Volunteer Engagement: Strategies for Smart Organizations
Every interaction a volunteer has with your organization matters. From the moment they land on your website to sign up for an opportunity to when they check out of their shift, your volunteer's experience can directly impact your organization's ability to meet its goals.
Here at Bloomerang, we specialize in volunteer management tools that help organizations develop impactful volunteer programs. We understand what it takes to empower teams of supporters, and using our firsthand knowledge, we've pulled together several volunteer engagement ideas and strategies for maximizing your team's impact.
This article will explore how your organization can ensure every volunteer has a meaningful and positive experience through a well-thought-out volunteer management strategy.
Volunteer engagement: What is it and why does it matter?
Volunteers are the face of your organization; they are the people delivering the qualified service to your clients and community, making them an absolutely essential part of your organization's team. Keeping your volunteers happy, motivated, and engaged in your organization's mission is a key part of longer-term volunteer retention and program success.
What is volunteer engagement?
Volunteer engagement is simply an organizational strategy that encourages collaboration between staff and volunteers to develop meaningful volunteer opportunities that positively impact the organization and the community. A volunteer engagement strategy should work towards matching volunteers with opportunities they are qualified for and interested in, giving them the best volunteering experience possible.
Why is volunteer engagement so important for your program?
Sometimes, the real challenge isn't recruiting volunteers, but rather, it's encouraging them to stick around by providing them with a meaningful experience. Every successful volunteer program prioritizes volunteer engagement in order to meet its goals.
By investing in getting to know who your volunteers are and what motivates them to donate their time and effort to your organization, you can ensure that they are placed in a role where they will thrive. When all your volunteers are thriving in their work, the whole program and organization will thrive as well.
How to build a volunteer engagement plan
Laying the groundwork for your volunteer engagement strategy up front gives you a path to capture and sustain supporters' interest. Follow this step-by-step process to build a comprehensive plan:
- Assess volunteer needs: Before strategizing, get to know your volunteers.
- WHO are your volunteers? Collect demographic information, skills, and qualifications.
- WHAT do they need or want from your program? Understand what they want to get out of their time.
- WHY are they involved in your organization? Understand their passion and motivation.
- WHERE are they coming from and going? Account for travel limits and time zones.
- WHEN can they work? Keep up with availability to map out an accurate volunteer scheduling workflow and reduce no-shows.
- Set engagement goals (SMART): Ensure your program goals are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.
- Segment volunteers: Group your supporters based on their skills, availability, and specific interests to tailor their experience.
- Match roles to skills and motivations: Place your volunteers in specialized roles where they can find personal meaning and thrive.
- Onboard and train: Equip your volunteers with the exact tools and knowledge they need to succeed from day one.
- Build communication workflows: Use robust volunteer communication practices to keep volunteers in the loop without overwhelming them.
- Recognize contributions: Develop structured ways to regularly show your volunteers that their work is highly valued.
- Measure and refine: Keep track of key metrics to understand what's working and adjust your strategy accordingly.
The volunteer engagement lifecycle
To fully support your volunteers, you should visualize their journey through the volunteer engagement lifecycle. This framework ensures you are proactively managing their experience at every single stage:
Proven volunteer engagement strategies
Implement smarter volunteer software.
Volunteer engagement requires good volunteer data collection and tracking, making volunteer management software the best tool for your organization. A volunteer management software should provide an end-to-end solution from recruitment to reporting and everything in between.
Volunteer management software like Bloomerang offers organizations unlimited flexibility to collect custom data points during the recruitment process. In turn, this empowers each organization to match the right volunteers with the right role every time.
Segment your communications.
There is nothing more frustrating to volunteers than wasting their time by making them read irrelevant emails and communications concerning things they aren't a part of. It is so essential to keep your volunteers informed, but they don't need to know every scheduling issue or read every inquiry from another team.
A volunteer management solution like Bloomerang keeps your volunteers up to date with automated notifications and communicates when something specific to their shift has changed. This ensures that they show up at the right place at the right time with no confusion.
Using our platform, consider opening up a chat thread with your volunteers through a volunteer mobile app to check in on them as they work and offer any help along the way. An essential component of any volunteer engagement strategy is making sure your volunteers feel equipped with the tools and information they need to succeed in their role.
Listen to your volunteers' opinions.
Collecting insight from your volunteers is vital to defining issues and finding ways to resolve them. Most people won't give feedback unless asked, so make sure you ask every volunteer about their experience and how it can be improved after they have worked.
Consider creating and distributing an online volunteer experience survey. This allows you to collect rich feedback and data points that you can measure. Online surveys are convenient for everyone! All you need to do is send a link to the survey message through your volunteer management app once a volunteer has checked out.
Collecting feedback should be easy and convenient for all parties involved. Plus, taking action on suggestions will convey that you value the supporter experience, making it a great volunteer engagement idea.
