I look forward to helping our clients implement it for their members over the coming months! 

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