|
Experts offer advice on making the best use of retiring Baby Boomers.
Over 18 million seniors in this country volunteer, an increasingly vibrant group making valuable contributions in myriad pursuits large and small, such as hurricane disaster relief, helping out understaffed schools and consulting with blossoming businesses badly in need of entrepreneurial advice. As our Baby Boom generation jets into retirement, youth-minded and healthier than those before it, giving back as a volunteer seems a natural act for a demographic group unwilling to stop contributing simply because the paychecks have stopped. But attracting and retaining Boomers isn’t simple.
Why do you want them?
“It’s that lifetime of experience they bring to the table, the ability to solve problems,” says Barb Quaintance, senior vice president of the AARP’s office of volunteer and civic engagement.
Oftentimes, though, she notes, it’s the one demographic group that gets the short end of the stick for opportunities. No one asks them to come aboard. By reaching out and connecting, credit unions can set themselves apart in reaching highly skilled and dedicated seniors.
“There is, in this country, a huge focus on kids. And I think it’s a little bit of an untapped resource and sometimes we don’t ask this group as readily. But here you have these … people 50-plus who have a lifetime of experience and skills to tap into,” she says, noting their tradition of volunteering across the lifespan.
“They have the long view,” she adds. “If anyone can really help to solve problems, it’s this remarkable group.”
What credit unions are offering
The benefits of engagement, however, are measurable for the volunteer. This sharing of one’s time and talents fits with Boomers’ fully engaged image of retirement as they spend their later years making an impact. Multiple studies show that helping others impacts mental well-being and also physical health, pluses for seniors seeking to expand their longevity.
Dave Gilbert, an engaging 81, retired from Aberdeen Proving Ground in Aberdeen, Md., and later joined Aberdeen Proving Ground FCU as chairman of the board after years of volunteering there. He says service at a credit union fills a desire to give back but doesn’t consume his life, a nice balance as he seeks to be active and feel fulfilled. He thinks it’s a perfect match for others looking to utilize business, finance or human resources skills.
“What I liked about credit unions was the ability to find something to do that was constructive and at the same time, not occupying so much of my time that I couldn’t still play a little bit with my grandchildren, do a little skiing in the winter and maybe tennis or travel during the summer months,” says Gilbert. Credit unions, he adds, do good by helping people achieve personal wealth and contribute significantly to the nation’s fiscal health. They rely on expertise and harness the skills of volunteers who serve on boards, attend meetings and in many cases, get so involved they run for leadership positions.
While Gilbert, who served on the NAFCU board, has found his niche, he knows that drawing others just as committed into the volunteer fold requires strategy. Organizations like credit unions look for volunteers to staff their boards and committees, and the competition for quality is fierce — plenty of supply but also intense demand.
“While credit unions are having difficulty getting or recruiting volunteers, there are a huge number of seniors that are leaving the job market and are retiring. One doesn’t retire from life. One just changes interests,” Gilbert says of the wide open field of retiree potential. But recruiting good volunteers takes effort, not just word of mouth. It’s no longer an old-fashioned “hey, wanna do this?”
“You just can’t leave it to the old days when a board member was told to look around for someone you know who might be willing to run for the board,” he says.
“You need a far more business-like approach, looking for skill levels and background experience that will be helpful to a credit union. There is no shortage of seniors today. If anything that is a segment that is growing more rapidly.”
|
HOW DID WE DO IT
How to create a board that looks like your membership
By Frank Berrish
Approximately eight years ago, Visions Federal Credit Union was faced with an aging board made up of retired IBM’ers. During a board retreat, consultant Ron Nice made the observation that our board should resemble our field of membership. Visions was a former IBM credit union that had lost the majority of its sponsoring organization’s employees from 1992 to 1998, going from 17,500 to less than a thousand today.
Despite transitioning to a community charter, the board members remained mostly retired IBM’ers and turnover was low; in its 40-year history, there had only been two chairmen over that period. The change to a community charter was challenging these board members, who had always been associated with IBM.
Do you really want new blood?
The first step toward taking Nice’s advice was to recruit advisory directors to be groomed for the board who were not former IBM or retired IBM members. Next we tackled the nominating committee. Our board chairman commented at a meeting that Visions was unable to bring in new members. That started the conversation: was the board truly intent on bringing in new members? Our nominating committee’s makeup at the time would indicate it wasn’t, as it was populated primarily with retired IBM’ers. The problem was that, for the most part, they were unfamiliar with the community and its SEGs.
Two ideas were floated for attracting new volunteers: holding a member or volunteer reception where each member of the board, management staff and SEG representative would bring two potential volunteers, and creating a larger, diverse nominating committee made up of one director, one supervisory committee member, the SEG representative, one manager, a person under 30, a SEG member and one person from an underserved community. We put both ideas into practice (see charts) and then worked to revamp the evaluation process used by our nominating committee.
How to choose your new leaders
The board of directors set up an ad hoc group to look at the nominating committee and come up with more ideas on how to get new blood. The board changed the nominating committee makeup of two board members and one supervisory committee member to a seven-person nominating committee made up of one board member, one supervisory committee member, one management representative, one staff member or business development member familiar with SEGs, one SEG member, one member from underserved communities or a diverse group, and one member under 30 years of age.
