Len Iaquinta's Blog

We are educated and trained in the crafts, trades and professions.  We’re looking for social contact, meaningful activity, challenging and interesting work.

Don’t ask us to stuff envelopes! 

Many of us are even experts -- nationally, regionally or locally.  Most organizations need our skills.  Few craft a way to use our time effectively.

Too often, senior staff in fund raising and other organizational management overlook the credentials and expertise of current and prospective volunteers.  It is often challenging to imagine how to take a large and complex task and configure an approach that allows the agency to progress on the basis of incremental, expert, volunteer involvement.  But it nearly always can be done.  The management effort is greatly exceeded by the results of well-planned volunteer projects.

Ideas to Stimulate Your Creativity

In the philanthropy department:
• Handwritten thank you letters and phone calls for every gift that express appreciation, offer further information and a tour, and inquire as to preferred means of future contact
• Giving tours of the facility to donors, community clubs, prospective donors, prospective clients, et al.
• Friend-raising parties to share the volunteer’s passion for your agency with her/his network of friends, family, and colleagues
• “Give Yourself” days to advance physical plant projects for maintenance and construction.  (The local AFL-CIO Council is often a great partner.)  There is always plenty of work around any sizeable agency in addition to basic needs work needed by its clients. 

In the marketing department:
• Personal thank you phone calls to special event underwriters, sponsors, auction donors et al. reporting on the outcome of the friend- and fund-raiser
• Telephone surveys
• Focus groups
• Copy writing
• Personal news release delivery
• Soliciting with the fund development staff cooperative marketing opportunities with businesses and organizations to increase name recognition and revenue
• Staffing informational booths at community events

Other possibilities:
• Planning
• Evaluating
• Greeting and client navigation
• Organizing

Tactics for Success

Organize projects so that they may be completed over time in brief, three-hour increments, for example.  Keep project length to about three months.  Remember seasonal issues – snow birds, December holidays, January-February boredom.

Senior volunteers are likely to be well equipped to work from home with phone, fax, computer, and Internet access.  Create projects that take advantage of these capabilities, but also allow for personal interaction at your agency.  Most volunteers thrive on that, too.

Give it a try!  You’ll get a lot more done.  And you will be cultivating future sustaining and major donors to your agency.  A productive, satisfied, engaged volunteer can’t resist giving financially when asked appropriately.

Len Iaquinta, a member of the Alliance for Children and Families’ Resource Development Advisory Commitee and Executive Consultant Select Group, is a career fundraiser of millions of dollars in major gifts, grants, and annual funds. He is recognized as a strategic and tactical thinker, often contributing to professional practice journals and presenting at professional meetings. He has created successful fundraising programs at public and private institutions from New York City to Milwaukee and Chicago. He earned his bachelor's and master's degrees in journalism from Northwestern University (Medill School) and Columbia University in the City of New York (Pulitzer School), respectively.

Len is president of Excellence in Communications Inc.