Episode #087 – Volunteer Research: Sector Trends & Our Latest Survey
Tobi: Welcome to the Volunteer Nation podcast bringing you practical tips and big ideas on how to build, grow and scale volunteer talent. I’m your host, Tobi Johnson, and if you rely on volunteers to fuel your charity, cause, membership, or movement, I made this podcast just for you.
Hey everybody, Tobi here. It is that time of year, that time of year where we conduct state of the industry volunteer research. And we’ve been doing our volunteer management progress report survey for eight years. This will be our ninth year. I cannot believe it. We’re almost to a decade conducting this research, figuring out sector trends.
And I want to talk about our latest survey as well. So, today I’m talking about volunteer research, sector trends, and our latest survey. I’m going to talk about what our theme is for this survey, what we’re going to be asking about, and what we’ll all be learning as a sector this year. But before we do that…
I’d like to talk a little bit about the history of the Volunteer Management Progress Report, and I wanted to do a fun rundown of some key trends and takeaways on volunteer research from each of the past eight surveys. So, I’m going to go through and do a rundown of each of the past. surveys, and give us all and review one key takeaway, just for fun.
What I thought was really interesting when I was doing this review was how things sometimes change and sometimes really stay the same. So, some of the themes I’m going to talk about, you’re going to say, think to yourself, you know what, we’re still, we’re still challenged by that. We’re still struggling with that.
So, I thought it might be fun to just see, you know, what are the trends over the last eight years? What are the things that we were discovering as we asked volunteer managers around the world? You know, it’s been a pleasure and an honor to do this research.
And I remember the first time we did it. People said, well, you’re not going to do this every year, are you? And I said, well, why not? And they said, well, cause people will get tired of participating. I said, no, they won’t. Not if they want to learn more and more about what we’re doing and how to advocate better for what we’re doing and to compare themselves to others. And to see where there’s opportunities for growth. I don’t think people get tired of that.
So, I kept doing it. And so, we’ve been distributing our survey link through our fans and followers and through our distribution networks. We’ve had generous partner organizations that contribute just by sending out our survey link. We provide a press kit, and they send out our survey link to their network so we can spread the word far and wide. And right now, right, we have about 40 organizations who will be supporting this volunteer research effort this year. So, if you’re interested in sharing the survey link with your network, you can add your info via a link in the show notes for this episode.
It’ll link to a Google form, and you can just add your information. Then, we’ll send you the press kit. Or, if you want to just send us an email to wecare@volpro.net, we’ll send you the link and you can fill in your information and then we can send you the press kit. It’s pretty much cut and paste, so it’s pretty easy.
But, you know, this support (and if you have been one of those long-term partner organizations, thank you, some of our partners have been supporting the Volunteer Management Progress Report Survey for nearly a decade, some of you since the beginning. And we just appreciate you so much.
Last year we had 1, 247 leaders of volunteers take the survey from 36 different participating countries. So, every year the breadth of participation and perspectives that we gather with the survey gets wider and wider and wider and it’s just really fun to see it expand around the globe and to hear from volunteer managers in really far-flung places from where I’m here in East Tennessee. So, it’s just a really fun thing to see happen.
As I said, our 2024 Volunteer Management Progress Report survey is now ready for primetime, and I invite you to also add your voice. If you’re interested in being a distribution partner to your network and you work in a network of volunteer managers, fantastic. We’d love to have you participate in that way.
You can also, and we highly encourage you if you’re a listener of the pod, to add your voice. If you are a leader of volunteers, if you are responsible for working with volunteers, then you are the perfect person to add your voice to the survey. But before I unveil the theme for this year and the details on how to participate, I thought I would share some key trends over the past few years.
Every year we ask some of the similar questions. There are certain questions we have asked every year since 2017 when the first report came out. The reports that we generate with this survey, in case you haven’t seen the report, Uh, before they’re very extensive. They’re usually 20, 30, 40 pages long.
