Next Steps to Utilizing Skilled Volunteers in Projects
We’ve said it before and it’s worth saying again. Skilled volunteers are professionals who use their skills & expertise to help a nonprofit. They could be marketers, computer programmers, HR professionals, accountants, or pretty much any profession you can imagine. At Purposely, we work with companies that employ these professionals. Nonprofits can then leverage the expertise of these professionals by posting skilled volunteer roles and creating projects!
Successful project scoping is a constant, multifaceted challenge for project leaders and their helpers. With so many moving parts within your organization, it can be hard to pinpoint the exact thing you want to achieve, while at the same time organizing tasks to accurately explain to the volunteers what it is they are doing. In doing so, it is my hope that you help build wonderful experiences for your volunteers.
For project scoping, we have an easy to follow methodology that I’ll lay out for you:
1. Establish a Need
Figure out the need for the project or a problem you would like solved. It’s the basic first step in Project Scoping - coming up with the idea to solve the problem! We talked about this in our feature blog post on Opportunity Templates, which is a great help for any organization starting a project.
2. Description
A relatively minor, yet important step is the project description. Being as specific as possible with your description will allow your project scope to be clear and concise. By providing a description of your organization and the idea behind your mission, your project will be intriguing to the right people you need and allow them to understand your goals.
3. Project Deliverables*
We will talk about this thoroughly in this blog post. Our main goal here is to outline the main deliverables and outcomes you want to see within your project. There are a bunch of strategies as well as tools to help you do this!
4. Timeline
This is a crucial last step that involves you, your staff, and skilled volunteers! We’ll get into this step quite a bit more in future blogs, but essentially, building a timeline helps structure tasks in order to complete the project in a timely manner.
How You Should Think About Project Deliverables
Project Deliverables are the steps you need to undertake in order to complete your new project. This includes everything, such as onboarding volunteers, paperwork needed to get the project going, setting the parameters of the project, and the actionable tasks towards project completion.
When working with volunteers, these deliverables are instrumental to organizing your workforce, orchestrating their tasks, and what they each need to do so that the project is building clear goals in a smooth and consistent manner.
Do this, and you’ll not only have a completed project in a set definable time period, but your volunteer engagement will be better than ever! I’ll get into why that is so important.
The Quickest Way to Get Help
When you inevitably begin scoping out your project's deliverable actions, one of the best things you can do is go on Purposely and check out our Opportunity Templates!
We talked about how these templates are great for getting ideas rolling in our last blog post - but we’ve made them just as helpful in scoping out Project Deliverables as well.
When you browse our template options, you will find that each Project has clearly defined needs, time commitments, and tasks involved.
For example, you are interested in starting an Email Marketing Campaign project that you just found on Purposely’s templates.
The Deliverables will outline what you need (We want to start a new online fundraising campaign), how much time it will take (about 4 hours each week for 3 weeks), and what tasks completion will be measured against (We need a volunteer to write compelling copy for 3-5 email sequences).
The volunteer can now take these objectives in hand and help you complete this project.
Easy for you, easy for them!
The Professional Way to Get Help
Another great feature of Templates is that they can be Consultations!
Consultation calls are 30-to-60-minute chats with a professional in Purposely’s network. We connect you with project managers, HR consultants, and administrators who have all been where you are now. Being able to post a consultation request and get feedback from skilled volunteers makes our team at Purposely really excited.
What is great about Consultations is that they can take place at any point in the Project process. If you have step 1 in the bag and have questions that fall outside the Deliverables that we provide, then talking to an expert about those things is the best way to stay informed and create a stellar project for your organization.
Check out our blog post on Consultation Calls and see how you can transform your project in less than an hour!
The Importance of Being Earnest
Purposely works with skilled volunteers all the livelong day - it’s our bread and butter!
We know that creating great environments for volunteers is the surefire way to keep them! Volunteers today want to live and work in environments that promote positive workplace culture and actively give back to community organizations. Promoting that within your organization is going to resonate with them a lot.
Creating these shared spaces of learning and growth takes time, and there is no single recipe, but building a transparent organizational structure and support system for volunteers is a great foundation. Using the steps we’ve outlined; finding an idea and what it means, building tasks and timelines for it, and actioning skilled volunteers, all build an experience that is clearly defined.
By being organized and transparent, your volunteers know they are not getting into something that they aren’t prepared for. Project scoping is projected confidence! An experience that will allow them to grow and learn!
It is my hope that by taking in some of these ideas, you will help build wonderful experiences for your volunteers. It’s what will keep them coming back and start them playing even larger roles within your organization.
