Volunteer Management 5 min read

How to Scale Your Volunteer Program with Volunteer Management Software

Eric Burger October 25, 2024

11:32

Scaling your nonprofit is critical to expanding your impact and reaching more people. However, growing your organization also requires the proper scaffolding. You need processes in place that are strong enough to support your nonprofit yet flexible enough to meet the new challenges you will encounter as you grow.

Volunteer management software plays a key role in that supportive framework. It optimizes your nonprofit’s operations while ensuring you are prepared to scale. Read on the learn more about how volunteer management software can inform your nonprofit growth strategy.

What is Volunteer Management Software?

Volunteer management software is a platform that provides solutions for every step of the volunteer management process, from recruitment to retention. Volunteer management software allows you to streamline volunteer program operations, ultimately saving your nonprofit time, money, and energy.

The numerous benefits of volunteer management software include:

Optimized resource allocation
Simplified training and onboarding procedures
Increased volunteer engagement
Automation for repeated tasks
More effective event management
Reduced volunteer turnover
Actionable insights to improve your volunteer program

Simply put, volunteer management software takes your nonprofit to the next level, making it much easier to scale your organization.

Growing Your Volunteer Program: Challenges and Opportunities

As your nonprofit grows, your volunteer program will need to grow with it. You will need more people to handle events, fundraising, and administration, and volunteers are the most cost-effective way to complete those tasks.

To mobilize your volunteers, you will need to increase your efforts in a variety of volunteer management areas, including:

Recruiting new volunteers is necessary to support increased programming and organizational capacity.
Training and onboarding. All your new volunteers have to be trained and fully onboarded before they can be utilized. If this process does not go smoothly, you risk losing new recruits.
A volunteer program’s impact is severely limited if the volunteers aren’t active. In order to support your organizational growth, you need an engaged volunteer base.
Clear, consistent communication channels will keep your volunteers in the loop and improve program results.
Volunteer segmentation is essential to understanding your volunteer base. Without segmentation, you will not be able to recruit, engage, or assign your volunteers as effectively.
Role assignment. As your organization changes, volunteer positions will change along with it. You need to be able to match the right volunteer with the right job, especially as you introduce new or refined roles.
Event management. Growing your organization involves introducing new programs and opportunities, as well expanding the scale of flagship events. With so many logistics and administrative tasks to take care of, you have to ensure you have adequate volunteer management capacity.
Rewards and recognition. Busy volunteer managers can let rewards and recognition fall to the wayside all too easily; however, they are critical for preventing volunteer turnover.
Budgeting and fundraising. As your organization grows, you will need to invest more resources into the volunteer program in order to keep up with demand. You need to develop a strong budget and plans for fundraising.

If you’ve been relying on old-fashioned volunteer management software methods, like storing volunteer data in a spreadsheet or manually sending reminder emails, these individual responsibilities will quickly become overwhelming as your nonprofit grows. Not to mention, they all require a certain level of time, money, and energy.

Volunteer management software has solutions to streamline all of these tasks. With volunteer management software, you can dedicate fewer resources to administration and redirect critical staff and funding to other responsibilities.

How Volunteer Management Software Supports Nonprofit Growth

Volunteer management software supports nonprofit growth by conserving resources, optimizing operations, and bolstering volunteer engagement.

Your nonprofit will encounter challenges as it scales. Volunteer management software presents a single, comprehensive solution that:

