Now that my group has worked together a few times, we have
come up with a few potential problems with our chosen service partner. For this
blog post, I thought I’d go over a few of these and explain how they hinder the
volunteer process from working at its full potential. The first problem we came
up with was the interest with volunteering. Since volunteers don’t get paid,
organizations must take necessary steps to ensure that their volunteers are
satisfied. Many people feel good about volunteering in the short term, although
many organizations have agendas that require time. What I mean by this is that
in order for these types of organizations to achieve their goals, they must
have dedicated volunteers. This ties into another problem we saw: awareness.
There are so many services that could benefit people yet remain wholly unknown.
This is where awareness comes into play. Organizations that provide service to
people have to advertise or promote this in the community. I know there are
many services even on campus that a lot of students either don’t know about or
don’t utilize. That is why gaining the attention of the target demographic is
essential in these organizations working effectively. Another potential problem
we saw involved the volunteer training. This also ties into the volunteer
interest. Some volunteer organizations require a lot of training for their
volunteers. For these especially it is important to retain volunteer interest
because it is a waste of time and resources to continually train new volunteers.
This is why we saw a potential problem with this aspect of volunteering. I
think there should be a larger emphasis on the efficiency of training
volunteers.
These are some good problems to focus on. It seems as if with every year the attention span of different people becomes shorter and shorter, despite the fact that we are supposed to have larger attention spans as we get older. Keeping interest can be really tough; especially if it just starts to become something habitual that never really changes. As for awareness, I think that you were exactly right when you talked about how hard different organizations have to work to promote themselves in their community and here on campus. I think I’ve heard of plenty of services that have an entire team devoted to raising awareness and working to bring people’s attention to their organization. As for training, I’ve never been in a volunteer situation where I received formal instruction before, but I think that most volunteering sites should offer training. Not necessarily because it’s really needed, but because at least a little basic training would serve the purpose of alleviating any nerves about starting tasks that volunteers may not have done before. Such as a quick tutorial on the manner in which emails should be answered just so volunteers have an idea of the level of formality or informality that needs to be used.
ReplyDeleteI think that your point about the problem of having dedicated volunteers is definitely a valid point, and I can see where it would be a large problem especially in college towns. Even for this English class we must commit ourselves to the service partner, but only until the first week of May. In my case, along with many others, this is hardly enough time to make ourselves feel comfortable in our particular volunteering location and for our volunteer location to have trust in us and know that we are dedicated. This can make it hard, like you said, for the service locations to achieve long term goals when us college students who are volunteering are only going to be there for a couple months if that. This also ties into the volunteer training; if the organizations take a long time to train their volunteers, then that’s even less time that the volunteer will actually be working there.
ReplyDeleteI know what you mean on all accounts. It is difficult to get volunteers to certain organizations because of interest, awareness and retention. I honestly would not have known to volunteer at Wolf Park unless the professor had pointed it out to me. I didn't even know it existed and it is such a major charity effort for this community. It relies solely on volunteers so getting the word out is vital. It also involves a lot of training which can put off some potential volunteers. The effort is well worth the experience of taking care of the wolves, but it is necessary to be there awhile to get to do the more interesting tasks. I think it would be a good idea for organizations that really need volunteers to advertise on campus because of the type of population the campus has. It is mostly either students who need volunteering experience or who want to be helpful. This is not to say that non college students don't like to volunteer but if you could only pick a few key strategic advertising spots, that would definitely be my first choice for a banner or sign to be placed.
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