The nominating committee was proactive in bringing in new representatives and added to the people who were presented. The nominating committee was charged by the board of directors to take the candidates and select six, or two for each open position at the annual election. The board of directors consists of nine directors with three-year terms, with three people up for election each year. Supporting documents were created to guide the committee in both reviewing the candidates and gauging how they would help the credit union meet its goals of diversifying the leadership.
New faces, new ideas
The process has worked, and Visions has recruited new individuals from its community. In 2010, we will have two retirees from IBM and seven members representing the community, such as a CPA, representative from Binghamton University, a business manager, a United Way county executive, two representatives from a SEG and a self-employed representative. The idea of the membership reception and a larger, diverse nominating committee has helped Visions recruit new members and more accurately represent the membership of our community charter.
Frank Berrish is president and CEO of Visions FCU in Endicott, N.Y., and is an at-large director of NAFCU.
|
SAMPLE COMMITTEE GUIDELINES
- Current gender representation:
- Gender representation desired:
- Age distribution current:
- Age distribution desired:
- Demographic distribution in the communities the credit union serves:
- Current board demographics:
- Board demographics if properly mirroring the populations in the community:
|
|
Volunteering builds work skills
For volunteers of past generations, volunteering wasn’t a mode for developing marketable skills. Those were goals of volunteering during your work years, perhaps, but not the focus of retirement-age volunteers. For Boomers that’s simply not the case. For credit unions that distinction is key: it must be clear to recent retirees that there’s something tangible in it for them. In Chicago, Mark E. Goodman, a former Motorola and software sales executive, volunteers his time as workshop chairman for SCORE, the Service Corp. of Retired Executives. Goodman says organizations must have a real marketing plan to recruit top volunteer talent.
“You need to...show the benefits you provide there,” Goodman says of luring the best to his ranks. “A lot of Baby Boomers are looking to give back but also learn something new.”
“It used to be that people worked and worked and then retired. In today’s world, people work and work and work. Then, they work some more. You need to show people what new things they will learn as a volunteer, new skills they might learn, new people they might interface with by volunteering for your organization.”
Goodman, himself, is using new skills on the job, creating a YouTube channel for SCORE Chicago. He is leveraging that into a business for himself, e-Conversation Solutions, which creates searchable video content for the Web along with social media management. Goodman believes other seniors can choose volunteering opportunities that assist their own future dreams — something credit unions are well-suited to offer. Plenty retire from a first career with visions of starting another.
“With people continuing to work and often needing income, they may be looking to volunteer and give back [while still] looking to learn something to maybe try to enhance a business idea they have.”
Creative recruiting
But in order for top-quality volunteers to see that being a credit union volunteer would benefit them, they have to hear about the opportunity in the first place. In Los Angeles, Brian Sheridan, director of development and communications at Heritage Square Museum says they let prospective volunteers, many of them seniors, know about volunteering while they visit for tours.
“When they visit, we remind them before and after … that we rely on the support of our volunteers. We let them know it’s easy to get involved and here’s how you do it, hand them our literature, let them leave contact information.” This point of purchase marketing, of sorts, makes it clear to seniors that they are visiting an attraction that needs — and values — their help.
But they don’t leave it at that, Sheridan says of the initial contact on site.
“We think it’s very important to pick up the phone and let them know what is going on. Once you’ve got them in and they see what you do, the phone calls are important.” (For more on how credit unions can recruit a new crop of volunteers, see Frank Berrish’s “How We Did It.”)
|
One of the challenges of retention is
having projects that can engage new
volunteers quickly, aligned to their
significant expertise.
|
What to do once you’ve got ‘em
Goodman at SCORE says the key to retaining good volunteers is to make sure their hard work has not gone unnoticed. He says even small gestures mean a lot to those who are investing their lifetime of experience into an organization.
“Baby Boomers are more than happy to give, but they want to be appreciated,” he said. SCORE puts money away and offers volunteers gift certificates for dinner at a restaurant, for example, as incentive for a job well done.
“Volunteers want to go home to their wife or husband and say, ‘Hey, isn’t this neat? I put a lot of time into this, and now we get to go out to dinner because of this,’” he says. “It really means a lot.”
Goodman also says volunteering requires a different model than simply assigning tasks to people who show up. One of the challenges of retention is having projects that can engage new volunteers quickly, aligned to their significant expertise.
“If you don’t engage Baby Boom volunteers to their satisfaction in the first four to eight weeks of volunteering, they are going to go do something else. They will say, I’m not getting what I want out of this. They will go volunteer at a couple of different places and pick the one that appreciates them.”
AARP’s Quaintance notes that while past generations are likely to go to an organization and do what they are told as volunteers, Boomers want to know that they are going to make an impact. Today’s active seniors also don’t want to be locked in. Studies have shown that for people over 55, volunteering rates have remained stable but self-directed volunteering has risen, she says. They may be more comfortable seeing a need in a community and doing something on their own to help older people winterize windows to lower their energy costs, for example.
“We know people are very fearful of signing up for an organization — they don’t want to be locked in,” Quaintance added. “They want flexibility to volunteer on their own schedule in things they are interested in.
“Baby Boomers, like every other time in their lives, want to do it their own way,” she says. “I think the Boomers, perhaps more so than older generations, are insistent on seeing the impact of their work.” For credit unions, that means finding a way to make sure their newest retired volunteers are able to see the impact of their work — something that should not be difficult given the gigantic impact credit union volunteers make on the financial fabric of this country.
Andrea Billups is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in People Magazine, Readers Digest and The Washington Times.
|
