Tillbakakaka

Tillbakakaka is a process that invites you to explore what is needed for your volunteers to create a sustainable volunteer engagement. The result of sustainable volunteer engagement is that your volunteers will stay longer as volunteers in your organizations and make their work more sustainable. With the aim of reaching your organizations goals.

In this exploration we will investigate where you are as an organization today in relation to your volunteers. And where you can invest to reach even higher goals!

We will include the volunteers and invite them to raise their voices about how they experience being a volunteer in your organization. We will acknowledge them and use the knowledge and the potential that is there. We will focus on what is working and what wants to emerge.

Tillbakakaka functions like an electric motor, you add it to what is already working in your vehicle to make it stronger and more sustainable. Both for your organization and for the world.

What makes Tillbakakaka special is that we focus especially on the typ of engagement that is self generating. Because we want to use our effort the best way possible we want to place the effort where they can generate the most. And we are experts in finding those places.

In our research we found three key factors to create ownership amongst the volunteers. These factors are; motivation, leadership and balance. The difference between longterm volunteers and short term volunteers was the conscience around these factors. The long term volunteers talk about how they considered and made decisions about them.

Volunteer engagement is the air in democracy
— Gudrun Schyman, famous Swedish politician.

Motivation, means to create an awareness of self chosen specify factors of motivation amongst volunteers.

Leadership, means to create an eagerness to be the owner of the wins of the volunteers engagement. It also means to make the motivation and wins tangible so that the volunteers can measure their wins and development. We are here talking about a personal leadership.

Balance, means to create an awareness about the playground. This means to map

out the different expectations of life, such as wanting to spend time with family, friends. Needs like earning money and working out. And within those expectations allow a reasonable expectations to yourself as a volunteer in the amount of volunteer work you want to do.

When a volunteer has this factors clear for themselves it becomes easy to listen in and adapt to the others expectations of themselves.

Ownership

Because sustainable volunteer engagement is owned by the volunteer it is the volunteer that needs to take responsibility for it. The role of the organization is to create the best circumstances for the volunteer to develop a sustainable engagement. The organization simply cant be the owner of sustainable volunteer engagement because the engagement was never theirs. It is simply something they borrow for the volunteers to grow bigger. Just like when you chose to invest money somewhere you take a chance and hope that the return will be bigger then the investment. It is up to the volunteer to make sure to do a good investment of their time and place it in a space where it can grow.

Tillbakakaka invites you as an organization to make a longterm investment. We want to challenge you to invest resources you have today, planed to go to your end beneficiaries, to be able to harvest bigger resources for the end beneficiaries in the future.

Tillbakakaka is not alone working for this change. Dan Pallotta has many years of experience in the non-profit sector. He speaks about how when a company with no intention to make the world a better place makes an investment and does not have a positive revenue in 12 months nobody questions it. But if a nonprofit does not have a 75% return of investments in 12 months it is viewed as a failure and their reputation is in danger.

In the article The Nonprofit Starvation Cycle, written by Ann Goggins Gregory and Don Howard they state- ”In our consulting work (....) we frequently find that our clients agree with the idea of improving infrastructure and augmenting their management capacity, yet they are loath to actually make these changes because they do not want to increase their overhead spending. But underfunding overhead can have disastrous effects, finds the Nonprofit Overhead Cost Study, a five year research project.

Many organizations fear loosing volunteers to other organizations. In my research I met volunteers that had continued their engagement but change organization. They told me that the reason they chose to change organization was because they did not feel listened to and that their tasks was not dynamic enough to both serve the purpose of the volunteers and the organization. Volunteers who had stayed in the same organization for many years also claimed as a reason for them staying that they felt part of co-creating what being a volunteer is in their organization. In Tillbakakakas process the volunteers are invited to raise their voices and take part in the development of their work.

When a volunteer choses to involve in an organization they always do research to understand the organizations values, vision and mission. If the organization represent what the volunteer want to represent that is a match. This also means that as long as the volunteer has a balanced experience of development and challenge they do not have a need to look for a new organization to engage in.

Concept value points

Tillbakakaka provides two groups value for them to create value for a third part.

Volunteers gain value in being the bosses over their own engagement and how they invest their time. They develop as volunteers and can spread this knowledge for the rest of their lives. Continuing being or not being a volunteer. To have create awareness about balance is skills that is easy to implement also in other parts of life. They make sure for themselves that they gain as much as they give being a volunteer.

The organizations gain value in keeping their volunteers longer by learning about motivation leadership and balance. They also gain a bigger understanding of their volunteers which will relief their workload. New structures will make an easier flow in the organization.

All this will create increased resources to gain the end beneficiaries of the organizations.

 

Do you want to know more? please contact Isabell

isabell.hedling@gmail.com

FOTO: Elin Johansson Krantz