June 6, 2024

Episode #113: Volunteerism Statistics for 2024: Insights from Our Latest Research – Part 1

Tobi Johnson delves into volunteerism statistics for 2024, sharing insights from the latest Volunteer Management Progress Report. Tobi discusses the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on volunteer capacity, the challenges of recruitment and retention, and provides a detailed look at trends in active volunteer numbers and volunteer hours.  

Additionally, Tobi highlights the importance of understanding organizational goals and progress in volunteer engagement, offering a comprehensive analysis of the current state of volunteerism. Key findings include the average number of active volunteers, monthly volunteer hours, the role of volunteer coordinators, and the need for evolving volunteer engagement strategies to address ongoing challenges in the sector to better manage their volunteer programs. 

Volunteerism Statistics 2024 – Episode Highlights

  • [00:29] – Overview of Volunteer Management Progress Report 
  • [02:31] – Survey Participation and Gratitude 
  • [10:45] – Challenges in Volunteer Management 
  • [12:46] – Volunteer Capacity and Recruitment Issues 
  • [23:27] – Impact of COVID-19 on Volunteerism 
  • [31:53] – Perceptions of Organizational Progress

Volunteerism Statistics 2024 – Quotes from the Episode

“The fact is that we are struggling to build back to full capacity, and it’s something that we’ve got to grapple with as a sector. It means we have got to evolve.” 

“The more time allotted, the more likely they were to be happy with their performance. Folks who are given enough time to work specifically on volunteer engagement, feel more confident and assess their progress more positively.” 

About the Show

Nonprofit leadership author, trainer, consultant, and volunteer management expert Tobi Johnson shares weekly tips to help charities build, grow, and scale exceptional volunteer teams. Discover how your nonprofit can effectively coordinate volunteers who are reliable, equipped, and ready to help you bring about BIG change for the better.

If you’re ready to ditch the stress and harness the power of people to fuel your good work, you’re in exactly the right place!

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Episode #113 Transcript: Volunteerism Statistics for 2024: Insights from Our Latest Research – Part 1 

Tobi Johnson: Well, hey there. Welcome to another episode of the Volunteer Nation podcast. I’m your host, Tobi Johnson and today we’re going to talk about volunteerism statistics for 2024. More specifically, some insights from our latest research, our Volunteer Management Progress Report. The Leadership and Workforce Edition is finally done. done. It took us a while. As you know, if you are a regular listener, you know we had a flood earlier this year in our home. 

It disrupted my operations pretty mightily and I’m finally making my way back to getting things done. Usually, our report comes out in January but had to make some changes and shift and we were finally able to get the numbers crunched and I wanted to share some interesting trends that I learned that I thought you might be interested in, might help you think a little bit about your work with volunteers, and maybe make you feel a little bit better. I don’t know. Maybe misery loves company because some of this is bad news, but some of it is good news, too. I want to start out a little bit, though, for those of you who are new to VolunteerPro and the work we do, we’ve been doing the Volunteer Management Progress Report survey for nine years running. 

Believe it or not. I can’t believe it’s been that long. I’m like, what? Nine years? Yes, nine years. And every year we focus on a slightly different theme. This year’s theme is leadership and workforce, you know, with all of the turnover and labor shortages in the nonprofit sector, as well as our incentive and push towards promoting volunteer leadership, which we do a lot of in the Volunteer Pro Community. 

I really want to see more volunteer leaders stepping up and having opportunities to participate in our nonprofits. It’s a big deal. I think it’s important. It helps us build capacity. So, it really is about capacity and workforce. And, you know, every year we release the survey in the fall and this last year, the survey questionnaire for this year’s report, the 2024 report came out and was distributed by our distribution partners and our, and volunteer pro to our contact list and our followers and fans was last winter. 

And we released the report, oh, a few weeks late, I think. And we had about 800, almost 800 people respond. So that was fantastic. So, you know, we really rely on the community and our sector to participate and add their voices. and this year was no different. And I want to thank all of you who did participate in the survey last year. 