There’s lots of data and people can use that data for a variety of different reasons to improve their program, to advocate for an additional FTE or even a pay raise. I’ve gotten emails from people who’ve said, you know what, I got a pay raise because I went to the board, I showed them this report, and I compared your salary information with my salary, and I got my pay raise.
So, we don’t ask about salary every year, but there are certain things like the “biggest challenge” question. We ask that every single year. What’s your biggest challenge so that we can understand? Where people are struggling to get traction. And also, to help us and inform us when we’re creating content.
If you’ve listened to the podcast or read any of our blogs, you know we create high quality content on a regular basis. Now, how do we do that? We do that through understanding you all and what your organizations need to win and volunteer engagement. So, this year, I’ll tell you in a little bit at the end what the theme is.
I’m very excited about it, but before we do that, I’m going to go down the trends from the last eight years. I just picked out one trend, one key insight or takeaway from each of the years that I thought I would share.
Also, you can download all of the reports from the past eight years from our website, our volunteer pro website at volpro.net/volunteer-management-progress-report (and there’s a dash between each of those words volunteer management progress report) or just go to volpro.net and at the top of the menu bar on our home page there’s a menu tab that says research just click on it and you’ll get right there so all of these reports can be downloaded. If something I’m covering interests you, definitely go and check out that report and get more detail on it and get the hard numbers, etc.
So, let’s dive in. This is going to be a little bit of fun. It’s a little bit of a walk down memory lane.
All right. So, in 2023, that’s this year’s report that came out last January, volunteer capacity had rebounded after two years of major decline. Now we call that our Back to Business Edition. In recent years, we’ve started to give theme names to our surveys. So, our report for that and the reports that are created from the surveys, I should say. So, we found that both the number of active volunteers and average monthly hours per volunteer were back to near pre pandemic levels.
However, volunteer recruitment was also the top challenge and top priority for respondents. Now, I will caveat that with the data showed. The comparative data of what people were telling us in 2021 versus 2023, definitely there was a resurgence of volunteer participation. However, anecdotally, we still hear from a lot of organizations that are struggling to recruit enough volunteers to meet the needs at their organizations. So, I will caveat that, but our data showed that a greater number of hours and a greater number of volunteers were participating.
In 2022, our theme was challenge and resilience and we found that diversity, equity, and inclusion planning was on the rise because even before the pandemic, I think in the 2020 (2018 maybe) survey, we asked, do you have a written plan for diversity, equity, and inclusion related to volunteers?
And we compared that question. We asked it again in 2022, and we found that between 2018 and 2022, there had been an increase in the percentage of volunteer involving organizations with diversity, equity, and inclusion or DEI plans in place related to volunteers. It was up 12%. So, we saw that as a positive trend in volunteer research.
It’s nice to know that more organizations are thinking about how to make their, organizations more inclusive for volunteers, more welcoming, and to see if we can diversify the depth and breadth of people who are involved in the volunteer enterprise. So that was a positive.
In 2021, my theme for that one was the COVID 19 Edition. It didn’t take a lot of creativity that year, I have to say. But we found a lot of interesting things going on during COVID 19. And one of them I found really interesting from that survey was the prevalence of intergenerational users of technology.
Our analysis showed that both the adoption of new tech tools and increasing levels of digital maturity were happening across all age group of volunteer managers. So, it made me wonder if the assumptions about who is able or willing to use online tools based on the age of a volunteer. Now in this case it was volunteer managers, but I just wondered about that age bias around tech.
Because I’m a woman of a certain age and I use technology and fairly adeptly. I had to teach myself and I had to get coaches to teach me back in 2015 when we started VolunteerPro, which is the online course and community side of our shop. But I didn’t know a lot about tech then, but I figured it out, right? Everything is figureoutable.
So, I think it’s interesting and I think it calls into question really when we assume that. Older volunteers aren’t going to want to use tech. I think we’re making a big, big jump. So, and you know, I know I’ve talked to some volunteer coordinators, and they’ve seen that more volunteers are willing to engage online than we’re first assumed during the pandemic.
