Marketing volunteer opportunities to baby boomers

Abstract

The world of senior volunteerism is undergoing a transformation of unprecedented proportions driven by the baby boomer generation. Senior Corps program directors and sponsoring agency executives addressed how the baby boomers will impact their organizations during a workshop held at all five of the 2001 Senior Corps Cluster Conferences. Their comments were used to create a blueprint for marketing volunteer programs to baby boomers. The blueprint ideas are presented as a framework to help individual community organizations begin their own planning. Submitted by Laura Wilson, director of the Center on Aging at the University of Maryland College Park.

Issue

As baby boomers near retirement, organizations wanting to enlist this generation as volunteers will need to rethink their organizational structure and corporate values. The new generation of senior volunteers will have education levels higher than that of previous generations, are individualistic in their thinking, and are looking for meaningful roles.

Action

The next generation of human service-centered organizations that wants to attract and retain baby boomer volunteers will need to address its organization's current strategies, structure, resources, technology, funding, partnerships and culture and values.

Organizational strategies:

Change the image of aging. Programs are less attractive to baby boomers that use the words older, senior or retired in their titles. Refine the volunteer experience to reflect a more challenging, meaningful set of experiences that can make a definable difference in the community.
Remove many of the distinctions between the paid and unpaid workforce, thereby focusing on the work to be done and the skills needed rather than remuneration. Volunteer positions will need to be designed and managed more like paid positions.
Place new emphasis on the needs and characteristics of the future volunteer. Bureaucratic tasks might need to be minimized in order to attract volunteers with high skills.
Plan new approaches to find volunteers. Use high profile media and technological means. Consider going to corporations now and work on a variety of approaches that might include part-time work and part-time volunteer packages, corporate volunteer release time for pre-retirees, and second career preparation and training through volunteer education and work.

Organizational structure:

Elevate the stature of volunteer coordinators and volunteers overall in the organization.
Identify a volunteer career ladder.
Remove as many barriers to volunteering as possible and create a flexible and broad range of opportunities.
Integrate the existing agencies into societal structures already attractive to boomers such as the workplace, church or college.
Create adequate and permanent feedback systems.

Organizational resources:

Use the best available technology.
Create corporate and community partnerships.
Include new sources of funding by getting more private sector foundations and other federal agencies interested.
Create incentives such as demonstration grants and awards for innovation.
Expand volunteer benefits.

Technology:

Provide adequate hardware that is accessible to volunteer managers and volunteers.
Utilize the web to create a clearinghouse of national and international volunteer opportunities, list volunteer opportunities online, and solicit ongoing input from volunteers.
Recognize the growing computer skills of future volunteers and their ongoing interest in technology. Provide incentives such as free e-mail accounts, opportunities to communicate online, and access to technology training.
Recruit technology experts as volunteers.

Organizational funding:

Establish corporate partnerships, particularly with companies that would be targeting boomer spending.
Use volunteers with specific interests, personal connections or corporate ties as fund raisers.
Participate in research and evaluation that would influence funders and donors by showing how volunteers impacted the community.

Organizational partnerships:

Develop new ways to work with businesses including corporate-sponsored volunteer vacations, release time for current employees, employee volunteer sabbaticals and fee-for-service benefits using volunteer program services as an expanded benefit to employees.
Collaborate with new partners for life-long learning, online career and volunteer training and with service clubs.
Tap into neighborhood and grassroots organizations more.

Organizational culture and values:

Offer more flexible and customized volunteer opportunities.
Create a seamless format for moving between volunteer and paid workforce opportunities.
Structure opportunities responsive to the diversity of the baby boomer population.

Challenges in preparing for the baby boomer generation:

Boards and councils will need to be retrained or reconfigured.
Agencies where volunteers are placed will need training and technical assistance to effectively utilize baby boomer volunteers.
New guidelines from the federal government would need to be instituted.
The planning and structuring of change would be added to an already heavy workload.

Context

The blueprint is based on comments from 375 Senior Corps program directors and sponsoring agency executives during a workshop titled "Marketing to Baby Boomers: A Blue Print." The workshop was held five times across the country during the 2001 Senior Corps Cluster Conferences. By 2030, one in every five Americans will be over the age of 65. Longevity rates continue to increase with medical advances and more active lifestyles. Volunteer agencies are preparing now to tap into the volunteer potential of the baby boomer generation.