Our skills and competencies at the service of others

Volunteering is an amazing opportunity to improve our society and ourselves. Doing it with our professional skills and competencies make it even more rewarding and significantly more impactful.

Over the last decade, most developed countries have experienced a significant increase in the proportion of people engaged in volunteering activities. Not only has this trend had a positive impact on societies and communities across the world, it has also triggered a welcome and much needed professionalisation of the charitable sector.

Big charities and private foundations have embraced this change in the mid-1990s, compelled by the size of their budgets and inspired by the capitalist mindset of their founders and main donors. Smaller foundations and publicly funded organisations, however, have continued to operate with a certain degree of amateurism for more than a decade, hindering efficiency and obstructing impact.

The Great Recession and the fiscal consolidations that followed in most developed countries impelled third sector organisations to strengthen their focus on value for money and to operate with the same rigour, transparency and efficiency expected from their for-profit counterparts. As a result, charities began to hire experienced professionals in key operational and managerial roles previously covered by volunteers. Simultaneously, business services firms started to create and expand their third sector divisions.

Whilst this ongoing transformation is already a hugely positive development, its impact on the sector could be even more disruptive, if it will manage to translate into a new and more structural way of organising and perceiving volunteering activity.

In fact, some charitable organisations still operate under the assumption that volunteering is necessarily a low-skilled activity. This assumption is sometimes driven by operational constraints (e.g. insurances and regulatory requirements), but it is more often prompted by a quite widespread misconception: if someone is doing something for free, it will necessarily do it at the worst of its intellectual ability.

As a result, many third sector organisations tend to allocate volunteers to manual or repetitive tasks and to hire experienced professionals to perform activities requiring higher skills levels. In a charity serving meals to homeless people, volunteers will often prepare, cook, serve and clean, whilst paid accountants will keep track of the organisation’s transactions on its balance book. In a community group driving old people to the hospital, volunteers will drive and clean the vans, whilst paid commercial managers will negotiate deals with mechanicians and car manufacturers to maintain and renew their fleet.

Basic principles of labour economics suggest that this “skills-blind” approach to people management is remarkably inefficient. Allocating a professional whose time is worth £50 per hour to a task that can be purchased on the market at £10 per hour clearly is a waste. And a considerable one. Not only does it make the economy as a whole £40 worse off. Most importantly, it deprives the people and the communities that should benefit from different volunteering activities of £40 that could have been invested in making their lives better.

Clearly, market prices are not able to fully capture the utility generated by a transaction, especially with regard to volunteering. When people decide to dedicate one hour, one day, or their entire life to others, they stop being doctors, painters or architects and they become human beings working for a value or a community they believe in. This generates direct benefits in terms of life satisfaction and well-being that could justify a proportion of the welfare loss generated by this inefficient allocation of resources (the £40 in the example above).

Nonetheless, I strongly believe that there are significant opportunities that could be unlocked by changing the way in which we perceive and organise volunteering activities. Some for-profit firms are already providing in a structured and systematic way expert advice to third sector organisations on a pro-bono basis. Even more interestingly, some charities are specialising in the provision of high-quality professional advice to other organisations using the time and, most importantly, the skills and the competencies of highly qualified professionals.

Please note that I have written this article in my personal capacity. The views expressed are my own and do not reflect in any way, shape or form those of my current and previous clients and employers.

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