Have you ever had a volunteer come to one event but never return? This story is all too familiar to many nonprofits and can be frustrating.
Cultivating long-term relationships with your volunteers is critical. Each volunteer hour is worth approximately $33.49, and volunteers generate an estimated $122.9 billion annually, so having a dependable and engaged volunteer base saves your organization time, effort, and money. Simply put, it’s always worthwhile to invest in volunteer retention.
What is Volunteer Retention?
Volunteer retention is the process of ensuring a volunteer’s continued involvement with your organization. Volunteer retention allows your organization to maximize its return on investment in your volunteer program, while also ensuring you always have the people you need to fill critical volunteer positions.
Volunteer retention strategies combat volunteer turnover. According to AmeriCorps, the average volunteer turnover rate is about 35%, so 1 in 3 volunteers will eventually stop working with your organization. High volunteer turnover rates force you to dedicate more resources on recruitment and training. However, when you have repeat volunteers, you can pour those resources into your nonprofit’s programs instead.
Returning volunteers aren’t just cost-efficient; they also typically perform better. Repeat volunteers already understand your organization and its processes, so they tend to be more reliable and confident on the job.
Understanding the Volunteer Lifecycle
The volunteer lifecycle traces your volunteer’s engagement journey from the day they first learn about your nonprofit. Understanding the volunteer lifecycle is key to developing your volunteer retention strategies.
The volunteer lifecycle can be broken up into 6 stages:
- Awareness: An individual learns about your organization.
- Consideration: The individual does some more research about your nonprofit and thinks about getting involved.
- Engagement: The individual signs up for an event.
- Retention: The individual continues volunteering with your organization.
- Recognition: Your organization makes the individual feel valued through both formal and informal forms of recognition.
- Advocacy: The individual becomes increasingly involved in your organization. Potential avenues for advocacy include becoming a donor, taking on leadership positions, and encouraging others to get involved.
If you know where a volunteer is in the volunteer lifecycle, you can better target your communications with them, provide ample support, and improve retention efforts. For example, volunteers in the consideration stage should receive information about training and upcoming events to encourage them to sign up.
Top Volunteer Retention Strategies
Volunteer retention encompasses a wide variety of techniques. As you’re building your volunteer retention strategies, consider the unique needs of your organization and your volunteer base, as well as the resources you have to devote to retention efforts.
Understand Your Volunteers’ Motivation
The best way to keep a volunteer engaged is to understand why they showed up in the first place. If you know what motivates a volunteer, you can nurture that element of their volunteer experience.
There are plenty of reasons why someone may decide to volunteer, and exact motivations will vary from individual to individual. However, some common volunteer motivations include:
- Passion for a Cause. 83% of volunteers join a nonprofit because they care deeply about the organization’s mission.
- Community Impact. Volunteers often engage with an organization when they see that it is making a positive impact on their communities.
- Improved Health. Giving back feels good! Beyond providing a sense of personal fulfillment, volunteering has been proven to reduce levels of anxiety and depression, boost your mood, decrease the risk of heart disease, and increase your lifespan.
- 35% of volunteers get involved to meet new people and spend time with others. Many volunteers may also join because their friends or family already volunteer with an organization.
- Professional Development. Volunteering exercises a lot of transferable skills that can benefit volunteers in the workplace, including communication, collaboration, and project management; that’s why 82% of hiring managers are more likely to hire a candidate with volunteer experience. Many volunteers may be interested in upskilling or building their resumes.
- Skills aren’t the only career benefit that volunteering can offer. Volunteering offers the opportunity to network with community leaders and other professionals across a variety of fields.
- Meet School Requirements. Many high schools and colleges have community service requirements. Teenage volunteers in the US contribute 4 billion hours of work every year. Younger volunteers may initially join your organization to fulfill a school requirement, but with strong volunteer retention strategies, they can become supporters for decades to come!