If you are a follower of Volunteer Pro, you’ll also have an opportunity to participate this fall as well for our next, our 10th annual, which will be next year. But those of you who did participate, I just want to give you, uh, just a shout out and say, thank you so much for participating. I know some of you have participated year after year after year. 

We also have a group of distribution partners that you’ll see listed in the report and every year we put a call out and ask who’s interested in sharing the report with their networks and specifically the survey link and I have a few of distribution partners who have also been with us since the very beginning have helped promote the survey year after year after year. 

So, I want to shout out to those folks as well. And you know who you are amazing people. organizations that just continue to see the value in this research and help promote it. And I’m really grateful for that. Every year we make the report free. We never charge for it. We don’t get grant money for it. We do it as a labor of love, as something that is important to us at VolunteerPro for understanding your needs as a sector, your challenges, and where organizations are headed so that we can provide content that’s super relevant. 

It helps us as well, but it also helps our field be better advocates. And I get emails all the time about how the report has helped somebody make the case for another FTE, or a bump in pay, or better understand their capacity, help their board understand, or their executive level folks understand, volunteer engagement really requires. 

So, that’s sort of why we do it. We also think it’s really good for those of you that are. in the trenches doing the workday after day to be able to compare yourself to others and see that you’re not alone. Because you’ll find around the world in the, in the field of volunteer engagement and volunteer management, that we’re more alike than different. 

You’d think that maybe we’d be a little bit different from country to country, especially because some of our infrastructures are very, very different. Some of us have a lot of resources, some of us don’t have any resources, but the challenges are very similar across the board. So, it’s always interesting for folks to see themselves reflected in our survey results. 

I hope it gives you some sense of hope and understanding that we’re all in this together as a sector. I also know that there are some researchers out there that Sometimes I’ll get an email from an academic. They may find a slight error in the survey. Sometimes we have typos in our report. We often do. 

We’re not perfect. Or they’ll ask us for clarification about a specific piece of data. So, it’s always interesting to see that even in the academic sector, academic field of, of social scientists is also, some of them are taking a look at our survey. Okay. Thanks. I think we are globally the longest running survey of leaders of volunteers in the world. 

I don’t know of anybody else. If you do know of anybody else, let me know because I’d love to talk to them and see what they’re learning. But I think we are the longest running survey of this kind. We ask about the work of leaders of volunteers, but we also ask about what’s happening in their volunteer program. 

So, for example, today I want to talk a little bit about volunteer capacity. So, we don’t always only ask about leaders of volunteers and their experiences. We also ask about how they’re doing, how they perceive what they’re doing, and how they perceive their organization is doing, as well as what is happening with their volunteers. 

So, it’s a great insight into those areas of our field that just don’t often get studied that much. I hate to say it, but they don’t. So, there’s a few exceptions, of course, around the world. Some wonderful people doing research in our field, but We’d sure love to have more data if we could. So that’s a little bit about what we do. 

Usually, our responses come from the U. S. for the most part, and this year was no exception. We had about 80, 79 percent of responses coming from the U. S. Now that isn’t surprising because the U. S. is more populated than other countries that are in the U. S. usually English-speaking countries, but not always. 

We have people from multiple countries participating in the survey, but the majority of folks come from the U. S. partly, I think, because we, our company is located in the U. S., but also because the U. S. just has such a massive population and number of nonprofit organizations. In terms of the types of organizations, the types of organizations that participate in this survey, just to give you some context around the data I’m going to share, about 50%, 49 percent represented health, human services, social services, or hospice organizations. 

So, a lot of volunteering is going on in those types of organizations, so it doesn’t surprise me that we have a high percentage, about half almost, of our responding organizations are those types of organizations. But we also have all kinds of other organizations. arts and culture, environmental, all kinds of organizations, advocacy organizations, all kinds of organizations participating. 

