Nonprofit Volunteer Management Strategies
Your volunteers are one of your organization’s most important assets. They assist you with tasks you could never finish without their help, keeping you from getting bogged down with small tasks and freeing you up to accomplish other things for your charity. Volunteers also bring an infectious spirit and enthusiasm to everything they do, getting others excited about your mission.
Providing volunteers with concrete direction and instructions will encourage them to give you the support you desire and help make your charity event stronger. Here are some effective volunteer engagement and management tips for nonprofits that can increase your organization’s efficiency.
Set Clear Goals
Employees are different from volunteers, but both groups should have a set of goals. Volunteers who know what they’re working toward will be much more motivated than those who do not. For example, if you tell your volunteers, “I need you to assemble as many baskets as possible in the next hour,” you aren’t motivating them to reach a certain goal. But if you say, “I need you to assemble 50 baskets in the next hour,” they know what they need to do, and they’ll know if they’re falling short or overachieving.
Either way, it’s valuable for your organization to get an idea of your volunteers’ productivity. This knowledge will help you set organizational goals as well.
Give Your Volunteers Recognition
Volunteers do what they do out of the goodness of their hearts, but they still want to feel valued. Hearing how they’ve made a difference for your organization keeps them excited and inspired to continue volunteering. You can show them how much you value them in several ways, including:
- Writing a thank you note
- Recognizing them at a company-wide meeting
- Naming something for them, such as a technique they developed for sorting donations
Improve Your Onboarding
Many places have professional onboarding programs for when a new employee is hired. Doing the same for your volunteers can increase the feeling of community and show them what an important part of the team they are while also answering many of the questions they may have at the start. Your onboarding might include training in specific duties and an in-depth explanation of the organization’s mission.
Encourage Volunteers to Tell Others About Their Experience
One of the best nonprofits’ volunteer management strategies can be to get your current volunteers to recruit future ones. If they mention to friends and family what a fantastic experience, they’ve had with you, it could spark others to step forward and volunteer.
Take Advantage of Technology
Technology has made scheduling, tracking, and contacting volunteers much easier. While paper schedules can get lost and someone could spill coffee on your volunteer contact list, storing all that information in a volunteer software program, like the one from Volgistics, will allow you to stay organized and communicate with your volunteers.
Follow these tips for managing nonprofit volunteers, and you’ll find that your volunteers become more engaged while you feel more organized. If you’d like to learn more about how Volgistics can help, you can sign up for a demo or get in touch with us today.