How do you gather this data? For a lot of volunteers, it may come up organically through informal conversations. However, you should consider incorporating questions about volunteer motivations and goals in your volunteer screening process, training materials, volunteer surveys, and exit interviews.
Segment Your Volunteers
Once you understand your volunteers’ motivations, a robust volunteer database can help you personalize the volunteer experience.
Sample volunteer segments include:
- Age
- Location
- Skills
- Qualifications
- Availability
- Interests
- Role Preferences
- Contact Preferences
Segmenting your volunteers tells you who to contact, and when. When you target communications so that they are relevant to your volunteers’ segments, volunteers are more likely to respond and take action—significantly improving your volunteer retention efforts.
Conduct Exit Surveys
Exit surveys play a critical role in volunteer retention. If you understand why a volunteer has decided to leave, you can use that information to inform your volunteer retention strategies.
When a volunteer signals that they no longer want to work with your organization, request a brief meeting or send them an online exit survey. Consider asking the following questions:
- Why did you start volunteering with our organization?
It’s important to understand what your volunteer’s motivations and goals were when they joined your program.
- What program(s) were you involved with?
Knowing exactly how and when a volunteer engaged with your organization can help you pinpoint areas for improvement.
- Why have you decided to stop working with us?
It is critical to understand why a volunteer wants to leave. Give them space to fully express themselves and avoid being defensive. There are certain reasons for leaving that you have no control over (such as changing life circumstances), but others may highlight pain points that need to be addressed to prevent further volunteer turnover.
Common causes of volunteer turnover include burnout, poor organization, inadequate training, a lack of engagement, interpersonal tensions, disinterest in available volunteer positions, not understanding the volunteer program’s impact, and feeling underappreciated.
- Would you like to continue receiving communication from us about future events and volunteer opportunities?
This question leaves the door open for possible collaboration. Sometimes a volunteer just needs a break or they are moving out of the area. Well-targeted organizational communication may re-engage that individual in the future as a volunteer and/or donor.
A retiring volunteer’s answers can provide valuable insights into the volunteer lifecycle, allowing you to address issues and improve efficiency. Use the insights you glean from exit surveys to optimize your volunteer program.
Provide Comprehensive Training
When your volunteers feel confident in their roles and responsibilities, they are more likely to stay on board. Volunteers who receive adequate training are 83% less likely to turn over. Paying special attention to the training period of the volunteer lifecycle sets you up for better volunteer retention. Not only does your organization operate more efficiently, but your volunteers also feel more empowered and engaged.
Create a comprehensive training protocol that addresses the following topics:
- Your organization’s mission and values
- Your programs
- Your volunteer code of conduct
- Key staff members who interact with volunteers
- Specific volunteer roles and responsibilities
- Event sign up
- Tracking volunteer hours
- Using specific tools and software
- Knowledge and skill gaps
- Processes for feedback
You should also compile a summary of this information in a volunteer handbook that your volunteers can reference after training is completed.
Show Immediate Appreciation
Volunteers are critical to your nonprofit’s mission, so make sure they know it! 76% of volunteers who left organizations did not receive any type of formal appreciation. If you want to reduce turnover, invest in recognition.
Express your appreciation for your volunteers verbally as soon as you meet them, and be sure to reiterate it before they leave an event. Then, follow up with something more tangible:
- Handwritten thank you notes
- Automated thank-you emails and e-cards
- Volunteer social media shout-outs
- Newsletter features
- Branded merchandise
- Gift cards
- Point-based reward systems
- Awards, such as a “Volunteer of the Month” initiative
- Certificates for volunteer anniversaries
- Volunteer appreciation events
Volunteer appreciation and volunteer retention go hand-in-hand, so making your volunteers feel valued is critical to your volunteer retention strategies.
Provide a Clear Path for Growth
While some volunteers may be happy pitching in any way they can, most volunteers will feel more engaged if they have opportunities for growth within your organization.