We interviewed folks on the Time and Talent podcast about volunteers getting involved online and trying out Zoom. Nowadays, you know, people are fairly comfortable and confident, not everybody, but many people are more confident using online video software and et cetera. So that was a win for the COVID-19 Edition in 2021.
In 2020, we conducted our benchmarking edition survey and we had been surveying for five years at that point. And we found something that just was troubling and was happening over and over again, and that is the uniform results in demographics, work characteristics, salary, and primary challenges have persisted across five consecutive years of surveys.
Even with a shifting cohort of respondents, similar challenges are faced by many, regardless of organization size, causes, or country of origin. Around the world, we are more alike than different when it comes to volunteer management.
Now, on the one hand, I think that’s comforting for many of us to know and to feel a solidarity with leaders of volunteers around the world and volunteer involving organizations around the world. On the other hand, it calls into question, sort of, why aren’t we evolving? The question is, why aren’t we evolving? Because things in our survey, there are things that don’t evolve, that the complaints continue.
And it’s either that we’re not evolving, or that the challenges are endemic to what we do. So, for example, one of the challenges that people often talk about in the survey is the lack of respect or lack of support within their organization of real misunderstanding and undervaluing of volunteerism as an enterprise and as a support and as a resource to nonprofits around the world.
Now part of that could be endemic because volunteer managers are middle managers and if you talk to anybody. Who’s in a middle management position in a nonprofit, whether they’re the comms person, the development person, the HR person, they will also tell you that they feel unheard, unrecognized, unsupported.
So, and it depends on the organization as well. I can’t really say it’s in every organization. But I wonder if part of this is just about the characteristics of being a middle manager. That said, I know that there is still, there are still major challenges in how volunteers are perceived, how the level of investment and support and work that needs to go into designing a volunteer experience that works for the volunteer and works for the organization and works for the community is highly misunderstood, you know, no, there are no magic wands in our field. We know that.
So, the Benchmarking Edition was an eye opener at some point. You know, the evolution of the survey and of our reports, we realized, wow, some things just don’t change, do they? And that’s kind of an eye opener, something to think about.
So, let’s take a pause for a quick break from my overview of key volunteer research trends over the past eight years. And when we get back, I want to talk also about our theme for this year. And I want to let you know what we’re going to be asking about and invite you to participate. So don’t go anywhere. We’ll be right back.
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Okay. We’re back with our discussion of my top volunteer research trends over the past eight years. We are now into year 2019. Now that year of the Volunteer Management Progress Report and our volunteer research, we themed it the Tech Edition, and we asked about volunteer management software and what types of technology folks were using.
But we also did a little bit of cross tabbing and correlation analysis between volunteer capacity and management effectiveness as well as available resources. So, we kind of wanted to see, okay, do volunteer managers and volunteer services departments that have more resource and more support, are they more effective?
And the proxy we use for effectiveness is capacity. So, to what extent are all of your volunteer roles filled? If we asked how effective you are, we would get a very subjective answer and it’d be really hard to compare apples to apples. So, we have to use a proxy in our survey. And the proxy we choose is capacity, people’s perceived capacity often.
And this is a perception survey. So, it’s not cut and dried a hundred percent. Lock tight and scientific all the way to social science. We are happy with the level of detail we get, and we are happy to report these trends.
So, in the Tech Edition, there are, we found there were interesting correlations between volunteer capacity and management effectiveness as well as available resources. And here’s what we found. Our data showed that positive correlations existed between program budget and perceived volunteer management effectiveness and percentage of volunteer roles filled.
So, we actually asked the volunteer managers and coordinators who participated in the survey that year to tell us how effective they felt. So, what, what was their self-assessment of their effectiveness? We found that the higher the budget, the greater the reported impact, both in capacity and perceptions of effectiveness.
