“How can I get my volunteers to keep coming back?”
Here’s how you can solve your volunteer management woes once and for all — using data.
Volunteers are the lifeblood of a non-profit. They help to relief much of the work in a non-profit (e.g. data entry, event planning), provide critical services to beneficiaries (e.g. subject tutoring, medical services, legal advisory, food delivery), and provide critical manpower at events. Since more than 80% of programmes in the social sector are delivered by volunteers, it is suffice to say that it is impossible for a non-profit to function without its volunteers.
Here’s the problem: volunteers don’t stick around forever. In fact, many volunteers leave before their stint is up, and this obviously creates problems for the non-profit. How do they recruit volunteers to fill the gap left behind by those who left, without wasting precious time and resources? More importantly, how do they prevent the problem from happening again and again?
While there are always a couple of bad apples, most volunteers start out genuinely committed when they step forward to sacrifice time and energy for your cause. What we need to realise is that non-profits are part of the problem too: to solve volunteer attrition, many teams must do more to improve the way they manage and engage volunteers!
So if you’re working in the social sector presently, here’s some good news for you: bantu is here to help.
We have released a research to understand critical volunteer management issues in the social sector today. Bringing together data from 62 non-profits across Singapore, we derived an empirically-driven approach to unlock the causes underlying poor volunteer retention and engagement today. Feel free to download a copy of it here.
Here are three findings we want to share with you:
1. Communicate with your volunteers.
Our results showed that organisations facing issues communicating with their volunteers have a 29% higher chance of reporting a problem with volunteer attrition. In other words, if you cannot get through to your volunteers, then chances are, you’re not going to see them around much longer.
With so many communication tools at our disposable (think of the 101 different messaging apps we have today), nothing beats meeting your volunteers face-to-face and building up rapport in person. At the end of the day, building up trust and aligning expectations early on will solve many problems for you later down the road.
In addition, sending out timely reminders and clear instructions to volunteers is very critical to the success of your programmes as well. If there are too many messages to send to your volunteers, you should consider automating the admin-related communications in your organisation, either via SMS or email.
2. Skills are important.
The most important finding we uncovered is that non-profits that deploy volunteers based on their skills are much less likely to report an issue with volunteer attrition: 38% less likely, in fact.
This means that your organisation should consider changing the way you recruit and engage volunteers. Instead of casting a wide net for volunteers, you can select volunteers with specific skill sets to deploy for your programmes instead. Alternatively, you can redesign your programmes around the capabilities of your volunteers: for example, you set up a calligraphy class for the beneficiaries if you have a volunteer who is particularly skilled at it.
Alternatively, you can consider developing the skill set of your volunteers instead. Just like employees, volunteers can also learn to become better at their roles, but only if you provide them training and guidance along the way. For example, a youth befriender can go on to become a life mentor or programmes planner in an organisation, once they are adequately trained in that particular capacity by your team.
3. Acknowledge the work that they do.
Volunteers aren’t just grunts in your organisations. They want to do good for your organisation because they believe in your cause, and perhaps feel strongly about your non-profit specifically. Therefore, it is important that you find time to appreciate your volunteers, and acknowledge them as part of your team (and not just as resources).
However, we at bantu recognise that appreciation is not easy work at all: our results indicated that those who run volunteer appreciation events are 38% more likely to report an issue with administration. This may seem like a curious and unconvincing relationship: how can having dinner with your volunteers possibly influence your administrative processes?
There is actually a key element tying these two variables together: calculating volunteering hours. Knowing which volunteers to appreciate (especially in a large organisation) means knowing how much your volunteers have contributed, and this can be a very admin-intensive task. Since a significant amount of time is required to capture such data, your team should consider processes and platforms that can reduce the level of repetition required for this objective. Volunteer management systems (VMS) are particularly useful for automating much of the work in such instances.
So…. what next?
Getting your volunteer management process right not only means fixing issues with volunteer admin and retention, it creates plenty of positive externalities too: better programmes, more donors, lower instances of staff-burnout… the list goes on.
We believe our findings will be a useful first step in helping your non-profit engage your volunteers more meaningfully. There is a growing amount of resources on volunteer management too: for a start, the National Council of Social Services (a.k.a. NCSS) has put together a concise list of localised materials on optimising the social good from volunteering, which you should certainly check out here. You should also check out volunteerism-related courses from the Social Service Institute (SSI), or volunteer-related consultancy from Emmaus Strategies.
And of course, if you ever need the right technology to improve your volunteer management process, bantu’s here to help.
So what are you waiting for? It’s time to win your volunteers back!
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We hope that this paper can help you or the agencies that you work with to address the volunteer management issues in this space, as well as validate and improve processes in your organisation.
Please let us know what are your thoughts on our research. We have also used this research to build out bantu’s VMS solution to solve such critical issues more effectively, and we would love to share our know-hows and resources with you or your networks.
