Volunteer Management and Boards of Directors

With few exceptions, nonprofits view board volunteers as distinctly different from direct service volunteers. As a result, boards of directors are separated from the routine volunteer management processes developed to ensure more effective volunteering for everyone else. Most volunteer program managers typically have little or nothing to do with the management of the volunteer experience of those who serve as board members. How could a skilled volunteer program manager be of help to the board and to the CEO most responsible for working with them? There are many ways to help. More

How to Manage Volunteers in Difficult Economic Times

A study conducted by The Independent Sector, a not-for-profit organization, confirms that when people are worried about their personal economic situation, overall giving and volunteering drops. Their facts suggest that giving drops by more than 50 percent and volunteering by close to 50 percent. So how are we going to manage volunteers in what many are describing as difficult economic times? More

Planning and Conducting Effective Training Sessions

Conducting an effective training session begins with appropriate preparation. Use the provided recommendations to plan an agenda that meets your training objectives, but allows for the flexibility to respond to audience needs during the session. Excerpted from section three of the Corporation for National and Community Service's Making an Impact on Out-Of-School Time by the National Institute on Out-of-School Time. More

Supervising the Invisible Volunteer

One of the biggest challenges in management is supervising those volunteers who work outside the normal office setting. These workers may be separated from their supervisors in a number of ways, such as being assigned to a field office, which is geographically separated from the headquarters, or in a job which requires them to work alone in a field setting. This separation, while small in appearance, is quite significant in practice. Anyone who has ever worked in a separated environment realizes the increased potential for frustration, inefficiency, dissatisfaction and occasionally even outright revolt. Those volunteers often come to believe that the central office doesn’t understand the “real problems” and those in the central offices see those in the field as not seeing the “big picture.” More

Ten PowerPoint Tips: Keep Your Audience Awake

PowerPoint slides can hold text, data points, charts, tables, photos, videos and sound effects, which you plug in to any of the many available templates. Making a presentation regarding a company event on July 4th? See the fireworks template. Is a video from YouTube essential to your presentation? See the "Insert Movie" functionality. To help you get started, CIO.com asked Ayca Yuksel, the product manager for Microsoft Office PowerPoint, to share five design tips and five technical tricks for those who are new to the application. Here are his 10 best tips as well as instructions on how to get at the functionalities in PowerPoint 2007. More

Keep Your System Safe: Email Security

According to Proofpoint, an email security specialist, email is already the primary outlet of data leakage and we are only just seeing the tip of the iceberg. Identification of data leakage, either deliberate or unintentional, will continue to grow. To help companies protect both themselves and their staff from data loss mishaps, Proofpoint has come up with following "Safer Email" top tips for businesses and employees. More

Improving Communication for Managers

Research indicates that managers spend somewhere between fifty and eighty percent of their total time communicating in one way or the other. This isn't surprising, since communication is so critical to everything that goes on in an organization. Without effective communication there can be little or no performance management, innovation, understanding of clients, coordination of effort – and without effective communication it is difficult to manage the expectations of those who are in a position to make decisions about your fate. More

How to Supervise Difficult Employees

Most employees exercise good judgment, follow company policy and listen to reason. But this is not true of all employees. Some won't change their work habits or behavior without a confrontation. These people are often irrational, unreasonable and practically impossible. A few can be entirely outrageous, boisterous and super aggressive. These are the times supervisors must disagree without being disagreeable. The heavy hand - if it ever worked - doesn't work today. More