We have a wide range of organization sizes represented all the way from organizations with zero employees, so they’re 100 percent volunteer run, we have a small percentage of those participating, all the way up to enterprise level organizations with over 500, 500 employees. So, we really do have a wide range of organizational sizes. 

As we look at organization size through the lens of employees, we also ask about budget for organizations, and those sizes, budget sizes are also varied as well. Now, not everybody knows what their organization budget is. About one out of every four respondents doesn’t know their organization’s budget. So, I think we have some work to do in our field. 

There are some other areas where they, you know, Respondents didn’t know their budgets. For example, their budget for volunteer involvement. We usually have a number of people who don’t know that number either. And so that just indicates to me that we need to do more work getting involved and getting to understand how the business of our organizations runs. 

So that’s just a kind of quick overview of the volunteer management progress report, what it’s for. why we do it and what we have to offer this year. And this year we’re going to talk a bit about challenges in this episode in particular. I’m going to talk about challenges and capacity, but I’m also going to do a part two for next week. 

So, tune in next week. I’m going to talk a little bit more about some of the infrastructure and support for leaders of volunteers and maybe why we’re struggling the way we are. I’ll give you my two cents on that next week, but this week let’s just get a baseline. So, if you want the run, the rundown of the key findings from our research over the past eight years. 

You can check out Volunteer Nation episode 87, Volunteer Research Sector Trends and our latest survey, that gives you a rundown of this was last fall, I believe, where I gave everybody a rundown of here are all the eight reports and here are the previous eight reports and what we learned, kind of key takeaways from each. 

It’s interesting if you want to look into the history of this research. Also, to order your complimentary copy and download all these past reports for free, you can go to volpro.netand just go up in our upper menu, and there’s a research tab on our menu bar on our homepage, and just hit that, it’ll take you to the page. 

We’ll also have a link in the show notes so you can go directly to the survey. And you need to opt in to get this year’s survey, but if you scroll down the page, you can directly download all of our past surveys. We like to capture folks’ information and understand how many people are downloading the survey. 

We also want to keep in touch with you for the next time around. So, if you’re not on our contact list, not on our mailing list yet, when you download our survey, you’ll become part of our mailing list and then we’ll let you know when the next survey comes around so that you can participate.  

You’ll find those in the show notes. In today’s episode, kind of part one of our volunteerism statistics for 2024. I want to talk about volunteer capacity. I want to focus on that directly because that’s one of the things we explored in this year’s survey. So, I want to kick off this conversation by saying that the struggle to rebuild volunteer capacity is real. 

It is very real. You know, we have been decimated by a worldwide pandemic. Organizations are struggling to build back. I am going to share some positive trends, but we are still not where we want to be or at least not where our respondents wanted to be. You know, I also want to note that there was a downward trend and has been a downward trend in volunteer involvement, at least in the U.S. over the past decade.  

This preceded the pandemic, except for the exception. There was an exception of a spike in engagement in 2016 after the presidential election. It really has been on sort of a downward trend. And we are basically facing this point in time, as far as we know, we don’t have the most recent data. 

Our last data was two years ago on the volunteer participation through AmeriCorps,who does the volunteering and civic life in America report, which I’ll link to that as well in case you don’t have it. But I also just wanted to, so I kind of wanted to point that out. The pandemic didn’t cause all this. 

It definitely pushed a dip here, a deeper maybe than we would have experienced, but we were not on the best trajectory of volunteer engagement. So, there are specific things folks are struggling with. And I want to call some of those out because those are the areas, we need to focus on improving. Because if these are the areas that are barriers to our success, then we got to figure out how to move those rocks out of the way and keep moving forward. 

So, volunteer involving organizations right now, as far as we understand from our survey results that they are struggling with the double-sided coin of both recruitment and retention challenges as everybody’s trying to build back from the pandemic. exacerbated by the challenge of waning shift signups from current volunteers and the commitment of new volunteers. 