Create a tiered system or roadmap that outlines how volunteers can take on more responsibilities over time. Be as specific as possible about the requirements for moving to the next level of engagement, as it will encourage volunteers to stick around long enough to advance.
In most nonprofits, the advocacy portion of the volunteer lifecycle will follow a standard progression path:
- Event volunteering: Most volunteers will start with a one-time shift at a specific event. If they have a good experience, they will often continue signing up for more opportunities.
- Project coordination: As volunteers become more involved in your organization, they take on tasks outside of one-time events, such as writing newsletters, assisting with volunteer recruitment, or coordinating with vendors.
- Leadership roles: Long-term volunteers will often assume greater responsibilities and formal leadership roles.
Highlight the different types of opportunities that volunteers can expect through continued involvement:
- Identify key roles within your organization that can be fulfilled by dependable volunteers. Consider designating shift leaders, training instructors, project managers, and community ambassadors.
- 92% of human resources executives say that volunteering contributes to an individual’s professional attributes, and many volunteers will see volunteering as a low-stakes way to hone career-related skills. Assign volunteers to roles that will be relevant to their career goals or help them learn new skills.
- In addition to upskilling on the job, you can also offer workshops for volunteers to improve specific skills, such as leadership, communication, and project management.
- Professional references and letters of recommendation. Your volunteer coordinator and staff will get to know your volunteers very well over the volunteer lifecycle, and they will be able to speak clearly to the individual’s strengths. Make it clear that your team is willing to write letters of recommendation or serve as professional references for reliable volunteers.
- Constructive criticism. Put systems in place that allow volunteers to receive valuable constructive criticism and compassionate feedback, such as annual performance reviews.
- Pairing new volunteers with experienced team members can make onboarding and training go much more smoothly, and volunteers can look forward to becoming mentors themselves one day.
Volunteers are willing to invest their time, energy, and skills in your organization; providing personal and professional development opportunities shows them that you are willing to invest in them, too.
Build a Sense of Community
Nurture connections between individual volunteers, your staff, stakeholders, and the entire organization. Everyone is working towards a common goal, and leaning into that collaborative energy leads to better volunteer retention.
Foster a community by:
- Organizing social events. Volunteers will naturally socialize on the job, but setting aside designated social time will further strengthen organizational bonds. You can organize formal events like volunteer appreciation parties, but more casual settings, like grabbing coffee before an event or weekly happy hours, can also go a long way.
- Engaging in team-building activities. Take a page from the corporate playbook and organize team-building activities, such as icebreaker games, trivia, and puzzles.
- Creating online groups. Use platforms like Facebook or Discord to create private online groups for your volunteers. These spaces are great for asking questions and sharing personal experiences.
- Encouraging mentorship. Connect new volunteers with long-term supporters so that they have a dedicated support system from day one.
- Breaking down barriers. It’s all too easy for volunteers to feel like they are “at the bottom of the totem pole.” Encourage communication between volunteers and senior leadership so that your volunteers know they are a vital part of your organization. Consider implementing open-door policies or office hours so that volunteers have an easy way of reaching out.
- Outlining a community culture. Establish the hallmarks of your organization’s culture early on in training, keeping honesty, respect, and inclusivity at the forefront of every interaction.
Articulate Volunteer Program Impact
Your volunteers joined your organization to make a difference, so articulating their impact is key to volunteer retention.
Regularly update your volunteers on how the work they’re doing impacts their community:
- Follow up after an event to showcase specific outcomes, such as the amount of money raised or services delivered.
- Share volunteer impact data through easy-to-understand infographics and high-value statistics.
- Engage emotions by highlighting compelling case studies, success stories, and beneficiary testimonials.
- Shout out to specific volunteers for their valuable contributions.
When your volunteers know they’re making a difference, they’ll want to keep going!
Offer Flexible Volunteer Opportunities
Busy schedules and changing life circumstances often present barriers to volunteer participation. You can optimize your volunteer retention strategies by making it as easy as possible for volunteers to get involved.
