Do you think volunteer management software is too expensive for your organization? The alternative could cost a lot more!
Deploying a volunteer management process, built on efficiency, can help your organization engage, retain, communicate, and reap value from volunteers. Volunteer management software, like VolunteerHub, can provide your organization with the essential features needed to run a successful program.
If you are concerned about the cost of implementing volunteer management software, have you considered the alternative? A manual management process could be costing your organization money, time, support, and staff.
The fact is, the alternative to a strategic volunteer management solution can be downright scary! Here are a few reasons why.
Creates Stress on Staff
Too much stress on anyone is a bad thing! A manual volunteer management process can cause a lot of it. Is your staff experiencing high levels of stress? Have you considered that your volunteer program could be causing it? Manually keeping track of volunteer hours, upcoming opportunities, recruitment, communication, and engagement requires a ton of planning, precise execution, and commitment.
This high level of program planning and execution could lead to too much stress for your coordinators. A recent Everest College survey found that 83% of American professionals are stressed at their job.
Stress can cause turnover and substantially increase training costs. Investing in a streamlined volunteer management solution can alleviate stress by automating much of the process and reporting for staff.
Unnecessary Amounts of Paperwork
If your organization is using a manual process for volunteer management, you probably know all about paperwork! Your nonprofit may have paperwork for volunteer applications, background checks, hour-tracking, training, opportunity-fulfillment, and more. Too much paperwork is a bad thing because it is error-prone and wastes time.
A study, performed by Adobe, shows that too much paperwork can also hurt employee morale. According to the study, 75% of participants said that printing and emailing was boring, time-consuming, and challenging. The same study also found that 33% of survey respondents were forced to cancel a project due to poor office task management.
The stats say it all… Too much paperwork could be setting your volunteer program up for failure.
Diluted Engagement
The unnecessary paperwork (as discussed above) that a manual volunteer management process creates takes away from engagement. Your organization could be losing out on the ability to get to know volunteers, build strong relationships with them, and utilize them in other (more strategic) ways. Engagement promotes trust, and trust takes time to build. A study, by Concerto Marketing Group, found that 83% of people who trust an organization will recommend it to their network. Talk about a growth opportunity for your nonprofit!
Investing in a streamlined volunteer management system can help your organization devote more precious time to engaging volunteers and building life-long relationships.
Cumbersome Training
Trying to train staff on using an outdated manual volunteer management process has many pitfalls. The process may work for existing staff (who know the steps), but what happens if your organization recruits a new team member to take over/ contribute to volunteer management? Will the employee be able to learn the process quickly and efficiently? Manual management often requires unnecessary steps that force recruits to learn a cumbersome deployment process that takes countless hours.
Did you know that well-structured training can significantly improve staff retention rates? According to the SHRM Foundation, 69% of employees are more likely to stay at an organization that provides quality training during the onboarding process. A cumbersome volunteer management process can impact experience.
Investing in volunteer management software can improve the process/experience for staff!
Costly Errors
Probably the most substantial pitfall of a manual volunteer management process is the susceptibility to errors. Manual entry is prone to mistakes and out-of-date data. According to a study, performed by AIIM, 46% of survey participants believe that the removal of paper is the biggest, single productivity improvement for most of their business practices. The top reason for this statistic is that data entry can create manual mistakes.
In the United States, the average benchmark for data-entry errors is 1%. Any errors over 1% are a concern for nonprofits. How many errors is your organization making due to a manual record-keeping process? The truth is, most organizations do not know.
Streamlining your nonprofit's volunteer management process can help reduce the risk of data error and help your organization keep data up-to-date over time.
There is a Better Way!
Volunteer management software can improve your organization's volunteer management process in many ways. Tools, like VolunteerHub, provide communication, data management, and engagement feature sets. Interested in learning how VolunteerHub can improve the way your nonprofit manages volunteers? Maybe it is time for a hassle-free demo.
