presented to Saint Mary’s College

Table of Contents *

Problem *

Purpose *

Objectives *

Strategies and Schedule *

Project Evaluation *

Participants *

Budget *

References *

 Problem

A non-profit organization is only as effective and efficient as the people that volunteer their time. The challenge is matching volunteers to the job skills that the league requires. In most cases, the ideal candidate for each position is not available from the limited pool of volunteers. Recruiting people to contribute their free time in most cases gets more challenging each year. Once someone has been offered an open position, the effort involved for the experience staff to properly train the new recruits is not being spent. Running a well-oiled organization demands a trained staff.

The Livermore Youth Soccer League ("LYSL") was incorporated as a non-profit organization of California in 1978. The stated purpose of the league, as defined by its Constitution, is to "promote mental and physical fitness, develop self and community pride; teach sportsmanship, and pride for all skills and competitive levels of organized youth soccer." To this end, the league has provided both a High Competition and recreational House soccer program every year to the youth of the city.

As the city's population and the prominence of soccer have both grown, so has the club. Long gone are the days when just a handful of volunteers handle the needs of the program and its members. Currently, the league supports a player membership of 3,200. Adding the parents, coaches, and volunteer staff, LYSL organizes roughly 5,350 people each year.

The legal realities of running even a non-profit organization has grown more complex with time. Ensuring adherence to the laws of the Articles of Incorporation, the special rules for non-profit business, and the changing tax laws demand for a more educated management staff.

The league has been a continued success each year. Very few registered players do not find the opportunity to play soccer within their own city.

The cost of this success has been the staff. As the demands of the growing organization have increased, more time each year has been spent trying to stick a finger in the dike of the tasks that need attention and less time on recruiting staff members to help with the jobs that need to be covered. The dike is bursting and action must be taken.

When individuals are located to volunteer, they are given responsibilities that are not completely explained to them in scope, deadlines, or process. The mission and goals of the organization are not explained. When issues arise, the volunteers do not know how to address them, where to find for answers to important questions, what they are allowed to commit to, or what they (or the club) should do. This is caused by the lack of any kind volunteer training program or manual.

Because the organization has not taken the time to ensure that its staff, paid or not, has not be fully educated, the volunteers burn out quickly. Each year, the club has an estimated 75% turnover rate of staffing. The time and resources to recruit, train, and manage a staff that is essentially new every year, is immense. The toll adds up quickly and when the experienced staff begins to leave, the situation worsens.

In the long run, the continued practice of not properly training volunteers and expending the cost of improving the consistency of the staff will create an organization that does not have an effective or consistent work flow. Volunteer retention suffers. Managers who receive transferred employees have had to deal with promises or situations that do not conform to their environment, yet they now have to find a solution to bridge the discrepancy between the tried and true methods of the past and the needs of the current organization environment. Growing as a league can become difficult, disjoined, and unclear in the goals it is attempting to achieve. The risk of failure is great.

The purpose of this project is to develop and implement a training program for volunteers. This will help to create an organization that behaviors more consistently and improve volunteer knowledge of LSYL procedures and policies by the end of the training program.

Only 18 of the potential 44 full board members from last year remain with the league's full board today. Of the returning staff, a mere three people are in the same position they were in before. In short, the entire board is new to their position or responsibilities. They have not yet mastered the issues and needs of the positions they now hold.

The "wheel" continues to be re-invented every year. Managing to do that, and do it well, prohibits the improvement to the league and the quality of the program that the club has set out to provide is destroyed.

This project has been designed to address and offer solutions to the problem of educating the league managers. Making the volunteers more informed of the basic skills and aware of specific organization policies and procedures, is the purpose of the project.

It is the additional purpose of this project to give the league more consistent behavior, a uniformed operating environment that sends a clear and coordinated message to the staff and membership that is in line with the league's mission and goals. A shared vision with all the pieces clearly working towards the same goals in similar fashion as opposed to various pieces assuming where the organization is going, each with its own idea of how to get there is the goal.

The project manager will be designing the training program, the training manual, and the surveys that will be used to measure the needs of the managers and the project effectiveness. As a current executive board member of LYSL, the project manager has experienced the challenges of non-profit environment. Frequently, the volunteers have had to learn procedures and tips on doing their jobs well and working independently of each other. Seeing this waste of resources and the high cost of unsupported volunteers supports the project manager's natural desire to fix broken links of communication. The project selection was obvious. A volunteer training program for the Livermore Youth Soccer League needed to be created and implemented.

An alternative to developing an in-house training program for volunteers has not been found.

There are two objectives of the project. They are:

1. Improve volunteer knowledge of league policies and guidelines after completing a training program by June 2001.
2. Improve organizational consistency by July 2001.

Improve new volunteer knowledge of organization policies and guidelines after completing a training program by June 2001.

To date, there has never been a training program in LYSL for new volunteers. After the appointment of a volunteer to a job and a some basic information, little else is offered by the organization to further the education or develop the volunteer to their role.

