I regularly hear frustration from party members about the problems we have in engaging our members. They know other members that have the skills to create good materials or work on our website, or are willing to make phone calls or go door-to-door. They ask why we aren't activating these members to do more volunteer work for the party.

The problem here is not that the party doesn't want or need the help of volunteers. Rather, the problem is that activating volunteers is a lot of work! The volunteer needs to be trained, the work we want them to do needs to be clearly defined and integrated into a larger plan, the materials to do their job need to collected and distributed, the progress of the work needs to be tracked, and so on. A breakdown at any step along the way means that the initiative to activate the volunteer work will be less than successful.

In my experience, the prepatory work and training required just to get each new volunteer up to speed can take a time investment of several hours from an experienced staff member or volunteer. Then there is the ongoing work to monitor progress. Consider that there is a close parallel to the business world, where few managers are expected to coordinate the work of more than (say) 10 employees. So if we want to activate 100 new volunteers working 10 hours per month, we need to have at least 10 other more experienced volunteers working at least 10 hours per month to direct their work. Trying to activate 1000 volunteers adds another tier to the volunteer-based organization. Activating new volunteers in these numbers is too much work for our over-worked staff to do on their own, which is why it currently isn't being done.

I think there is a belief in the party, based on anecdotal experience and small-scale volunteer projects, that our "grassroots" members can and will self-organize if the central party just gets out of the way. However, consider two of our successful medium-scale volunteer efforts: the 2004 Living Platform project and the recent second-place finish by Elizabeth May in the London North Centre by-election. In both cases, we had at least a couple of hundred volunteers involved. But there were also key staff members and volunteers who were working full-time to direct the work of other volunteers. These two efforts show that volunteer initiatives can work, but that they need to be carefully managed. If they are not, they can and will lead to the burnout of key volunteers and staff in the long-term.

A rough estimate that I use when considering how many volunteers we can bring to bear on a task is that about 1 in 10 members will volunteer at some level, and 1 in 100 members will have the skills, initiative, and time to be long-term leaders.  Both types of volunteers are to be valued and are essential to the growth of the organization.  I think those numbers accurately reflect our current membership base: of our 10,000 members, about 100 are long-term leaders and 1000 have done volunteer work on a semi-regular basis. In my experience, these numbers are consistent at all levels of the party and are achievable without any sort of coordinated volunteer program.

So the first, and best, thing we can do to get more volunteers involved is to recruit more members. The number of volunteers we can activate will always be constrained primarily by the size of our membership base. On the positive side, we can always expect that a certain percentage of those members will self-select themselves into volunteer roles.

The second thing to do is define a volunteer program that is focused on delivering skills and training to volunteers who want to take the step of moving from an "on-the-ground" volunteer to a volunteer who is willing to step back and start directing the work of others. It is probably possible to slowly increase the above percentages of members who volunteer (despite the natural inclination of most people to not want to do anything :-) We can also be more effective at coordinating the work of those who do volunteer. The long-term success of this program will be dependent on developing a skilled middle management volunteer infrastructure in the party.

This is one of a series of articles examining how to fix key problems facing the GPC.