And so, we appear to have challenges kind of across the board, both bringing volunteers in, getting them involved on a consistent basis and keeping them engaged and making an impact and so you know those things combined are very difficult. You know it’s one thing to be challenged by one thing but if you’re challenged by all three things then it makes it a lot harder. 

If you’re feeling the pain right now, you are not alone. I read a lot of comments in the open-ended comments. I read through every single open-ended comment in, in our biggest challenge. We ask a biggest challenge question And I read through every one of those responses. We noted in those, we ask a question, what is your biggest challenge engaging volunteers? 

And we, or engaging or managing volunteers, actually specifically, I’ll tell you what we specifically asked. What is your number one biggest volunteer management? challenge right now. Please be as detailed as possible. We don’t create boxes for people to check on this question. And we’ve been asking this question for nine years. 

We want to see in people’s own words what they’re struggling with. We’re not going to assume we know. And so, we go through every single question, and we code them and with major codes and subcodes to really get a sense in people’s own words, what their struggles are. And if you get your hands on the report, you can see some of the quotes. 

We pull out some of the quotes, both positive and negative challenges folks have, and triumphs people are experiencing. We would like to include a mix of both, but you’ll see some of the comments that people left in their survey. But yeah. The two biggest things, well, first of all, you know, 43 percent noticed that attracting or keeping volunteers was a major challenge, particularly when it comes to engaging supporters to staff traditional, ongoing, and in person volunteer roles. 

And so, we’ve heard that anecdotally, I’ve heard that anecdotally over the years that people are really having a hard time finding those longer-term volunteers and the data backs it up. There is hard data in this report that shows that. So, 43 percent note that attracting or keeping volunteers is a major challenge. 

And many talked about those staffing, those traditional and ongoing roles. The big let’s drill down for a minute in the challenge area of recruitment. Recruitment was a big challenge area. Recruiting volunteers remained the top challenge reported in open-ended comments, dropped by only two percentage points from the year before. 

In last year’s survey, recruitment was also the top challenge. Year over year, except for the middle of the pandemic, uh, when supervision was the top challenge because we were trying to supervise remote uh, volunteers. Every year recruitment is the top challenge. So, find people to get involved. So, we talked about traditional ongoing roles, also that role that they needed volunteers to support them in person, often during weekdays. 

Weekday volunteers are difficult to find for some organizations. In addition, many organizations mentioned that they were challenged to recruit specific populations and they mention specific groups of people that they hope to engage. And so, some organizations are really working hard to diversify their volunteer bases and that came out in the survey. That’s a little bit about recruitment. 31. 3 percent of respondents mentioned some problem or challenge with recruitment as their top challenge. The second area was retention and about 12. 3%, so about a little over 1 out of 10 people, about 1 out of 3 people said recruitment, about 1 out of 10 people said retention. 

Retaining volunteers has returned as a top challenge. It was not in our top five challenges last year. Retention was not an issue last year. And now it is. Our retention is trending towards a bigger challenge right now for our organizations. Many noted wanting volunteer commitment as a challenge, whether it be followed through, no shows, shift sign ups, or the successful transition from training to service. 

So, folks are really struggling to maintain volunteer capacity, or some folks are, I shouldn’t say everybody. So, those are some big challenges. Now, let’s talk about active volunteers for a minute. For volunteerism statistics for 2024, I want to talk about active volunteer trends, because we asked about this as well. 

Well, volunteer recruitment was waning, and folks were struggling to engage sufficient volunteers. We heard that in the open-ended comments that we just talked about. It appears that the average number of active volunteers is actually growing and has returned to pre COVID averages, which is interesting, I think. 

