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Engaging Skills-based Volunteers

Many of your organizational processes require skilled individuals to implement them successfully. Skills-based volunteerism (SBV) is a broad category of volunteering that includes ways to use a variety of skills, knowledge and talents of volunteers to help deliver an organization’s services to the community. Pro bono is a type of skills-based volunteering that uses a volunteer’s core professional expertise to build the capacity and internal infrastructure of an organization serving the public good. The main distinction is that pro bono service is one very specific type of skills-based volunteering that focuses on using a volunteer’s core professional expertise, for which they’d otherwise get paid. 

Many people have skills that could greatly increase the capacity of your organization. At Downtown Women’s Center, for example, they saw a need for nutritional counseling so they recruited graduate-level students who could provide that resource. Other examples could include an IT professional who helps you build your website, improve your database or start a social media campaign. You might engage accountants or lawyers. Maybe you need to re-wire your computer lab or create graphics to use in your training presentation. You might even recruit a retired executive assistant who could support your senior-level leaders. 

Keep in mind that many people do want direct service volunteer positions because they want to work with your clients. Others may want a break from their normal job (i.e., a small business owner who wants to drive the bus for an afterschool program). All in all, you have a wide variety of skilled individuals who can contribute to your organization. 

If you’re engaging skills-based volunteers in your organization, think through how you recruit, place and support them. Being ready to engage skills-based volunteers is crucial to the success of the initiative. One tool to help you navigate this is the Readiness Roadmap. This tool lays out the steps for engaging SBVs: 
1. Organizational Readiness – Understanding whether your organization is ready to leverage the services delivered by skills-based volunteers to better meet your mission 
2. Needs Identification – Understanding which of your organization’s needs could be addressed well with SBVs 
3. Project Readiness – Understanding whether your organization is ready to engage internal and external resources to well execute and sustain a specific skills-based project 
4. Sourcing – Identifying how you find and access the SBVs your organization needs 
5. Planning – Planning to efficiently allocate the resources, create internal accountability and work productively with the skilled volunteers; includes working with staff to understand the role of the SBVs and orienting SBVs to the culture of the organization 
6. Implementation – Executing the project with all players spending the needed time with the right level of commitment, with a clear understanding of the expectations from all parties and projects well defined and scoped, in order to obtain the expected results. 
7. Evaluation – Understanding how your organization can evaluate the success of your project 
8. Recognition and Celebration – Understanding the importance of recognizing and celebrating the efforts and accomplishments of SBVs 

Printed with permission from Points of Light, Service Enterprise. Participant Materials, Session 3: Creating Sustainability |