Consider offering:
- Easy online self-scheduling through volunteer management software like VolunteerHub
- Flexible volunteering hours
- Virtual and in-person volunteering opportunities (90% of volunteers are interested in virtual volunteering)
- Short-term and micro-volunteering options that require minimal time commitment
- Childcare to assist volunteers with families (9% of parents volunteer)
The more flexible your volunteer offerings are, the more people can participate in them!
Act on Volunteer Feedback
Show that you value your volunteers’ opinions by soliciting feedback regularly and implementing changes. Volunteer surveys give you invaluable feedback, directly from your volunteer base.
To get the most out of your volunteer feedback surveys, follow these tips:
- Time your feedback surveys for the most relevant results. In general, you should send out surveys within 24-48 hours after an event, as well as conduct periodical satisfaction surveys of your entire volunteer base.
- Narrow your survey scope so that you only poll the most pertinent volunteer segments.
- Incorporate a variety of questions, including multiple-choice, numbered scales, and short answers.
- Send reminders and offer incentives to encourage volunteer participation.
Once you get your volunteer feedback, act on it! Responding to volunteer feedback doesn’t just optimize your program; it also shows volunteers that they have a voice in your organization.
Target Your Communication
In our digital age, we are bombarded with stimuli. From texts to notifications to emails, your volunteers are receiving dozens (if not hundreds) of messages a day. Don’t get lost in the shuffle; contact your volunteers strategically.
When you reach out to your volunteers, remember:
- Your audience. Only contact relevant volunteer segments. For example, your long-term volunteers don’t need information about the upcoming volunteer onboarding session.
- Your purpose. Every piece of communication should have a specific reason, such as conveying information or a call to action.
- Your timing. It’s important to communicate with your volunteers regularly, but not so regularly that they start to get annoyed. Space out communications so that they are consistent and relevant, and try to send them at appropriate times. For example, you are less likely to get a response at 11 pm!
Keeping your volunteers in the loop is critical to keeping them engaged!
Keep Volunteer Interests in Mind
When you are assigning volunteer roles, keep their interests in mind. 44% of volunteers will leave an organization that they feel doesn’t utilize their skills, so prioritizing volunteer interests is critical to your volunteer retention strategies.
Be thoughtful and match your volunteers with the right opportunities. Look for roles that speak to their:
- Motivations
- Skills
- Interests
- Hobbies
- Personal and professional goals
If you’ve taken the time to get to know your volunteers through onboarding interviews, social events, and volunteer surveys, you should have no problem with proper matching!
Ask Your Volunteers to Donate
Volunteers are twice as likely to donate to your organization. After all, they have already demonstrated a willingness to give to your organization! Volunteer fundraising efforts don’t just help your organization raise more money; they also help with volunteer retention. When volunteers become donors, they now have two points of engagement with your organization, making them even more invested in your mission.
Create Meaningful Traditions
Annual events and traditions give your volunteers something to look forward to—and stick around for.
Try incorporating:
- Milestone celebrations for both the organization and individual volunteers
- “Graduation” ceremonies for volunteer training
- Signature fundraising events
- Special seasonal and holiday opportunities
Meaningful traditions celebrate the past, present, and future of your organization, and they also have a specific goal. For example, a Volunteer Alumni Day can celebrate both former and current volunteers, while also giving alumni a chance to reconnect with your organization and consider renewed involvement.
Invest in Volunteer Management Software
To retain as many volunteers as possible, you need to invest in volunteer management software. Volunteer management software optimizes your program to provide your volunteers with a smooth, enjoyable experience.
VolunteerHub is the top volunteer management software on the market today. Our intuitive, easy-to-use platform addresses multiple aspects of volunteer retention strategies, including:
- Communication
- Awards and Recognition
- Volunteer Segmentation
- Scheduling and Check-in
- Configurable Forms for Applications
- Impact Reporting
- Volunteer Fundraising