Developing and implementing a new volunteer training program will share information on specific club steps and procedures to volunteers at the same time in a formal setting. This will avoid the largely unsuccessful "hit or miss" method that most volunteers have to used for discovering the processes on their own.

Improve organizational consistency by July 2001.

Due to the nature of a non-profit organization where resources and free time are scarce, there have been no volunteer programs or classes offered. The quality of support and training a volunteer receives depends heavily upon the quality of the other board members that the volunteer can locate and question. Due to the history of each member acting independently, those answer may (and usually do) vary.

As the volunteers are trained in the same manner and armed with the same knowledge, it is expected that the volunteers will begin to benefit from the best of all the board members, not just at the level of the random individuals they happen to be able to get a hold of or what they personally make up.

If the organization's consistency in the league was to level out and then rise, it would make volunteers that "inherit" situations from volunteers who have moved on, less of an issue.

In order to accomplish the objectives of this plan, there are three strategies that will be used. They are:

1. Develop and implement a training program that will include topics covering league goals, board roles, and areas of responsibilities, organizations timelines, league policies, and legal reminders.
2. Develop a training manual, that will require research, of the currently available organization materials, external research on non-profit management needs.
3. Develop pre- and post-training surveys to measure basic knowledge, needs, and change in volunteer job confidence. Surveys will be distributed to volunteers before the program and again one month after the program. The feedback data will be analyzed. The survey analysis will be presented to Executive Board.

The development and implementation of a training program will include topics covering roles and responsibilities, staffing, career opportunities, league policies, and legal reminders that will address the issues associated with Objective One.

The training program will expose the volunteers to procedures that are supported by the league. In turn, there will be less risk of individuals continuing to be forced to create their own guidelines, usually not in alignment with the behavior of others in the same organization. This will help create a working environment where similar, shared behavior will begin to emerge.

The project tasks and the expected completion dates are listed below.

In the event that a league volunteer training program is not tenable, a manual of league structure, goals and procedures will be created. This manual will be distributed to all of the league volunteers currently in the organization and will remain available to potential volunteers.

No project can be a guaranteed success. Measuring the results of a project must be done to determine the success. If the goals of a project prove to be unmet, an alternative course of action can be evaluated.

• The program will be evaluated with a pre- and post- training survey to measure the increased knowledge of participants.
• Comparison of survey answers will measure the consistency of the organizational application.

Improve new volunteer knowledge of organization policies and guidelines after completing a training program by June 2001.

Measure: A survey before and after the volunteer training program will be conducted. It will be a questionnaire in which the participates will be asked to rate their current knowledge and their implementation of the knowledge.

Method: The survey will be anonymous. It will have 20 questions covering basic management theories and specific league policy questions. The answers will be rated on a scale from 1 (being the not at all) to 6 (very comfortable) that rate how comfortable the volunteer feels he knows or enforces organization policy, procedures and supported behavior.

Improve organization consistency by July 2001.

Measure: A survey of the volunteers before and after the management training program will indicate how uniform the volunteers respond within the same organizational environment.

Method: The anonymous survey will contain eight sample situations that a volunteer might be expected to experience. There will be a choice of possible answers. A comparison of the volunteers' answers will show how diverse the volunteers are in their approaches to the problems. The more questions that the volunteers answer the same, the more consistently they tend to behave.

Additionally, there will be an anonymous survey of the league membership before and after the training program. It will contain 20 questions covering policies and procedure questions. The answers will be in the form of a scale from 1 (being the not at all) to 6 (very comfortable). This will rate how the membership feels about the volunteers' enforce league policy, procedures and behavior.

At the completion of the training, the results of the surveys and the project report will be given to the LYSL Director and the Executive Board members.

Similar to a company, a successful project requires the input of more than one source. This program will get assistance from the following resources to help the project research, training goals, training environment.

When implementing any project, identification of the sources of the budget and the expenses must be done. Controlling the resources of a project start with the assessment of the time and money that is available for the project before it begins.

There are two types of costs when implementing a project; direct and indirect. The direct costs of the project will be the actual cash that is spent on materials and supplies for the development and implementation of the training program. Costs that are indirect will be the value of the time that the participants will be contributing. Indirect costs are difficult to measure precisely, so the formulas that were used in the estimates have been provided below.

Running an internal manager training program is cost effective in the long term. Hiring external training consultants is expensive and does not adequately cover material and processes that are unique to the league. Such information is a goal of this training program to help alleviate waste and prompt consistency within the league. Sending a single manager to a managerial training program through the American Manager Association costs $1,500 for the week. The program of this project will be more focused on the current needs of the league instead of the AMA program which covers a wide range of material in generalities.

Buying and distributing management books is less costly up front costs, but does not deliver the league message with it. Also, books can be easily put aside to read on a day that never seems to come in our busy work lives.