Ask the Expert: Bill Quirke
Q: Do you have any advice when writing a three-year internal communication strategy for a diverse range of volunteers?
A lot of the advice you see assumes that you're trying to engage paid employees. I work for a charity with 13,000 donors, 15,000 members, 1,000 professional members, 100 support branches (UK-wide), 80 volunteers (who provide advice and information), 100 specialist nurses and 60 staff. This is an extremely diverse range of stakeholder groups and only the nurses and staff actually get paid for what they do.
A: Working with voluntary organizations is certainly trickier than working with organizations with paid employees. Charities are a complex mix of people who are working together for different reasons – some as a profession, others wanting to make a contribution to a cause.
Just because you pay people it doesn’t mean that you can engage or direct them.
However, the lessons learnt from communicating in charities are increasingly useful for organizations wanting to engage paid employees. Just because you pay people it doesn’t mean that you can engage or direct them. You might have them by the wallet, but it doesn’t mean that you have their hearts and minds.
Cause, community and contribution
Volunteers strike a deal with the organization for which they volunteer. They resemble employees in organizations with a strong ethical agenda – good examples would be cosmetics retailer, The Body Shop, particularly in its early days, and Innocent Drinks.
They buy in to the organization for a number of reasons:
- Cause – they feel they’re making a contribution to something bigger.
- Community – they like being among people who are like minded, they enjoy seeing a difference being made, and they’re happy to learn from others in other parts of the country or the organization.
- Contribution – they want to be clear what it is they can do, and what they’re expected to deliver.
Clarify goals and responsibilities
Unfortunately, if they perceive that the deal is being shifted, they can easily opt out. This means that communicating in a voluntary organization means spending more time on explaining why things are being done, why changes are being made, demonstrating continuity between the future and the past, and making requests rather than issuing instructions.
The same things that apply to employees apply to volunteers when it comes to engagement – being clear what you want your people to think, feel and do.
The same things that apply to employees apply to volunteers when it comes to engagement – being clear what you want your people to think, feel and do.
People need to understand clearly where we’re going and why. They need to feel a valued part of an organization, and they need to be clear what they’re expected to do and how they can contribute.
Peer-to-peer impact
In a voluntary organization, volunteers are influenced by other volunteers. So getting peers to communicate with each other, communicate and explain changes, can have more impact than communication from management – especially where managers are seen as professionals who are being paid for the time they’re putting in.
A number of charities have put a lot of effort into reorganizing, restructuring and refocusing themselves. Often this is misinterpreted by their volunteers as forsaking their roots, their values and their priorities.
Volunteers are less persuaded by cause for greater efficiency unless there’s a very clear demonstrable link to improving the service that they provide to the people they feel that count.
Ensure passion in the powerful
Professional leaders have to be seen to be passionate about the cause, focused on delivering better service, and grateful for, and reliant on, the energy and enthusiasm of their volunteers.
From my experience of working with charities, I’ve learnt a few useful lessons:
- Look ahead over the next 3 years – what changes are there that are coming which may upset the core values of your volunteers? You may for example be hoping to become more efficient by making changes to support branches, getting more people to work closely together, adopting common processes etc.
- What changes to direction are there, and how clearly do these link to the past? People want to see continuity between what are we doing in the future and what they bought into in the past.
- Be clear what your strategy requires your different employees, volunteers and associates to do. This is so you can measure whether your communication is helping achieve the outcome you want.
- Look at how are you using people in different parts of the country to communicate with each other and share experience. If you're geographically spread you may want to use local people as ambassadors, and to feed back reactions.
- Importantly, put feedback channels in place so people can tell you how they, and others, are feeling. Volunteers tend to feel strongly – otherwise they wouldn’t volunteer – and it’s better to get their responses out in the open than have them muttered between colleagues in private.
Bill Quirke is one of the leading authorities on internal communication and the management of change. He is Managing Director of Synopsis, a specialist internal communication consultancy whose clients include British Airways, Vodafone, Intel, Shell, BBC, Diageo, UBS Group, AstraZeneca, Pfizer, Rolls-Royce, Unilever and Whitbread. Prior to founding Synopsis, Bill was a Director of Burson–Marsteller, where he worked on global projects and led the European change communication practice.