Celebrating Your Volunteers Instead of Scaring Them Away
Lessons learned from managing a small nonprofit.
In honor of National Volunteer Week (April 21–27), I’m sharing some advice I gave one of my nonprofit clients. The organization was losing volunteers, several of whom had been helping there for years. The director couldn’t fully understand why.
Part of it was clear. Many of their longstanding volunteers were growing older and couldn’t perform the duties asked of them anymore. However, another portion of their volunteer base seemed to be leaving for unexplained reasons. As part of the agency’s strategic plan, they hoped to create a more thoughtful and effective volunteer recruitment and retention program.
To do that, it’s essential to distinguish between volunteers and paid staff. I managed the local food pantry for many years, and if you walked in off the street, you might not have known that the person who greeted you from behind the front desk didn’t actually “work” there. She was a volunteer, as were many people working in the back stocking shelves and sorting cans. The board members who governed the organization and ensured we had adequate funding were volunteers, too.
Like most nonprofits, we relied heavily on our volunteers so we could do our own jobs. Without them, we couldn’t fulfill…
