OM DENNE EPISODE
#045 - Today I am speaking with Tobi Johnson. Tobi has 25 plus years of experience with nonprofits. Instead of simply moving to another job when she moved across the country 13 years ago, Tobi decided to start her own company where she could share her expertise and help organizations with volunteerism.
Tobi helps organizations of all shapes and sizes build their volunteer strategy by helping organizations replace old and ineffective approaches with new innovative and research-based practices.
One of her superpowers is showing organizations how to onboard new volunteers and make them feel like they are a part of something…
“This feeling of belongings ingrained in our nature as humans.”
“And when you are a volunteer and if you feel like you're on the outside looking in, you're just not going to engage and you're actually gonna become not as productive.”
“The time that belonging matters most is the time when you're onboarding new volunteers and welcoming people in to make sure that every single person feels like they belong.”
Through VolunteerPro, Tobi provides online volunteer management training, coaching & community to leaders of volunteers at all levels.
The key takeaways from my discussion with Tobi are:
#1 If your volunteers feel like outsiders, they are not going to engage and will not be as productive as they could be;
#2 Volunteers leave groups when they feel implicit promises are not kept;
#3 Make implicit expectations explicit by naming them;
#4 Giving informal recognition can much more powerful than formal recognition;
Be sure to stick around until the end to hear Tobi discuss using Bling for Belonging.
