Member Spotlight: How One Member Rebuilt Her Nonprofit Volunteer Program with No Previous Experience 

Welcome back to another member spotlight, where we feature some of the ups and the downs and everything in between of what it’s really like to work as a leader of a nonprofit volunteer program.   

Follow along and learn how our members are taking action and getting traction with their volunteer management strategies!

This month, I spoke with Jolene Rudisill, Volunteer Coordinator for Gilda’s Club Madison.  

Valerie: Hello and welcome Jolene! I’d love to hear a bit about your organization and how you work with volunteers to start us off!  

Jolene: Sure. I work for Gilda’s Club Madison. We are an emotional and social support community for anyone impacted by a cancer diagnosis of any kind, at any stage and their entire family. Because it doesn’t just happen to one person, we support the whole family.  

I am the volunteer coordinator for our organization and so I recruit, onboard, give informational sessions and just about everything to do with volunteers.  

Valerie: That’s something I hear a lot in the conversations I have with volunteer managers, that the job is just so big. There’s so much variation in your role day-to-day.  

How many volunteers do you work with in the space of a year?  

Jolene: I would say 75 to 100. It depends on what’s going on. COVID this year was very odd, so we haven’t had a whole lot of volunteer interaction this last year, but we do have some volunteers that lead healthy living classes, like yoga and Tai Chi. 

We’ve got some volunteers that are teaching art classes and all kinds of things to help reduce the stress of the person that’s on this cancer journey and everyone around them.  

Valerie: I wonder if it’s much like hospice are a lot of your volunteers coming from a background where they have that kind of personal connection to the work. 

Jolene: Yes, and unfortunately a lot of the opportunities that we have for volunteers aren’t directly interacting with our members, which is what most people come to us wanting to do. So, I have to say, okay, well, this is important too, right?  

Jolene’s Challenge:  Re-Engaging an Underwhelming Nonprofit Volunteer Program  

Valerie: I’d love to know, what drew you into this kind of work?  

Jolene: I was drawn to Gilda’s Club because I have a family history of cancer and I was a huge Gilda Radner fan. 

When I started my job in 2017, I had never been a volunteer coordinator of any kind before. So, I was just doing what the person previous to me had done and following all the instructions from everyone around me in the organization.  

Then I started thinking, there’s got to be a better way to do all of this and to connect with people.  

Valerie: Is that when you learned about VolunteerPro and Tobi Johnson?  

Jolene: Yes, initially I was searching the internet for ways to recruit volunteers. And I stumbled upon one of Tobi’s eBooks. So, I downloaded that, and I started reading it. Then,  I followed her blog, and I followed the Facebook page, and read more and more.  

When I read Tobi’s book, I was like, wait, what? All of this is part of my job? It was really overwhelming!  

Valerie: Other than beating that sense of overwhelm and learning the ropes of volunteer management, what other challenges were you facing when you took on your role as volunteer coordinator?  

Jolene: Well, I was looking for recruitment resources because I thought that my problem was that we didn’t have enough volunteers. I had in our database a big, long list of people that were classified as volunteers, over 500!  

Yet, when I would send out calls for volunteers to do things, I’d hear from the same 15-20 people all the time. And I’m thinking, okay, are they the only ones that are actually reading this stuff?  

So, I was looking for ways to recruit and to retain our volunteers because I thought that was my problem.  

But then I found out that there was a whole lot more behind the scenes before you got to the recruitment part. And when I started looking around at the information that had been left to me by the previous volunteer coordinator, I couldn’t find most of that information. 

I had to figure out how to do these things, how to create these documents and such from scratch because they didn’t exist in our organization. 

Jolene’s Objective: Rebuilding a Volunteer Program from the Ground Up  

Valerie: So, the recruitment piece brought you into VolunteerPro, but once you got in and learned more about what goes into it, your goal and objective clearly changed.  

Jolene: Yes, so when I started it was clear that I would need to pretty much revamp the entire program.  

I started with doing a risk assessment. I put together a new handbook because the one that we had basically just gave the volunteer role descriptions. I rewrote the volunteer role descriptions because they were vague and not really appealing to read. They weren’t something that you read and say, “Hey, that sounds like fun. Let’s go do that.”  

I wouldn’t say that I am completely finished rebuilding and revamping this program. It seems like every time I think I’ve gotten one aspect finished, Tobi will say something and I’m like, oh, I didn’t think of it that way!  

Jolene’s Results: A Whole New Look and Feel to the Volunteer Program 

Valerie:  Outside of having more structure in your volunteer program, what else has changed for you?  

Jolene: I was able to put out some surveys to our volunteers and get some feedback from them on what kinds of things they wanted to do and who was interested in continuing to get all these messages from me.  

As a result, I was able to pair our database entries down from over 500 to about 150 or so that now I’m getting to the people that are going to respond and are interested in volunteering.  

I completed the volunteer handbook. My director is reviewing that now.  

And I’ve rewritten the volunteer application.  

I’ve set up a different way of doing orientation and onboarding, because I didn’t realize before listening to some of Tobi’s classes, how different those two things are supposed to be, and that wasn’t the way it was happening in our organization. So, I changed it up and it’s worked a lot better.  

Valerie: I imagine it has an impact on volunteer satisfaction and then retention. The more they are satisfied with their experience the longer they stick around!  

 Jolene: Yes, absolutely!  

What Jolene Wants You to Know 

Valerie: What would you say to someone who is in the same position as you were, learning a new role with limited direction? 

Jolene: I would say, there is a place you can go to be more confident and do your job well. You just have to jump right in. That’s what I had to do, and I really have not regretted it.  

If anything, I have too much information now! I just have to figure out what will work for me.  

There’s so much more that exists than I ever knew, because before starting in this position, I didn’t even know this was a job. Come to find out it’s a whole lot more of a job than anybody prepared me for it to be.