PLA 2012 session notes: Get Involved: Powered by Your Library -- Successful Engagement of High Impact Volunteers

Following are my notes from the "Get Involved: Powered by Your Library -- Successful Engagement of High Impact Volunteers" session at PLA 2012, held on Saturday, March 17 at 8:30.

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Statewide volunteerism campaign in CA: "Get Involved powered by your library"

- Aim = get high-impact volunteers and make them advocates

- Volunteer recruitment aimed at baby boomers, who are different from senior volunteers

- Goals: train public libraries in recruiting and engaging skilled high-impact volunteers, position libraries as centers for civic engagement, help people find opportunities that match their skills and interests

Baby boomers and volunteerism

Why should we care?

* Lots of them (77 million)

* Most educated and financially secure generation in history

* Volunteer at higher rates than past generations did at the same age

* Nearly 2/3 of Boomer non- volunteers want to get involved but don’t know how

* Have been in workforce & have professional skills they want to share to make high level of impact

Right now, ages 48-66 – not silver-haired

Different from senior volunteers

* More physical ability than previous generations; 4 of 5 expect to work past 65; "feel younger"

* View retirement very differently -- see second half of life as a source of social and individual renewal, not as a time to just rest and relax

* Think some of their most important contributions lie ahead

* Not simply extending the years of working and volunteering -- looking to add deeper meaning

* Different perception of aging -- don’t want to be called “Seniors,” “Retirees,” “Elderly” or “Older Adults”

Attracting baby boomers

Offer flexibility and a wide variety of options, including virtual volunteering

Engage their skills and expertise

Show them impact on mission -- how will their work make a difference?

Provide clear expectations of time, tasks and training

Go beyond volunteer management – look at engagement in meaningful ways

See Get Involved: Powered By Your Library website for resources (library.ca.gov/lds/getinvolved.html?)

Idaho is now coming in on this project

VolunteerMatch created search widget that gives back multiple results – library opportunities, then literacy opportunities, than general opportunities near your zip code

Last 2 or 3 years, 27% increase in volunteers in California

General insights/thoughts from putting this in practice

One library no longer collects applications for generic volunteers, only for specific positions

High impact volunteers have leadership roles, may train and supervise other volunteers

Putting volunteers in teams helps in case of turnover (volunteers often have unpredictable time commitments)

Interview volunteers extensively and basically treat them like job applicants

Volunteer management software exists

Lessons

A good job description is key

- Make it very clear what skills and commitment you're looking for

For high impact volunteers, this is a real job

- Approach them personally to recruit them

- Professional level interviewing

- Look for a good fit, and give them a chance to say no

- Remain flexible

Communication is critical

- Trust your volunteers, keep them in the loop, facilitate networks, share successes and outcomes

- Feedback matters (from patrons and staff)

You can still  have volunteers doing more rote tasks – high impact volunteers don't exclude your having more traditional volunteer work

Make it fun, and include the volunteers in the process

PLA 2012: Thursday, March 15

My first session of the day was Engaging Customers in an Online Environment, led by four California librarians. This was a pretty solid session. It covered a lot of basics, but the speakers also offered some ideas and tips that were new and interesting to me, like taking advantage of memes or the need to have a clear goal and measurement metrics for your social media use (should be obvious, I know, but I hadn't been thinking about this this way). The presenters clearly knew their stuff and offered a well-organized, insightful, and engaging presentation.

During the break I had a meeting with the person in charge of Maryland's One Book program. She had helped to run a forum/get-together for librarians in charge of community read events on Wednesday, but I had arrived too late to attend that event. However, she generously agreed to meet with me to summarize what had been discussed. It was a great conversation and I really enjoyed meeting her in person (we'd communicated by e-mail a bit in the past).

Then it was off to a "ConverStation,"* Reaching for the Future: You've Got to Take the Risk to Get the Reward. This was the only unmitigated disappointment of the conference. The description made it sound as though this session was going to be a high-level discussion of the future of libraries, incorporating some talk about the need for creativity and how we can work as a field to innovate in the face of the sweeping societal changes and the challenges we are encountering. What actually happened was quite different. First, the presenters spent ten minutes plugging an entirely different conference that they were putting together and wanted us all to attend. They then briefly summarized six characteristics of creativity and presented the idea of having "experience zones", or small surprises scattered around the library for patrons to encounter - such as a puzzle or a cross-stitch for people to work on, or a place where patrons can write what they love about the library on a post-it and then stick it to a wall. When they announced that we were going to break into groups and brainstorm our own little ideas like this, I left. I was stuck standing in the back anyway, and the session was clearly not going to be what I thought it was.

