Volunteer Survey Reveals: How to Increase Volunteer Motivation at Your Nonprofit

Why This Matters: Because 83% of Volunteers Are Also More Willing to Donate Where They Volunteer

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Do you understand your volunteers? Do you know what motivates them to give freely of their time to help your nonprofit?

Volunteer motivation is critical to understand if you care about volunteer retention.

9 Ways to Retain More Volunteers

A recent study by Verified Volunteers revealed some powerful insights about volunteer motivation. As you’ll see, over 80% of volunteers share certain common traits. That’s four out of five. If you want to understand what motivates your volunteers to keep working with your charity, you need to see this data.

What Motivates People to Volunteer?

83% of volunteers give their time to causes because they care. That shouldn’t be too surprising. But this gives you great confidence that when you write to volunteers, you can basically assume this. Write to them as if they care about your mission, because almost all of them do.

This means you don’t need to waste time convincing them to care. Communication with volunteers should therefore have a different tone than how some fundraising communication often sounds. There is no convincing required of volunteers. They already care. They’re part of your team. Communicate to them as such.

66% of volunteers also want to improve their communities, and this motivates them to volunteer.

But here’s an interesting subset of your volunteers:

22% also care about building their skills, and 17% want to enhance their resumes.

This means offering the chance to do higher level work will appeal to some of your volunteers. It’s also why you should create a system that allows volunteers to track their hours – something 51% of volunteers said they want in the survey.

How Committed Are Volunteers?

84% of volunteers do so “at least a few times per year.” Only 25% volunteer once a week or more.

In my book – The Ultimate Fundraising Case Study – I discuss the idea of quantity vs frequency in great detail after reflecting on how volunteers contributed to the capital campaign on which the book is based.

Most volunteers will give quantity more easily than they will give frequently of their time. The survey bears this out, with 81% reporting they volunteer between 2-5 hours at a single time.

Let’s put these two statistics together.

84% volunteer a few times per year, and 81% volunteer 2-5 hours at a time.

Key Finding:

That means the great and overwhelming majority of your volunteers prefer to volunteer for one-time projects that require extensive time, and they do NOT prefer to volunteer frequently on an ongoing basis. Volunteers aren’t looking for a second job. They’re looking for occasional ways to make a big impact in their community through your charity.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Yet too many nonprofits keep looking for volunteers to fill roles that require ongoing commitment. The most common such area I have seen is in social media. This is where nonprofits try to find college students and Millennials (because they’re “good” at technology, we mistakenly think) to manage their social media accounts. See an excerpt from my book on social media and nonprofits.

Almost universally, when you task someone with managing a social media account – even if that just means posting regularly – that person will fail to follow through over time. They’ll start off excited and do plenty of activity, but it will wane and eventually cease, likely within a couple of months.

Why?

It’s not because they don’t care. 83% of volunteers care about your mission. It’s because these sorts of tasks start to feel like a job. And volunteers aren’t looking for a job.

Saying it only takes 10 minutes per day doesn’t help. That’s 10 minutes, every day, the volunteer has to set aside and work around. As the survey revealed, the great majority of volunteers prefer to spend more hours doing a single task rather than giving shorter amounts of time with greater frequency.

Learn this lesson now, or you’ll continue to be frustrated and disappointed as you search for volunteers to perform ongoing tasks.

Another insight from the volunteer survey is that 87% of volunteers work with more than one organization. Only 12% devote all their volunteer time to one nonprofit. So when your volunteers say they’re busy, this is one reason why.

They prefer to do a few things for several organizations, rather than work week after week for the same one. They don’t have time for that. (And neither do you, by the way. For many ongoing tasks – especially social media – you’ll end up spending as much time managing your volunteers as if you just did it yourself).

How to Keep Volunteers Motivated and Engaged

Just like we care about donor retention, we should care just as much about volunteer retention. Training a new volunteer isn’t much different than training a new employee. The more ‘institutional memory’ and community you can establish among volunteers and paid staff, the stronger and more nimble your nonprofit will be.

That means, you need to be proactive about finding ways to keep volunteers engaged and motivated. The survey reveals three pretty easy ways you can do that. The good news is, these are things volunteers themselves want to see happen.

1. Show Your Volunteers the Impact of Their Service

78% of volunteers want to know how their work has made a difference.

Image by Mary Pahlke from Pixabay

If you have an annual fundraising event, you probably depend heavily on volunteers to produce a successful outcome. Do you follow up with your volunteers afterward? Do you share with them the results, and in a way that personalizes it to their contributions?

I have volunteered at numerous fundraising events and galas, for many different organizations. Almost never do I get even an email after the event thanking me for my service, telling me how much was raised and what it will be used for, and giving me additional ways to volunteer.

Almost NEVER.

78% of your volunteers want that.

Not giving it to them is a tragic waste of an opportunity. Did my work even get noticed? Did it matter? If you don’t tell them it did, they’re left to wonder. How likely are they to volunteer again next year in that case?

2. Give Your Volunteers New Ways to Serve

44% of volunteers stay engaged when nonprofits provide new opportunities to serve, build their skills, and gain experience. Remember, volunteers want to track their hours. Some even want to put this on their resumes.

Suppose you have an envelope-stuffing party.

Afterward, in your communication sharing the impact their time has had (point #1), give them additional ways to serve in the future. Then, follow up when those opportunities draw near.

Your volunteers want to help. They want to stay engaged with new ways to serve.

How to do this?

I recommend creating a segmented email list comprised of all your prior volunteers so you can easily communicate to them and no one else with special, targeted messages and opportunities.

3. Recognize and Celebrate Your Volunteers

For 21% of your volunteers, nothing inspires more motivation than public recognition. Yes, this is a small minority, as most volunteers do not care about being recognized for their work. But many do, and it doesn’t have to take much.

Even just listing their names in an email newsletter, or having them stand up at the end of the event to be thanked – these small gestures show appreciation that is deserved and in short supply.

3-Step Volunteer Motivation Blueprint

To restate the main ideas learned from the volunteer survey, there are really just three essential strategies you need to implement to encourage and strengthen volunteer motivation.

1. Don’t overuse volunteers – give them high-impact, short-term tasks to help with

2. Communicate to them effectively – show impact, recognize and reward

3. Offer continuous places for them to serve

Do those three things, and you’ll retain more volunteers who love serving your organization and who are happy to know their work has made a difference.
And don’t forget one more thing found in the volunteer survey: 83% of volunteers are more willing to donate to the causes they serve. Retaining volunteers is therefore not only good for your operations, but for your revenue. Volunteer retention is good business.

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