Tie everything back to the mission.
Stating how every volunteer program and event helps support the organization's mission is so important to motivating volunteers to keep doing their best. People want to know how their work is important to making a difference, so whenever you can explain that, do so.
Your volunteer handbook and training sessions are the perfect places to state the impact the volunteer work will have toward reaching the overall mission. After all, your volunteers must have initially felt a connection to your work, and a simple reminder of that can go a long way.
Make sure your volunteers know they're appreciated.
Volunteers donate their time and unique skills to your organization, and just like donors, they deserve to feel appreciated and thanked for their work and dedication to the cause. According to the Bureau Of Labour Statistics, 72% of volunteers serve only one organization or cause, meaning that you need to provide the best volunteer experience possible in order to stand out from the rest.
Volunteers show how much they care about your organization's mission through action, and you should show them appreciation in the same way. There are many ways to accomplish this, from a sending a simple thank you message at the end of every shift to giving awards of recognition for those outstanding volunteers who go above and beyond.
No matter how your organization wants to implement a volunteer appreciation effort, what is important is that you have one in place.
Implement check-ins with regular volunteers.
Nonprofit organizations often rely on volunteers to complete important tasks that are often paid work in businesses. A volunteer should be treated similarly to an employee if they work a steady shift, so it is important to routinely check in with those core volunteers to make sure they are set up for success and find meaning in the role they serve.
Much like HR or management best practices, a frequent one-on-one session with their manager can go a long way when ensuring those volunteers are properly supported. During these sessions, managers can collect feedback and implement changes to make an improvement to prevent volunteer burnout.
Overall, remember that volunteers are giving, but it is important not to take advantage of them as an organization. Make sure to set volunteer hour limits to ensure you don't overwork your generous volunteers. This way, they can stay energized and continue supporting your work.
How do you measure volunteer engagement?
Metrics matter! Collecting important volunteer program data points will allow you to track your engagement and the progress you are making with your new plan. Without these metrics, you will be unable to accurately measure success. Here are the most important KPIs to keep track of:
- Volunteer retention rate: What percentage of volunteers did you retain year over year?
- Frequency of volunteering: On average, how many shift opportunities does a volunteer work?
- Total number of volunteers: What is the total number of volunteers that you recruited and retained in one year?
- Digital engagement rates: How many social media followers do you have, and how are volunteers engaging with your emails and texts?
- No-show rate: How often do scheduled volunteers fail to show up for their shifts?
- Satisfaction/NPS: How likely are your volunteers to recommend your program to their friends and family?
Volunteer engagement: Frequently asked questions
What is volunteer engagement?
Volunteer engagement is an organizational strategy that fosters collaboration between staff and volunteers to create meaningful opportunities that advance the mission, matching volunteers with roles they're qualified for and motivated by.
How do you create a volunteer engagement strategy?
Start by assessing your volunteers' needs, setting SMART goals, segmenting your volunteer base, matching roles to skills, establishing onboarding protocols, building communication workflows, and consistently measuring your success.
What are examples of volunteer engagement strategies in action?
Examples include segmented email workflows, structured onboarding and mentorship sequences, consistent appreciation calendars, and regular post-shift volunteer satisfaction surveys.
How do you engage and retain volunteers?
Provide thorough training, ensure they feel consistently appreciated, tie their specific tasks directly to your core mission, and offer flexibility in scheduling to accommodate their personal lives.
What is the volunteer engagement lifecycle?
It is the end-to-end journey a volunteer takes with your organization: needs analysis, recruitment, screening, placement, orientation/training, supervision, recognition, and retention/re-engagement.
How do you measure volunteer engagement?
Track key performance indicators such as your retention rate, frequency of volunteering, total active volunteers, no-show rates, and overall satisfaction or Net Promoter Scores (NPS).
How do you re-engage disengaged or inactive volunteers?
Send personalized outreach messages, offer flexible or entirely new roles, ask for their honest feedback on their past experience, and share updates on how their previous work made a tangible impact.
Additional volunteer engagement resources
Now that you understand how important volunteer engagement is to your organization's long-term success, it's time to start implementing some of the above best practices. If your organization is looking to streamline your volunteer management processes and operations, make sure to check out Bloomerang's all-in-one volunteer management solution.
If you're looking to continue your research into the best volunteer engagement strategies, we have created several free volunteer management resources to help set your organization up for success.
- Five Best Practices for Volunteer Management: Practical, easy-to-implement moves that turn a so-so volunteer program into one people actually want to show up for.
- A Buyer's Guide to Volunteer Management Software: Free eBook that walks you through exactly what to look for, what to ask, and how to prove ROI before you buy — download it and skip the guesswork.
- 19 Top Volunteer Management Software Picks for Nonprofits: Top-rated tools compared side by side, so you can find the one that fixes your scheduling headaches and keeps volunteers coming back.