So that is, that’s very interesting because I believe that even your perception of your effectiveness makes you more effective because it’s around your confidence, right? And you’re going to try things. That are maybe a little quote unquote risky but could be big bets that could be big wins in your volunteer program.
You won’t try anything new if you’re not confident. And the surefire bellwether of someone who’s unconfident or an organization that’s unconfident is that the majority of people want to do things because we’ve always done it this way. That’s a level of a lack of confidence, right? So, in order to innovate, we need confidence. And resources help volunteer managers feel more confident. Interesting correlations there.
Let’s look at 2018. That was year three. That 2019 was the year we started assigning themes. and setting themes for our reports every year. Before that it was, because we didn’t know how long we were going to do this, right?
So, year three was 2018. And interestingly, if you’re new to the field of volunteer engagement, this is going to be an interesting one to you because this is one of those ones that things haven’t changed, right? So, this is the challenge. Volunteer retention is a challenge on the rise.
Anecdotally, leaders of volunteers increasingly note the challenge of maintaining volunteer involvement over longer periods of time that point out that volunteers increasingly prefer short term episodic assignments. The increase in retention has also increased relevance in open ended comments. So up 7 percent in three years.
So. it appears to support these perceptions. What I mean by that is in open ended comments over three years, retention was mentioned as a challenge more often at 7 percent more often in 2018 versus when we first started the survey in 2016. So, I know that this is really challenging for people.
In fact, last week on the volunteer management, or I’m sorry, on the Volunteer Nation podcast, I did an entire episode on episodic volunteers. So there you go. If you want to know how to convert episodic volunteers into longer term supporters, check out that episode. It’s episode 86 and I’ll link to it in the show notes.
So, let’s go down to our next year, which is 2017, year two of the survey. That was the second year we did the survey. I’m going back in time.
We found that the relationship between agency support and satisfaction may impact employee retention. Now, I found this really interesting. It’s been a while since we’ve explored this. So, we found that how organizations support their volunteer managers may influence. employee satisfaction and retention.
There appeared to be relationships between inclusion in the organization’s strategic plan, how respondents graded the level of support they gave their leadership and satisfaction, and the intent to stay working in the field. So, when we crosstab, we found some correlations between if volunteers were included in the organization’s strategic plan, people felt more satisfied and had a higher intent to stay.
We also found when they felt their leadership supported them, they were more likely to want to stay. And not only the organization but stay working in the field. So, this type of support really does matter. And it’s sort of an obvious, right? You want to be valued. You want to be your work to be understood and included in the rest of the organization’s mission-based work.
And, you know, volunteers are part of the workforce that helps a mission get achieved and accomplished. And if they’re not part of the strategic plan, if they’re not mentioned anywhere, and they’re not part of, and the volunteer manager isn’t part of the planning process, you’ve got to wonder how important are they, right? It’s just a question, right?
And so, people feel that. And it impacts whether or not they want to stay not only working in the organization but staying and working in the field and continuing their work forward, going forward. So, I think that leadership at organizations really needs to understand that because the work of volunteer management evolves over time.
It’s not a skill you learn overnight. It takes months, years to become really good at it. Certainly, there are characteristics and things that help you get better. And certainly, we help people get better faster at VolunteerPro with our courses in our community help people level up a lot quicker than they can on their own. However, it does take time, right? And you don’t want to lose that talent. And so, it’s important that we safeguard the talent that you all have for engaging communities.
Alright, final thing I want to mention is our first survey, 2016. And in our first survey, we asked about salaries, and it was really interesting. We were trying to figure out in our first survey. What was it? What were the standards of our field? Did we have standard job titles? Did we have standard salaries? Was there anything that we could standardize? Because you know, when you’re designing a survey, it’s tough to do if there’s no standardization.
So, we were exploring what does the field look like? And what we found that the salaries of paid leaders and of volunteers do not appear to correlate with job title or certification attained, attained, like your Certified in Volunteer Administration or your CVA. It did not correlate between your CVA and having a higher salary.
