By Meg Davis
Before you begin recruiting volunteers, you should come up with an outline of the projects you need help with, and create a schedule that involves a few different volunteering opportunities. Different organizations have different schedules for their volunteer programs. Because Asia Catalyst volunteers are mostly students, we usually follow a four-month
term.
by Meg Davis
One of the issues groups ask us about often is how to recruit and manage volunteers. Based on our experience (a lot of our work is done by student interns), and some manuals we consulted online, we are putting together a manual on volunteer management and posting chapters from it to this blog. Please share your own suggestions by posting a comment.
by Meg Davis
After advising other organizations on how to create their own strategic plans, Asia Catalyst sat down in a conference room on Sunday with ten or so of our best friends and engaged in the annual exercise to plan our own work. Every year, we seem to find this a little more difficult, as our projects multiply and become more complex.
Fortunately, we had on hand our new board advisor, John Santoleri, who stopped us and said, “I don’t have a sense of the cost and benefit of each program — how much time each one takes, versus how hard or easy it is to raise funds for that program, versus the impact each program has.” With his help, we created a form to track just that.
by Ken Oh
Around Asia, internet users face several barriers to doing legal research. The barriers can be political, as the recent row
between China and Google demonstrates. In some cases, developing countries do not have the capacity to provide internet access to their citizens. Finally (and likely the most easily fixed), the barriers can be more practical: once you have internet access, how do you know where to search?
by Meg Davis
The strategic plan is the most important document of your organization. It defines who you are and why you do what you do. It ties all your work into your vision for the future. This is how we and the groups we train create a strategic plan. You might want to print out the model we use to look at while you read this (in English here, in Chinese here).*