What we’re finding is that nearly half, 48 percent, of respondents reported over 250 active volunteers currently. Prior to the pandemic, in our survey, the average was about 101 to 250 volunteers. So, we have a higher number of average active volunteers. Now, I will say that there’s one thing that may be skewing these data, and that is that we have a higher number of larger organizations participating this year, slightly higher, and that may be why that number is bumped up a little bit, because there’s more, there’s you know, enterprise level and larger organizations participating, and of course, they’re going to have larger volunteer numbers. 

So it can be that. So, it’s interesting to see, you know, we want to look at our open-ended comments, but we also want to look at our more concise single response questions. And for our single response questions, the average right now is over 250 active volunteers. And that’s up from previous years. 

Now let’s look at volunteerism statistics for 2024 monthly volunteer hours. So, in addition to these positive trends we saw in the volume of active volunteers, there’s also good news in terms of the average number of hours contributed each month. Uh, both metrics have been increasing steadily year over year. 

It could be that it’s being a bit skewed by larger organizations or it could just be that there is a growth, there’s growth here. In this year’s survey, 41. 8 percent reported an average of zero to 10 hours per volunteer per month compared to 50 percent last year and 55. 8 percent two years ago. So, the organizations that are reporting the smaller number of hours per month are the number, the percentage of organizations that are reporting that are going down. 

And in addition, 15. 4 percent reported average volunteer hours of 90 to a hundred per month compared to 9. 8 percent last year and 3. 0 percent two years ago. So, the percentage. It’s hard to do this on a podcast, talk about data because I can’t show it to you, but you can download the report and see those charts yourself. 

However, let me get back to this. So, what I’m saying here, and what we’re seeing is the percentage of volunteers that devote or contribute zero to ten hours a month is going down over the past few years, and the percentage that are contributing 90 to 100 hours per month is going up. So those are good signs, right, on both sides. 

So, in the report you can see the year-over-year trends, and I will give you the specifics. So, let’s talk about another area of volunteer capacity, and that is the impact of COVID on volunteer capacity. So, Let’s talk about these volunteerism statistics for 2024. And this year we again asked, how has the COVID 19 pandemic impacted the number of active volunteers in your organization? 

How has it changed between 2019 and now? So, we asked this last year and then we asked again this year. And the perception is that the impact of the pandemic has been less. So that’s kind of interesting, right? It’s a perception, right? Because it’s the same, it’s the same number of volunteers, right? 

Although maybe they’ve gained volunteers this past year. That’s true. So, half of the organizations, about 50. 6 percent reported a decrease in the number of active volunteers, down 14. 4 percent from last year’s report. So, about half reported a decrease that that COVID had an impact of decreasing their active volunteer core. 

And last year, about 65 percent of respondents said COVID had decreased their volunteer core. So, there’s been a shift in how we think about the impact of COVID and perhaps that there’s been some build back and so that perception of not having enough volunteers maybe has changed. So again, I have the breakdown of year over year trends for last year, uh, last year’s report and this year’s report. 

You can check those out in the report itself in the PDF. On average, and people ask me this as well, they’ll ask, well, does that, is there a difference between the size of the organization? Does that impact, were larger organizations better off? And on average, I checked, I did the cross tabbing to just check on that, and on average, most organizations, regardless of size, reported that the number of active volunteers involved had decreased during the pandemic. 

So, there’s not a big difference between the impact of the pandemic on large organizations or small organizations, at least according to our data. Right, so there’s little correlation between organization size and the impact of COVID 19 on their volunteer teams. That’s a little bit on volunteer capacity. 

I want to share a little bit more after the break. So, stick with me and I will be back with some more info on some key volunteerism statistics for 2024 and research trends from our recent report. So don’t go anywhere. I’ll be right back. If you’re enjoying this week’s episode of Volunteer Nation, we invite you to check out the Volunteer Pro Premium Membership. 

This community is the most comprehensive resource for attracting, engaging, and supporting dedicated high impact volunteer talent for your good cause. Volunteer Pro Premium Membership helps you build or renovate an effective volunteer program with less stress and more joy, so you can ditch the overwhelm. 