In addition, there were no strong relationships between the titles used for volunteer managers and the number of organizational volunteers. So, volunteer director versus volunteer manager versus volunteer coordinator versus other job titles. There was no standardization around the number of volunteers that they were responsible for.
So, we found that interesting as well. So, hmm, we don’t have any standardization in this field. Interesting. And I think that persists. So those are a little bit, just a little bit of information about some of the top lines.
So, you got a great reader’s digest kind of condensed version of some of our research over the past eight years. I want to switch gears really quick and just talk about this year’s survey. And I want to invite you personally to add your voice to our ninth annual Volunteer Management Progress Report survey so that we can create the best, absolute best report and distribute it out in January or February next year in 2024.
And the reports are free. We don’t take any sponsorship, at least not now, haven’t so far. We don’t get grant money. We don’t get funded in any way. Of course, these surveys help us understand how to help you better, but we also share our results. So, we want to continue to do this. And the way it works is if our community participates and takes the survey, adds their voice.
We are able to provide a very robust survey set and a very robust analysis. You know, as I said, we have over 1200 sometimes up to 1600 people who take any year’s given survey. So, I invite you to be part of this. It’s really important to hear your voice. We want to have a diverse range of voices. We want to make sure we have a solid understanding of what’s happening in the field.
And so, I want to make sure that we are inviting every one of you to be part of this. So, this year’s theme is leadership and workforce, and we’ll be exploring satisfaction, intent to stay, as well as where volunteer services sits on the org chart. The progress of DEIJ plans, diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice plans, the extent to which volunteer leaders are leveraged and more.
So, we’re really looking at infrastructure. What, how is volunteer engagement? What’s the infrastructure look like and where is the leadership? And how are volunteer managers situated in their organizations? Are they feeling supported?
And we’re going to look at intent to stay again. We haven’t talked about that for a while, and we want to see if there’s any way to predict what’s happening with our field. We hear a lot about churn in our field. It’s very hard to, for us to research that in terms of volunteer research because we don’t survey, we don’t know what happens when people leave, when they’re no longer in our universe. And we only survey people who are active in the field. So, it’s a difficult thing to look backward, but we can look forward and we can get some ideas.
So, the survey will be open through the month of December. And anyone who wants to participate, who is an active leader of volunteers can participate. You don’t have to have volunteer manager as your title. You could be executive director and be responsible for engaging volunteers. Anybody who participates gets free access to our Early Results Sneak Peek Webinar, which will be happening in early February.
And you get to hear our research results first. We don’t share them. We don’t make them public until the people who participate in the survey hear them first, and our distribution partners. We invite everybody to a kickoff webinar and share what we’ve learned. We take questions. It’s really exciting and fun.
So, I hope that you will be interested in participating, both yourself and anyone you might want to share this with. You can download the reports and take the survey. The survey link is up at volpro.net/volunteer-management-progress-report.
And again, if you go to volpro.net and just look at the top menu bar, you’ll see a tab called Research. Just click on it and it will take you to the main page where you can download all the past reports and you can also take the current survey, which were our theme this year again is Leadership and Workforce.
All right. So, I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Volunteer Nation podcast. If you enjoyed it, I hope you’ll share it with a friend. If you liked it, I hope you’ll rate and review. It helps us reach more people.
And as a listener of the pod, I just want to appreciate you. We have a dedicated group of listeners week in, week out. It’s just so fantastic. And sometimes when I’m out and about, I’m doing my speaking in conferences and workshops, et cetera, people will come up and say, I listened to the pod!
And it always surprises me. I don’t know why it does, but I really appreciate all of you for listening to the Volunteer Nation podcast. And I will be back next week, same time, same place. So, take care and happy holidays, everybody.
Thanks for listening to this episode of the Volunteer Nation podcast. If you enjoyed it, please be sure to subscribe, rate and review so we can reach people like you who want to improve the impact of their good cause. For more tips and notes from the show, check us out at tobijohnson.com. We’ll see you next week for another installment of Volunteer Nation.