Managing Volunteers: Challenges of Non-Profit Organizations by Jessica Miller-Merrell for Blogging4Jobs. Discusses methods for clarifying roles and ensuring a good fit for volunteers.

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If you manage a staff at a non-profit organization, more than likely, you will deal with volunteers, which can be both rewarding and frustrating for human resource managers.

Volunteers can be tricky. They aren’t paid staff, yet if they perform work for an organization, they have to be managed like any other employee or the jobs they do can go to the wayside. For non-profit organizations on a tight budget, sometimes volunteers make up the majority of the day to day tasks that must be done in order to succeed.

So, where’s the line? How do you keep volunteers happy and successful, but still be able to enforce the job they’re supposed to do?