Volunteer Retention: 3 Strategies

Volunteer retention is as important as it has ever been before. Volunteer behavior is changing and supporters want to be engaged in exchange for their time. What strategies is your nonprofit deploying to keep volunteers coming back? How is your organization measuring volunteer impact and communicating with your volunteer base? Did you know that only 55 percent of nonprofit organizations measure the impact that their organizational volunteers are making towards the greater good? The first step in retaining volunteers is understanding how big of a role supporters have towards reaching your organizational goals.

Here are a few impact metrics your nonprofit will want to measure in 2018:

1. Overall volunteer experience
2. Volunteer training costs
3. Volunteer opportunity perception
4. Conversions rates of volunteers to donors and vice versa
5. Quality of volunteer work
6. New versus returning volunteer commitments
7. Total impact towards your nonprofit's cause

First, let’s talk about a few ways that your nonprofit can retain volunteers and use these increased retention rates to have a bigger impact in 2018.

Volunteer Retention Strategy No. 1: Engage, Engage, Engage

Engagement is much more than a buzzword. It is the process of creating collaboration opportunities, building lasting relationships and putting processes in place to keep volunteers interested in your cause. All nonprofits, regardless of size, need to have a plan. A strategic engagement plan can help your nonprofit better understand volunteer behaviors, ask important questions, analyze how engagement is helping to reach organizational goals and increase retention rates.

Here are a few ways to engagement strategies that could be included in your engagement plan:

Article printed in Funding For Good, written by Eric Burger, marketing communications manager for VolunteerHub,