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Okay, welcome everybody. We’re back with my review of some key volunteerism statistics for 2024 and some trends from our recent report, the Volunteer Management Progress Report. Specifically, we’re talking about volunteer capacity. And before the break, I talked a little bit about volunteer hours, active volunteers, the impact of COVID on organizations, and the challenges for leaders of volunteers. 

Now I want to talk about roles filled, the percentage of roles filled and perceptions of progress towards goals. So, this is really, we’re really getting into the nitty gritty of capacity and whether or not we have capacity or we’re still experiencing a gap. Remember that you can order your complimentary copy of this year’s volunteer management progress report, the leadership workforce and leadership edition. You can just go to volpro.net and look up at the menu in the top of the homepage and just click on research and it’ll take you right there to order up your copy and you can scroll down and download any other reports you want directly from our past nine years. So, check that out. 

There’ll also be a link in the show notes. So, let’s get into volunteerism statistics for 2024, the percentage of volunteer roles. build. So, I would like to ask this question to see if organizations are still experiencing gaps. Now, I will preface this by saying, you know, some organizations are very ambitious about the number of volunteers they want to bring on and the different roles, and they may have experienced very large gaps but may also have large volunteer capacity because they are ambitious and have been filling those roles. There are other organizations that are very conservative about the types of volunteer roles they bring on, and they may have 100 percent of their roles filled, but that’s only because they are only involving a very small number of volunteers. 

So there, there are a lot of different ways to interpret the data. I just wanted to call that out. It is interesting, nevertheless, to understand our needed roles filled, whatever the, that level of need that an organization identifies. And so, we asked this year again, and we’ve asked for a few years now, to what extent are volunteer roles needed at your organization? 

So, 63% of our respondents reported that having that they had three quarters of all their roles filled over. One in 4 28 0.2% reported having half or less of roles filled, and nearly one in ten eight percent were unsure of their current volunteer capacity. Our average across the board was about half of their roles filled, and if you can think about the impact of that on an organization, if only half of their volunteer roles are filled, they are limping along. 

The things that needed to be done by volunteers are either being filled by paid staff or they’re just not getting done. And if you think about the current workforce Uh, shortages in the nonprofit sector, you can see how this is a problem, right? We don’t want to have only half of our roles filled. So, this is an issue for capacity. 

I did check on organization size and it appeared to have little impact on the percentage of needed volunteer roles filled. Volunteer managers reported an average of one half of roles filled regardless of organizational size. and all volunteer organizations reported a slightly lower average of roles filled. 

So, I have more of the data breakdown in the report. I also checked across cause impact areas wondering if you know what kinds of organizations, what kinds of causes are struggling the most. The average number of volunteer roles filled was relatively similar across cause impact areas. It didn’t matter the size of the organization, didn’t matter the cause impact area, the fact is that we are struggling to build back to full capacity. 

And so that is sobering. And something that we’ve got to grapple with as a sector. And I think it means we’ve got to evolve. And you’ve heard me talk a lot about the ways we need to evolve. So, I won’t go into that right now. But the data is backing it up, right? We are struggling and we’ve got to change. 

It’s just how it is. So, let me end with one more volunteerism statistic for 2024. And this is the perception of organizational progress. So, we asked our respondents to tell us how do you feel about your organization’s progress toward your volunteer goals? And we are showing actually a positive trend toward confidence and organizational impact, which is good news, right? 

We’ve got to have a little confidence that we’re able to move forward. So over half of our respondents, about 55. 2 percent noted that it’s okay, but I would like to improve it. This is down 2. 5 percent from last year. 16. 2 percent indicated; I feel it needs to improve a lot. That’s down 10. 2 percent over last year and nearly one in four, 24.9 percent noted, I’m happy with it, which was a 14. 2 percent rise over last year. So, in other words, we saw the folks who are happy with their organization’s progress towards their goals. We saw an increase of people who are happy and confident about their role, their goals. And so, it’s interesting, and then the folks who want to improve it, that’s been down. 

