Are there ideas, objects, or even people weighing down your volunteer program? “Spring Cleaning” is a great excuse for dealing with some of these issues. Take a good look around you. You probably see at least one thing that needs work but you’ve been putting it off for months. Throw open a window, let in some fresh spring air and sunshine and let’s get to work! Volunteerism expert Susan J. Ellis offers these tips to get you started:

Form a Spring Cleaning task force of six to eight volunteers (some who’ve been around a long time and some new ones) and paid staff supervisors to help steer your evaluation plan. Invite a volunteer management colleague from another agency to sit in, too.

First assess where you are by collecting evaluative feedback from program participants. Focus your attention: pick one to three areas or issues that you are most interested in studying. Then work with your task force to formulate questions that will reveal useful information about those areas. But it’s always okay to ask respondents: “What else would you like to tell us?”

Announce, with some fanfare, that you will be asking everyone a lot of questions in the next few weeks. Also launch some informal data gathering, such as a “question of the week” on a public bulletin board, with lots of index cards and thumbtacks to encourage anyone who passes by to respond. Change the question weekly and summarize the previous week’s responses to show that you read them!

Ask volunteers: “If we had to cut one activity out of your assignment, what could we eliminate with the least amount of negative impact?” Then ask the paid staff the same question from their point of view: “If we had to cut one thing that volunteers do in their assignment…”

Ask yourself: “What task am I doing now that I’d love to remove from my to-do list?” Then assess whether you still, in fact, need to do it, can stop doing it, or could recruit a volunteer to do it instead.

Other good questions to ask program participants:

• What skills or talents do you have that we have never asked you to apply on our behalf?
• What needs do you think our clients have that we don’t seem to be addressing?
• What would make volunteering here even better?

Now get out that ‘back burner’ list of new program ideas that has been sitting around for a long time. Toss these out to your Spring Cleaning Task Force and see which ideas generate enthusiasm. How might some of these possibilities become reality? What could you stop doing to make room for something new?

Invite a colleague to your office and together take a look at your shelves and files. As you explain what you have in the office, think about whether you really need items at your fingertips out in the open. Or might some go into files, be boxed for storage, or even – gasp! – be thrown out? What about your books and reference materials. Are any still unread that you might schedule to read soon? Does your colleague want to borrow anything? Then go and visit your colleague’s office and reciprocate!