There are upwards of a 100 fairly good books on managing volunteers, and of those I selected four based on the information provided by Amazon and its readers, who now represent a critical mass of useful guidance. Of the four books, this is the best. If you buy only one, this is the one. (The other three were Vineyard & McCurley's "Best Practices for Volunteer Programs", Lee & Catagnus, "Supervising Volunteers", and what may be one of the originals (from 1994), Susan J. Ellis' "The Volunteer Recruitment and Membership Development Book." These latter three are reviewed in their own spaces.)
This book by Helen Little, as good as it is, would normally lose one star because it fails to provide an index or a guide to other readings (including web sites) in niche areas of volunteer management. However, it does provide excellent forms for each step of the volunteer management process and these are all downloadable from a given web address, so we'll call it even.
By way of larger context, this book, and books on volunteer management in general, are valuable not only for organizations that use volunteers as a resource, but for those who would manage citizen activism, as well as teen-agers with chips on their shoulders and a reluctance to bear down on chores.
While others have outlined volunteer "needs" and how to address them, Helen Little does it best. The 12 basic needs--applicable to neighborhood mobilization, regional political campaigns, and teen-ager "work for respect" programs--are very well and concisely listed: 1) specific manageable task; 2) task that matches motivation; 3) good reason for doing the task; 4) written instructions; 5) reasonable deadline; 6) freedom to complete the task; 7) everything necessary to complete the task; 8) adequate training; 9) safe, comfortable, friendly environment; 10) follow-up; 11) opportunity (for the volunteer) to provide feed-back; and 12) appreciation, recognition, and rewards.
As I read this thoughtful book, comparing what volunteers need at each step of the way--and the more advanced comments by the author on how to plan for succession at every level of the organization from neighborhood to national, I kept thinking to myself: "traditional political parties are dead." Both the Democratic and Republican parties are violating every single tenet of this excellent work on how to attract, motivate, and activate citizen-voters. It remains to be seen if our neighborhoods might yet self-organize. This would be a good book for anyone thinking about organizing any endeavor of free spirits, at any level of play.