Retention

Acknowledging Volunteer Needs

• Think about how to best balance meeting your volunteer needs and your care recipient needs. Think about flexibility and expectations. Do you talk about these areas during onboarding? Do you reevaluate the care recipient and volunteer needs regularly? What can you change to ensure the volunteer and care recipient relationship is thriving?
• Volunteer attrition can occur at any point in the volunteer’s life cycle with your organization be it through self-selection to exit the program or life events. Stay in touch with exiting volunteers. Share program success stories and plans. Keeping them engaged may bring them back into the fold.
• It is important for volunteers to set clear boundaries with care recipients. When care recipients over ask of their volunteer it can lead to burnout, which results in attrition. Teach volunteers how to set and maintain clear boundaries. Educate care recipients on what volunteers are allowed and not allowed to do. Check in regularly with volunteers and care recipients to ensure needs are being met on both sides of the relationship.
• Provide volunteers with the opportunity to share thoughts, ideas, concerns, feedback and brainstorm solutions. This builds community between volunteers while offering supports to assist them in managing new or difficult situations and improve their volunteer skills.
• An essential part of retaining volunteers and continued successful recruitment is to ensure volunteers feel valued as part of the organization and program team. Getting to know the volunteers one-on-one will help build strong relationships that can also strengthen connections during onboarding/training. Supervisors who treat volunteers with the same respect and courtesy of any new employee and implement regular check-ins with the volunteer to assist with any difficulties they may be experiencing also promote volunteer retention.
• Volunteers want to understand their role and how it fits into the plan to meet the organization’s mission. Having this information provides value and purpose to their engagement, increasing the likelihood that they will continue to volunteer for your organization.
• Offer volunteers the opportunity to attend trainings and programs offered to caregivers. This will help them gain insight into the caregiver experience.
• Volunteers may have set ideas and expectations about your program prior to training. Try to honor their wishes and create situations that benefit them. It is important to realize that volunteer expectations and desires often evolve over time. Needs, interests and skills change. Often, more seasoned volunteers gain confidence over time and become ready to take on larger projects. Having other volunteer opportunities available will keep them engaged in your organization instead of moving on to find other opportunities that better meet their needs, interests and skill set.
• During the volunteer recruitment process, you will likely identify individuals who have high-level skills who could assist you in program development and implementation. To capitalize on their skills and abilities and offer a fulfilling volunteer role, consider whether they can assist with curriculum development, marketing materials development, community outreach, partnership building or sustainability. To what other areas could they provide insight that would help your program run more efficiently and effectively?
• Getting to know the volunteers as individuals and connecting with them at a relational level during regular check-ins can help with retention and keep the volunteer feeling connected to your organization.
• Sometimes loss of key volunteers cannot be prevented. To mitigate the impact, have a back up person or persons in place to transition into those roles when necessary to minimize down time.
• Supporting a volunteer through every step of the volunteer journey will build your volunteer retention rate. This can be achieved by starting the volunteer onboarding process as soon as the volunteer candidate shows interest, providing in-depth volunteer trainings, offering training times that meet the volunteers schedule, offering opportunities for volunteers to shadow staff members or other volunteers providing the same type of assistance that they will be offering, being available to answer volunteer questions as they arise, and offering volunteers the opportunity to meet regularly with each other to provide support and share information.

Embracing Flexibility

• Try to offer a variety of volunteer options at your organization and cross-train your volunteers so that they can partake in various volunteer opportunities.
• Cross training volunteers across programs allows you to be flexible, nimble and access a larger pool of volunteers quickly without having to provide training. Community needs often pivot quickly. Having a cross-trained work force can be highly effective and efficient.
• Volunteers want flexible volunteering opportunities. Organizations can address this challenge by offering volunteer opportunities that require different levels of time commitment and contact.
• To meet the needs of the volunteers, consider allowing them to set their own hours. This allows flexibility, decreases volunteer burden and increases the volunteer pool.
• Create flexibility with paperwork and timesheets. Volunteers are the lifeblood of the work. Make the documentation as easy as possible. This may mean offering fillable PDFs, printed materials, online documentation options, etc. Use whatever method the volunteers prefer to get necessary documents completed.
• One challenge you may face when developing a volunteer program that offers in-home support is a lack of volunteer interest in the significant time commitment required (typically weekly visits for possibly several hours at a time). To address this, consider structuring the volunteer opportunity as something small groups, or even families, could do together and share the responsibility.
• Volunteer recruitment and retention challenges for Volunteer Transportation or Volunteer Chaperone programs may include volunteers feeling nervous about transporting someone who just completed a medical procedure, only wanting to drive in a small geographic region, not being able to provide as many hours as planned due to their own illness. One way to increase volunteer engagement while managing the above challenges is to offer the opportunity for one volunteer to bring the client to the medical appointment and have another bring them home.
• Volunteer exhaustion is an often faced challenge. Consider addressing this issue by giving volunteers the opportunity to not do the same task more than once per month by providing different types of tasks that offer different experiences.
• It is important to find ways to adapt to volunteers with limited technology skills. Past grantees have heard feedback from some volunteers that they felt discriminated against in other volunteer positions because of their technology limitations. Find ways to make accommodations for those volunteers who do not have smartphones, access to the internet, or use email. Making those accommodations could be one reason a volunteer chooses your organization to engage with.

 Showing Appreciation

• Volunteers that feel appreciated and valued for their work are more likely to serve as ambassadors and can assist in recruiting more volunteers.
• Incentives are another way to make sure volunteers feel valued and appreciated. These can have monetary value, such as gift cards to assist with transportation expenses or gift cards to local businesses for food, etc. Other incentives can be team/staff events, like lunches, personal tokens of appreciation, like thank you notes or notes expressing sympathy if they have experienced a loss, can have a huge impact as well.
• Acknowledge and thank volunteers regularly. Their participation is essential to your program. It can be something as simple as a quick email, text, phone call or letter. Telling them you appreciate them can be more valuable to the volunteer than receiving gifts.
• You may find that not all volunteers require much recognition. They simply enjoy giving back to the community and meeting new people. Offering social events for the volunteers may meet the needs of this type of volunteer.
• When planning volunteer appreciation opportunities consider the following
  • Try something different. Don’t repeat the same thing every year.
  • Different people like to be appreciated in different ways. What can you do to meet the individual needs of your volunteers?
  • How can you show appreciation to your volunteers every day?
  • Use volunteer appreciation events to stay in touch with current and former volunteers. Share new opportunities, successes, volunteer and organizational news.
  • Offer milestone bonuses to volunteers who meet pre-established expectations.
• Recruiting and training volunteers at the same pace as recruiting care recipients and family caregivers helps to prevent attrition. Having enough individuals to fulfill program matches prevents long waitlists for care recipients and caregivers and ensures that volunteers are engaged promptly.