This topic guide will help readers looking for help and/or capacity building resources in the area of volunteer management. You will find general works in print and electronic formats on a variety of volunteer management topics, including:

• Volunteer recruitment and selection, including screening and interviewing
• Job design, volunteer training and supervision
• Motivation, retention and recognition of volunteers
• Rating and evaluation of volunteer contibution
• Planning and program management

Look also for materials on special topics such as employer-supported volunteerism, virtual volunteering, motivations, barriers and burn-out, paid staff-volunteer relations, dealing with problem volunteers, children and youth volunteers, older volunteers, women volunteers, volunteers with disabilities, minority and ethno-cultural volunteers, and more!

Other Resources:

For facts and figures on Canadian volunteers and the organizations that they support, please see the following important reports:

Caring Canadians, involved Canadians : highlights from the 2004 Canada Survey of Giving, Volunteering and Participating/ Michael Hall ... [et al.]. Ottawa : Statistics Canada, 2004.

Cornerstones of community : highlights of the National Survey of Nonprofit and Voluntary Organizations / Michael Hall ... [et al.]. [Ottawa] : Statistics Canada, c2004.

Satellite Account of Nonprofit Institutions and Volunteering : 1997-2003 / Malika Hamdad, Matthew Hoffarth, Sophie Joyal. 3rd ed. Ottawa : Statistics Canada, 2006.

This manual will help you interpret statistics on volunteering:

Understanding Canadian volunteers : using the National Survey of Giving, Volunteering and Participating to build your volunteer program / by Norah McClintock. Toronto : Canadian Centre for Philanthropy, c2004.

For a larger selection of research and statistical resources on giving and volunteering in Canada, please see the National Survey Collection.

You will also find volunteer management Web sites under the Volunteering category of the Nonprofitscan Links Directory.

For resources on volunteer boards of directors, see A Guide to Board and Governance Resources.

For resources on the management of paid employees, see A Guide to Human Resources Management.

Independent searching tips:

To search the full Library Catalogue for additional records, use the keywords: Volunteer, Voluntarism, Volunteering, etc., which can all be captured using the string Volunt* (with a wildcard character * to capture all the variants). Use Volunt* in combination with the keyword Management (type Volunt* & Management) to find general resources in this subject area.

Other useful keywords to use in combination with Volunt*: motivation, screening, selection, recruiting, training, satisfaction, rating, job, interviewing, etc.

Use Handbooks to focus on practical tools and resources, and Statistics to focus on quantitative data.

You can also use these keywords in searching the catalogues of other academic and public libraries.

"Collectively, nonprofit and voluntary organizations report having more than 19 million volunteers who donated a total of more than 2 billion hours—the equivalent of more than 1 million full-time jobs. Nearly all organizations rely on volunteers to some degree; more than half rely on volunteers exclusively."

-- Cornerstones of community: highlights of the National Survey of Nonprofit and Voluntary Organizations, p. 42.