How to Retain Your Volunteers

Volunteers are part of our greater ecosystem of change as advocates for your mission and as community members giving their time.?If your nonprofit manages volunteers, we want to offer three quick tips that you can consider for stewarding and retaining them. It’s a lot easier to keep the volunteers we have than find new ones!

The key idea here is to help your volunteers create a meaningful experience so that they commit to continue engaging with your work and, more importantly, the “why” behind your work.?Volunteer retention is intertwined with strong stewardship efforts and volunteer management. Think about the overall life cycle of your volunteers:

1. Creating a clear and effective start clarifies the impact of volunteering with your organization;
2. Providing further opportunities to engage allows volunteers to build a relationship with you, as does continually thanking and recognizing them; and
3. Finding ways to build their capacity as community leaders and advocates deepens that relationship.

Successfully orientating your volunteers from the get-go aligns them with your mission and values, as well as welcomes them into your community and encourages them to truly be part of it.

Tip #1: Educate your volunteers.

It is critical to contextualize why their volunteering matters, in addition to setting expectations for what the work actually entails. One of the lessons from a conversation with Breauna Dorelus of Connecting the Cause, hosted by our nonprofit partner Volunteer Fairfax, was to “get back to the why” of volunteering. We want to emphasize how important it is to create a space for this question when managing your volunteers. What are the greater systemic issues that have created the conditions for this volunteering opportunity to exist in the first place?

Giving your volunteers this context transforms the relationship by allowing for more possibilities to engage differently.

Tip #2: Ground your volunteers in the hyper-local.

Paint the picture for your volunteers. Who are you as an organization? Who is your organization to the community?

Showing them the tangible and relational impacts of your work can help them better understand why volunteering with your nonprofit, specifically, matters.

Tip #3: Build your volunteers’ hard and soft skills.

Before your volunteers begin the actual volunteering, don’t forget to train them in both the hard and soft skills they’ll need to feel confident about their experience. Depending on the volunteer opportunity, this can look like a briefing to set expectations, a Q&A session, or a role-playing scenario, etc.

Make the volunteer experience itself as clear as possible. The simple things matter – ensure they know how to get to your volunteer site, let them know where they can leave their bags, and so on. Feeling like your nonprofit has sufficiently prepared them and is invested in their success goes a long way in creating a meaningful volunteer experience.

As a final tip, don’t be afraid to open conversations with your volunteers about how they deepen their engagement with your nonprofit. Ideally, the practice of volunteering gives community members the tools they need to better advocate for your cause. So, ask if your returning volunteers would commit over the long-term and build their capacity to become community leaders who are part of driving your change.

Found this article helpful? Follow the Catalogue for Philanthropy on LinkedIn to read future articles! If you’re a more visual and auditory processor, we also have a variety of?publicly available webinars?that you can check out.

If you’re ready to learn more about fundraising, as well as other topics in communications, management, and nonprofit operations, consider purchasing a membership to our Learning Commons portal! Gain access to 80+ live webinars a year and 175+ unique existing resources.?Contact Chiara Banez, our Director of Nonprofit Programs, to learn more.