The Real Reason 75% of Americans Don't Volunteer

Our country takes great pride in the role volunteering has played in our history. We believe that volunteers are virtuous, kind and essential to the health of our society. It is why the Dr Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, for instance, is celebrated as a national Day of Service. We are a country that loves volunteering.

We are also a country where three out of four people don't do it.

According to the Corporation for National & Community Service 62.6 million Americans volunteered in 2013. That is about 25% of the adult population, and if you happen to be keeping score, the lowest rate in a decade. Yes you can view this as a glass 1/4 full. But given how important volunteering is, I'm not alone in thinking, "We can do better."

In 2009 I joined a cross-sector coalition of leaders, practitioners and researchers to take a fresh look at why so many efforts to promote volunteering fail to live up to expectations. The group came to be known as Reimagining Service and over the last five years it has hosted an open and honest inquiry into everything that is right and wrong with volunteering.

The group recently released its final report, which summarizes its history and findings. It also champions four principles we need to take seriously in order to overcome the challenges that limit volunteering.

ATTENTION -- policy makers, philanthropists, business leaders, nonprofit executives, consultants, pundits, reporters, data scientists, academics, political leaders, future Presidents and future volunteers. If you are serious about investing in a world where everyone has an opportunity to make a difference here are four things you need to know.

Reimagining Service's Four Principles of Volunteering:

Principle 1: The volunteer ecosystem is more effective when all sectors participate in its evolution

Volunteerism doesn’t exist in a single sector and the responsibility of successful volunteer engagement resides beyond nonprofits alone. We are interdependent when it comes to this work and together we can increase the impact of volunteerism by working to improve the system across all sectors (i.e., nonprofit, private, faith-based, education, government).

Principle 2: Make volunteering a core strategic function, not an add-on

Volunteers fundamentally increase our ability to achieve our objectives and advance the social mission of our organizations. Engaging volunteers effectively can help an organization serve more people in the community as well as change the core economics of an organization, which can allow it to scale more quickly in a cost effective way.

Principle 3: Focus volunteer engagement on true community needs

Rather than responding to the supply of volunteers, identify key priorities in the community then purposefully seek out volunteers with the core skills needed to address those priorities. We should also strive to communicate the value of volunteers to the community by measuring their impact, not just the hours they serve.

Principle 4: In order to get a return, you have to invest

Organizations that make volunteers central to their work and manage them well are able to generate as much as three to six times the community value from
volunteers as the cost to manage them. This is a smart way to maximize impact, but it requires up-front and ongoing financial investment in volunteer engagement in all sectors. We need more funders to recognize that funding volunteer engagement supports their broader social missions and raise their voices so that the funding community can learn from their stories.

Like everything else in life effective volunteer engagement takes leadership, planning and resources. Reimagining Service's four principles tell us that volunteering won't increase until there are more organizations with the vision. leadership and resources to effectively engage volunteers.

It is like the job market, you can't increase the employment rate just by telling people they should go get a job. To get more people working, you need more jobs.

I believe knowledge is power and that the future of volunteering is bright. However, change is hard and talk is cheap. So the status quo won't be easy to defeat. But we can make a difference if we stop spending so much time and money convincing people they should volunteer, and spend a little bit more on helping communities and causes invest in asking them if they will. The four principles are a foundation to help us get there.

The real reason more American's don't volunteer is because we don't have enough leaders to ask them.