Regardless of the cause of your social impact organization, you will need to have robust strategies or policies in PR and communications, marketing, finance, accounting, fundraising, legal and compliance etc. to ensure that your organization can continue to work on fulfilling its mission with financial stability.
However, due to budget constraints, your organization may not always be able to afford to hire these subject matter experts as full-time in-house staff.
This is where engaging skilled volunteers can serve as a solution. Here are a few ways in which skilled volunteers can help your organization build capacity:
- Providing Expertise: Much as a skilled volunteer specialized in marketing can offer insights on how your organization can engage different audiences, a skilled volunteer experienced in legal matters can offer invaluable advice on compliance issues and protection for vulnerable individuals who are amongst your beneficiaries. Engaging skilled volunteers with the right skills, expertise, and networks can enable your organization to improve its operations, develop new strategies, implement new initiatives, and even sustain long-term growth.
- Supporting Innovation: Sometimes, it is easy to lose sight of what works best for your team and your beneficiaries and stakeholders after working on a program for a long time. Skilled volunteers can help your organization to innovate by bringing fresh perspectives, new ideas, and creative solutions to the table. This can lead to the development of innovative programs or services that are more efficient and streamlined, and that can better address the needs of the community your organization serves.
- Strengthening Partnerships: Skilled volunteers bring in their respective networks of professionals and organizations that can be leveraged to help your organization expand its reach, increase its impact, and build a more sustainable network of support and collaboration. If you are able to find mission-aligned skilled volunteers who are passionate about your organization’s cause, consider asking them to be your ambassadors and spread the word about your organization’s work. This can enable your organization to strengthen existing partnerships and potentially build new ones with partners, collaborators, volunteers, and funders.
- Mentorship, Coaching, and Training: Talent development is essential to employee retention and building the capacity of your team. Skilled volunteers can be leveraged to provide training, mentoring, or coaching to your organization’s leadership, staff, or volunteers. Examples include mentorship or coaching to help leaders and staff reach their professional or personal goals, training sessions to equip the organization’s staff with new skills to improve work processes, and workshops on impact assessment best practices.
Community Connections: Connecting Your Organization with High-calibre, Mission-aligned Skilled Volunteers
At Foundation for Shared Impact (FSI), we have enabled numerous successful engagements between skilled volunteers and community partners through our Community Connections Program.
What makes our program different is that we are dedicated to cultivating an in-depth relationship with our community partners, starting with helping them identify their organization’s key challenges and needs. We then connect our community partners with skilled volunteers whose skills, expertise, and passion are aligned, and we continue to provide all parties with the support they need to see the engagements to fruition.
Since taking over the Community Connections Program, we at FSI have connected under-resourced but high-impact community partners with the board of directors, marketing advisors, legal advisors, and other subject matter experts to design marketing strategies, draft contracts, establish risk management frameworks, enhance work processes, offer a variety of advisory support, and overall, build capacity for our community partners.
Read the case stories below to learn more about how Community Connections can help you recruit skilled volunteers with the right skills and expertise to accelerate your organization’s growth and impact!
- Soap Cycling, Asia’s first and largest youth-led soap recycling charity, continues to benefit from the advice and support of its Marketing Advisor, Nick Shao-Wilson, who is also Marketing Director at Tatler Asia. Read more here.
- Wedu, a Singapore-based organization committed to empowering women changemakers around the world, launched an important with legal support from Sandy Lin, a partner at Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP. Read more here.
- PathFinders, serving migrant mothers and their children in Hong Kong, benefited from the risk management framework built out by Carl Fernando, a risk management professional at Macquarie. Read more here.
- Third Sector Connect, a social enterprise that helps social impact organizations build capacity, enhanced its work processes with the help of Monica Cai, Controller, Cost Management & Analytics, Nomura, and Michael Fung, Senior Accountant, PwC Hong Kong. Read more here.
Interested in joining Community Connections and gaining access to our pool of high-calibre skilled volunteers as well as a rich library of resources? Fill out this registration form or get in touch with us at communityconnections@shared-impact.com!
