It’s the first Monday of the New Year and many of us have headed back to work, school or whatever routine that is part of our daily lives. It is also the day when we start getting serious about those New Year’s resolutions we so eagerly made just last week.  And it's the day that marks the beginning of the end because we all know we’ll scrap the whole resolution thing – if not most of it – by March.

But don’t despair. We can make it past March if we are just a bit more creative with some fun thrown in.

The most common lament we hear (ok it’s tied with “we can’t find volunteers”) is how can we get the volunteers to actually do what they say they will. As we’ve always said here at Mariner, volunteer management is really HR management and so the many principals for motivating employees are relevant.

I was sent an old high school picture by a friend, which by itself was horrifying. But what really struck me was the text underneath.

There is no easy answer to fixing the volunteer pool but the answer really isn’t complicated either. At issue is that our approach is too often reactive not proactive. We look to fill empty seats instead of building an engaged membership. One way to shift gears is to think of this as building a farm team … a feeder system like we see in sports.