Unfortunately, the other session of interest to me was full (one of my only major criticisms of the conference as a whole was that room planning was really not well done - I and many other people were locked out of over-full sessions more than once). So I checked my e-mail at the Internet cafe while there wasn't a line, then went up to the exhibit hall for a while.

For lunch, I met up with a bunch of other New Hampshire librarians. I had expressed an interest in dim sum, which it is nearly impossible to get in my area, so we went to a place called Dim Sum Garden right near the conference center. It wasn't "real" dim sum but it was amazing anyway - lots of dumplings, most of a kind I'd never tried before. And after all of us were very full, it only came out to $8/person! I am definitely adding that restaurant to my "must-revisit" list for Philadelphia. Conversation was, once again, enjoyable and stimulating. It was nice to get to know some of the people I encounter on mailing lists and at New Hampshire Library Association conferences a bit better.

Full of amazing Chinese(?) food, I returned to the conference center for Isn't It All Just Improv Anyway? Building Successful Relationships in the Workplace and Community. I admit: I went to this session because 1) I took improv in college and loved it, and 2) I couldn't pass up the chance to meet a real live Second City performer. The session was fantastic. The presenters introduced the five elements of improv (trust, communication, acceptance, building, and spontaneity) and then led us through a variety of improv games that can be played in the workplace to improve relationships, address problems, and facilitate communication. It was fun and thought-provoking - and though I'm not in a management position right now (and I doubt that improv at staff meetings would really fly at my current library), it's definitely something I will keep in mind as a management option later in my career.

Then it was time for something a little more serious. For my last Thursday session, I chose to attend Building Your Base (& Your Budget). Led by the coordinator for library growth and sustainability in the Mid-Hudson (NY) Library System, this session discussed the strategies for increasing community engagement and support developed by the Mid-Hudson Library System as part of their "Building Your Base" project. My library is lucky enough to enjoy strong community support, and we already implement some of the ideas from this session (e.g. provide great service first, since that will naturally make people want to support the library). However, it also provided good insight on how to identify non-supporters of the library and find the best way to reach out to them and hopefully change their minds, as well as some solid practical advice on how to improve marketing and outreach efforts without using lots of additional resources.

Afterward, I took an hour-long walk around downtown Philadelphia. (The architecture is lovely, but I was sad to see many homeless people around the city. They seemed to be more prevalent than in other cities I've visited. I hope that the city is taking some steps to address the issue.) For dinner I ate at Maggiano's, just a minute or two from the convention center and across the street from the Reading Terminal Market. It was a fabulous, typically huge Italian meal, and my waitress slyly pointed out that they offer desserts in individual sizes for $2.50 that can be wrapped up and taken back to one's hotel room. After that, I couldn't resist the tiramisu! It stayed in a bucket of ice overnight and I had it for breakfast in bed the next morning. It was amazing.

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* I think that these sessions were meant to be smaller, discussion-driven events, though none of the ConverStations I attended were small (although they were in smaller rooms, they were inevitably full to overflowing) and some were run mostly like lectures.

News

Hello everyone,

I'm settled in enough to make a quick post but not quite enough to make a longer one. So, some quick news/notes:

• The move was fairly uneventful. A couple of our boxes did get destroyed in shipping, so we unfortunately lost a bunch of books. (Word to the wise -- don't ship via the US Post Office, or if you do, make sure you get insurance -- we didn't and they wouldn't even reimburse us the postage for the box that came completely torn up and empty.) We got to drive into MA via Route 2, which I loved -- lots of curvy hilly roads through (sort of) mountains.
• I was ultimately not offered the job I interviewed for. The feedback I got when I asked how I could improve was very positive, though, which was encouraging -- I didn't do anything wrong, just got beat out by someone with a bit more experience.
• On the very same day I heard about the job just mentioned, I was asked to interview for another position! It's a very similar kind of job (community outreach/public relations/program coordination plus some reference and collection development), and it's at a busy library that enjoys quite a lot of community support. I think the interview went reasonably well. It certainly made me even more excited about the position! The library building is lovely, and the culture meshes well with the value I place on customer service, staff participation in decision making, and collaboration. Plus: I met with a panel of staff members, and beyond being really nice people, they shared my interests: knitting, dogs, baking...

And finally, to make this post about something actually library-related...

• I thought this post about treating your volunteers right on the Closed Stacks blog had a lot of good advice. Some of it is perhaps common sense (e.g. letting your volunteers know when your institution will be closed (!!)), but overall I think it provides good pointers on how to treat volunteers in a way that ensures both that they feel good about their service and that your organization benefits from their time. As someone who is likely to be overseeing volunteers in a future job (many of the postings I answer seem to include that responsibility) and who is interested in leadership and management, this was a very helpful post for me to read -- and I hope you'll find it helpful too!