So, fewer people are saying they need to improve it, and fewer people are saying that it needs to improve a lot. So, if you’re interested, you might think about this yourself, how you, if you didn’t take the survey, or if you did and you want to compare how you feel right now, just take a minute and answer this question. 

So, the question is, in general, how do you feel about your organization’s progress toward your volunteer goals? And just think for a minute, which of these would you, would you answer? It’s really bad. I feel it needs to improve a lot. It’s okay, but I’d like to improve it. I’m happy with it, or I’m not sure. 

Think for a minute, think yourself, which one of those most feels like where you’re at right now. The way that you would assess your organization’s progress towards goals. And I’ll give you a breakdown, and this is also in the report. If you said it’s really bad, you’re joining about 2. 9 percent of respondents. 

If you feel it needs to improve a lot, you join by about 16. 2 percent of respondents. If it’s okay, but you’d like to improve it, you’re the majority, 55. 2%. If you’re happy with it. You’re at 24. 9%, so you’re one out of four. If you’re not sure, you’re at 0. 8 or 1%. So that’s how it kind of stacks up so you can compare yourself to, uh, our respondents. 

In last year’s report, the mean or the average of all respondents was, I feel it needs to improve a lot. This year, it’s, it’s okay, but I’d like to improve it. So, we’ve, we’ve gone up one level over the past year. Again, there was no correlation between organizational size and the volunteer manager’s perception of progress. 

All were relatively similar. So, we just don’t see a lot of difference. We’re more alike than different across the field. Doesn’t matter cause impact area, doesn’t matter org size. However, there was one really interesting correlation that I want to share and that is that there was a clear correlation between the percentage of volunteer coordinators time devoted to volunteer management in a given week and their perceived progress towards goals. 

In fact, the more time allotted, the more likely they were to be happy with their performance. So, folks who are given enough time to work specifically on volunteer engagement, feel more confident and assess their, their progress more positively. Interesting, no? I find it interesting. So, I think it’s really interesting to think about when we’re wearing too many hats, when we are juggling too many priorities, how does that impact our progress? 

We can ask people what their perception is of progress to goals, but what we can’t do with this survey, at least this survey in this format. is actually track everyone’s performance. We can’t do that. I mean, that would take an insane amount of work and resource to make it happen. And plus, we don’t all have standard outcome metrics. 

However, we can use the perceived You know, how people self-assess their performance as a proxy for what their actual outcomes are. And we’re assuming people are fairly honest, although it might skew to the positive a little, but it’s interesting, nonetheless. and when I correlate or crosstab some of these outcomes with other, other areas of the survey, it comes up, it offers some really interesting insights in this case around performance and related to the amount of time folks can spend working with volunteers and working on volunteer engagement. 

So fascinating stuff. These are just a few of our volunteerism statistics for 2024. Next week, I’ll return with part two, where I’m going to talk a little bit more about key resources and supports that drive active volunteer engagement. And these supports may be the keys to getting us back on track, so they’re important to take a look at. 

This week, I wanted to talk about what is the status with volunteers right now. And next week we’re going to talk about what is the status for leaders of volunteers when it comes to the resources they have and the work they’re trying to get done. So again, if you want to check out the report and download your complimentary copy, you can just go to volpro.net/volunteer-management-progress-report The report is extensive. It’s about 45 pages long and has lots of graphics, lots of information to digest, and lots of information to help you make decisions about your next steps forward. 

So, I hope you’ve enjoyed today’s podcast. If you liked it, I hope you’ll share it with a friend. And of course, we’d love a five-star rating because it helps us get the word out to others who might be interested in learning about the best way to engage volunteers in our community. So, I will see you next week. We will do part two of volunteerism statistics. I hope you’ll join me, same time, same place, right here on The Volunteer Nation.