When facing problems as a nonprofit, your first instinct may be to turn and enlist help in the form of adding an ongoing volunteer role to your team. While ongoing volunteers have the potential to positively impact your organization, volunteer projects are organized to solve a specific problem, fulfill a need, or capitalize on an opportunity.

What's the Difference?

Ongoing volunteer roles are multi-month commitments where the volunteers engage in continuous or regular tasks. Volunteer projects on the other hand bring a group of skilled volunteers together to solve a specific goal set out by the organization.

Why Your Organization Might Need Volunteer Projects Instead of More Ongoing Roles

1. Get the help you need (rather than what you think you need)

With projects come scoping, or detailed planning, which allows for deeper analysis of the root issue as well as what is required to solve the problem. Do you need a volunteer to help with HR an hour a week or do you just need a group of HR specialists to help you create a more efficient HR strategy? Do you need an ongoing web developer for routine maintenance or would a project revamping and simplifying the website suffice? By closely analyzing the issue, you may find opportunities to enlist help for projects rather than simple role additions.

2. Efficiency

While progress can occur over the course of many months with enlisted ongoing roles, having a group of experts to tackle a problem would ensure that the project is completed efficiently without compromising on quality. Not only would teamwork speed up the process, your organization is now introduced to more perspectives and ideas to figure out what is best to reach your goals. This goal oriented nature of volunteer projects can greatly increase the impact and quality of the outcomes.

3. Easier to Keep Track

With a clear goal and timeframe in mind, it is easier to keep track of key metrics such as resources, volunteer hours, and performance indicators. Ongoing roles often result in slower progress as well as more flexible goals, but being able to keep data contained to a certain time frame and ideal outcome increases focus and productivity.

Volunteer projects have the potential to elevate organizations to newer heights, but they can't be fulfilled without volunteers to take part in them. Looking for volunteers? Post your project(s) on Purposely where you can reach over 2000+ volunteers for free as a nonprofit.

Still stuck on how to go about executing a volunteer project? Check out our previous blog post about how to transform your nonprofit with projects and stay tuned for our next blog post to learn more about how you can gain insight from consultation calls with professionals!