Automates volunteer recruitment, onboarding, and training. Volunteer management software streamlines the process of posting opportunities, collecting applications, and training volunteers, allowing your organization to efficiently onboard more volunteers without overwhelming staff.
Simplifies scheduling and event management. Volunteer management software allows volunteers to self-schedule and sends automated event communications, making it easier to coordinate large groups of volunteers and ensure full coverage for every position.
Centralizes volunteer data. Volunteer management software provides centralized databases for more effective role assignment, segmentation, hour tracking, and impact measurement.
Targets communication. Volunteer management software provides email and text message communication options that can automatically contact the right volunteer segments at the right time.
Scales outreach. As your nonprofit expands, you can leverage volunteer management software’s segmentation and communication options to personalize program marketing and outreach for all potential stakeholders.
Builds community partnerships. Volunteer management software helps your organization forge strong relationships with other civic organizations through customizable landing pages and refined opportunity management.
Reduces volunteer turnover with rewards and recognition. For your nonprofit to continue to grow, you need to prioritize volunteer retention as much as volunteer recruitment. Volunteer management software offers rewards and recognition programs that make your volunteers feel valued while encouraging healthy competition.
Enhances reporting. Volunteer management software can effectively analyze volunteer data and generate meaningful reports, helping organizations demonstrate impact to stakeholders and make data-driven decisions to grow their program.
Boosts fundraising efforts. Volunteer management software makes it easy to convert volunteers into donors with donation landing pages, multiple payment processors, and automated fundraising communication.
Strengthens grant applications. In addition to improving your fundraising efforts, volunteer management software gives you the compelling data and effective analytics you need to articulate your organization’s past successes, present projects, and future goals—showing grantors that you are a worthy investment.

With volunteer management software, your organization will have the tools it needs to effectively scale its operations and impact. Volunteer management software is not only helpful for organizational growth; it is necessary.

How to Choose the Right Volunteer Management Software

Choosing the right management volunteer software is key to supporting organization growth. As you research your volunteer management software options, look for the following features:

Intuitive, user-friendly interfaces for easy training and implementation
Customization options to meet your organization’s changing needs
Comprehensive volunteer databases with robust analytics, advanced reporting options, and enhanced security
Self-service features so that volunteers can take ownership over scheduling, check-in, hour tracking, and other tasks
Automation for communication, rewards, and other repetitive tasks
Software integration so that the volunteer management platform can be effortlessly incorporated into your current processes
Helpful, responsive customer service

Remember: take your organization’s unique needs into account and look for the volunteer management software solutions that will address your current problems and support future goals.

How to Pitch Volunteer Management Software to Stakeholders

Once you have chosen a specific volunteer management platform to implement, you need to get a variety of stakeholders on board, including leadership, board members, and the volunteers themselves.

To develop an effective volunteer management software pitch, you will want to consider the following factors:

Pain points. Understand the challenges your organization is currently facing and highlight how volunteer management software can solve them. A volunteer management platform can address a lot of tasks, but how can it specifically help your organization?
Scalability and customization. Articulate the ways that volunteer management software will support organizational growth and how it can be customized to meet new challenges.
Return on investment (ROI). As your organization directs its funds to growth, leadership may be initially reluctant to invest in volunteer management software. Be ready to demonstrate the platform’s strong ROI and how it can fit into the volunteer program budget.
Goal-setting. Showcase how volunteer management software can help your organization achieve its short-term and long-term goals.
Back up all of your claims with a combination of impactful data and compelling case studies. How has this volunteer management platform already helped organizations like yours? What projected impact will it have on your nonprofit?
Invite volunteers, board members, and other stakeholders to share their personal experiences and how they believe volunteer management software will help your organization. If you can demonstrate that others are already on board, it will be easier to secure buy-in.
Propose a timeline and plan for efficient software implementation. It may seem like you are getting ahead of yourself; however, you won’t be able to make a compelling case without outlining the steps for actual mobilization.
Consider your audience carefully. While you always want to craft a strong argument, emphasize the things that will resonate best with your audience. For example, volunteers will probably respond strongly to emotionally-charged testimonials, but your board will likely be more interested in data.

With a carefully crafted argument, it will be easy to show the positive impact volunteer management software will have on your organization, especially as it grows.

VolunteerHub: Your Volunteer Program Growth Partner

If you are looking to grow your nonprofit, you need VolunteerHub. We are the premier volunteer management software solution on the market. Over the course of the past two decades, VolunteerHub has helped thousands of organizations manage billions of volunteer hours, so we have the expertise to help you unlock your organization’s full potential.

VolunteerHub’s friendly, knowledgeable staff will help you customize our platform to meet your organization’s needs and directly support your growth efforts. With VolunteerHub, you can easily: