137 – Volunteer Stats, Trends, and Benchmarks We’re Researching Right Now

November 21, 2024

Episode #137: Volunteer Stats, Trends, and Benchmarks We’re Researching Right Now  

In this episode of the Volunteer Nation podcast, Tobi Johnson celebrates the 10th anniversary of the Volunteer Management Progress Report survey. Tobi reflects on the evolution of the survey over the past decade and its significant contributions to the field of volunteer management.  

This year’s theme focuses on volunteer recruitment, aiming to gather detailed data on effective tactics and challenges. Tobi also details the survey development process and emphasizes the importance of participation for generating valuable insights! 

Volunteer Stats – Episode Highlights

• [00:31] – Celebrating a Decade of Volunteer Management Progress Report 
• [02:10] – The Importance of Volunteer Recruitment 
• [03:22] – Overview of the Volunteer Management Progress Report 
• [05:33] – Global Participation and Impact 
• [11:14] – Survey Methodology and Best Practices 
• [16:49] – Crafting and Testing the Questionnaire 
• [23:29] – Promoting and Distributing the Survey 
• [25:04] – Analyzing Survey Results 
• [26:01] – Cross Tabulation and Hand Coding in Surveys 
• [26:27] – Challenges of Open-Ended Comments 
• [27:48] – Coding and Analyzing Survey Responses 
• [31:51] – Sharing Survey Results 

Helpful Links

• 2025 Volunteer Management Progress Report Survey Link 
• Volunteer Management Progress Report 
• Become a Distribution Partner 
• Contact us: wecare@volpro.net 
• VolunteerPro Membership Community 
• Volunteer Nation Episode 087 – Volunteer Research: Sector Trends & Our Latest Survey 

Contact Us

Have questions or suggestions for the show? Email us at wecare@volpro.net.

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Episode #137 Transcript: Volunteer Stats, Trends, and Benchmarks We’re Researching Right Now 

Tobi: Hey everybody, it’s Tobi Johnson at the Volunteer Nation podcast, and I’m excited because it’s that time of year again. It’s the time of year when we release our Volunteer Management Progress Report survey. And this is our 10th year. I cannot believe it. We have been doing this survey for a decade. It’s really blowing my mind. You know, time really flies. It seems surreal that it was that long ago that we started this research project. 

But we have been providing. These free reports and distributing the survey around the world and gathering data. And we have trend data. Some of our trend data is 10 years old, like 10 years of trend data of the same question being asked. Our biggest challenge is a question we ask. We ask everybody to give us, it’s an open-ended question where people tell us their biggest challenge. 

And we have been tracking that for a decade. It is nuts. So partly I want to pat myself on the back but also shout out to all the people throughout the past decade who have helped distribute the survey, who have participated in the survey, who have edited the survey. And there’s a few people who have done some number crunching for the survey. 

So, we’ve had a lot of contributors across the world. And I just want to shout out to everybody, people who’ve helped this year and people who have helped in the past, just helping us provide this service for our field has been an honor and a privilege. So today I wanted to talk a little bit about what this year’s survey, our 10th anniversary survey, is all about. 

And the theme is the recruitment edition. You know, there’s not a lot of recruitment data, and I get asked a lot. I do a lot of coaching with folks around volunteer recruitment, training around volunteer recruitment, and consulting, and I do comms audits for people, and we’re always trying to, uh, get really see where we can improve. 

And consistently people ask me, well, what’s working, what are people doing? And I’ll say, well, I can only tell you about the people that I work with. So, I don’t really have broad research on what people are doing. So, this year I thought we’d do a little bit of a deep dive to just see what’s happening in the field in terms of volunteer recruitment, but also it will help. 

Me and others like me who do capacity building pinpoint some areas where there might be some gaps and some opportunities to improve our communications and our engagement of our communities. So that’s, that’s what we’re going to talk about today. You know, if you’re not familiar with the volunteer management progress report, I’m going to give you just a little bit of an overview of what this is. 

Our first survey was conducted back in 2016 or 2015, I should say, and we’ve continued to collect this research data to help nonprofits really compare their work with others, but also to give them ideas. It’s never been done before. So, no one ever has to pay to get the report, and the reports are usually robust. 

They can be up to 40 pages long. Everybody can download them off our website. In fact, I’ll put a link in the show notes to where you can go. And if you scroll down the page, you can download every single survey from the beginning of time. So, if you want to look at those, they’re all different. themes. 

So, there’s different things we’re exploring each year. We don’t get any grants to do this work. We don’t offer sponsorships, although people have asked me and I’ve considered it, but in the end we haven’t so far. It might be different in the future. And we make it available to anybody who wants it. And over the years, it’s been lovely to get emails randomly from people where they’ll say, hey, you know what? 

I used your survey results to get a raise. Or I used your survey results to get a new FTE in my volunteer services department. Or I used your survey results to help my leadership understand how complicated my work is. Whether you’re an executive director or a volunteer manager or a volunteer leader, this report can help you contextualize your work and see where you might have opportunities. 

So, it’s really a fun thing to do. There’s a lot of reasons we started conducting this survey. And I remember when I started, I said, look, I’m going to do this survey every year. And people thought I was nuts. They’re like, no, don’t do that. People will get tired of taking it. And I have found like, no, they don’t. 

They really appreciate the results. And they really like the idea of crowdsourcing this data. Um, so we have been happy to provide it, and people keep, remain interested. And I think we’ve reached about 35 to 40 different countries around the world. Most of the respondents are from the US and Canada and Australia and the UK, mostly English-speaking countries, but we get a fair number of other countries participating. 

And although we don’t provide the report. In any translation, when you take the survey in our software, if you do speak another language, there are languages at the top of the survey, and you can click in the software now. This is a new thing, just a few years ago we started having this. So, people can translate the survey into their language, which is kind of cool. 

It’s been fun to see where people are at. what’s changed and what has not changed. It’s not the fun, the fun stuff is not to see what hasn’t changed because when we’re not evolving, that’s a little bit of a disappointment I think as a, as a field in the sector. So, there’s a lot of reasons why we do this survey. 

One is volunteered fueled organizations really need clear trend data and benchmarks so they can make informed decisions about their strategies. You know, if we’re just flying blind, it’s hard to see what the rest of the field is doing. Volunteer resource managers can really benefit from seeing how their colleagues are rating their own priorities, challenges, and opportunities. 

So, they don’t feel like they’re so alone. I think a lot of it, a lot of times the volunteer manager or the leader of volunteers in an organization is the only one doing what they do specifically. And most other staff don’t have any idea what it’s all about. So, a lot of times it’s just a great place to come together and understand where we have a lot in common around the world as leaders of volunteers. 

The third reason really is. that nonprofit consultants, trainers, and capacity builders like me need to know what the greatest needs of support are or needs for support and transformation, where they lie. And a lot of times the survey results help me assess sort of broad scale. Okay. I see some gaps here. 

Let’s see if we can address this with content with training. with consulting. And so, it’s a really good way. It’s a good sort of compass for those of us that are in the, you know, training and development side of things. So, it’s very helpful for that. And I know several of my fellow consultants have been distribution partners for the survey over the years and shout out to you guys, you know, who you are, who supported me from day one and it helps them with their work as well. 

The data is often shared in training presentations as well. So, it’s good stuff. The fourth reason is really that our sector needs to understand our trends and challenges so that we can better advocate for our evolving needs. Because We are evolving, although sometimes it doesn’t feel like it because there are certainly challenges that we have not cracked the nut on yet. 

We’ll get there someday, but we’re not there yet. But, you know, it’s just good for us to understand how we are evolving so that we can start to think about how we can stay on the bow wave of things. This isn’t the be all, end all research survey. I know a lot of people want me to do a lot of things with the survey. 

They’ll send me emails with long laundry lists of, hey, can you do this, that, and the other. And, you know, there’s only so much that a single questionnaire that’s done on an annual basis can answer. And there’s certainly lots of academic research out there that can give people answers as well. It’s just that our survey is more of an industry survey, more of a pracademic type of survey, practitioner, and academic. 

I’m not really an academic, although we have published in a journal, an academic journal, some of the survey results, and I’m pretty sure we get cited from time to time even though we’re not peer reviewed. That. We want to provide something that’s accessible that people can understand. By the same token, we don’t do super deep regression, correlation analysis, and deep statistical analysis because we don’t have the money, don’t have the time, and it’s probably not the best use of our time. 

And the results, the reports are so big anyway. You’re going to get plenty of value. If you have never picked up one of our reports, I can guarantee you will get value from them. So, I thought this time around, cause every year on the podcast for the past few years, I’ve shared a little bit about the survey. 

You know, a few years ago, I think it was last year I did, I think it’s volunteer nation episode 87 volunteer research sector trends in our latest survey. I have gone through all the surveys from the last. nine years and I talk about key takeaways from each one. So, if you want a rundown, a quick digest of the rundown of all our surveys for the last decade, or well, eight years, last year was the ninth. 

You can do that. And then last year we did our leadership. That’s not included in that podcast episode is our leadership and workforce edition where we talk about who’s on what, whose team, who’s the supervisor of the people who lead volunteers, all kinds of things about teaming are what we did last year. 

So, I thought it might be fun, too, to just talk a little bit about how do we do this survey. Because, you know, I encourage everybody to get involved with creating their own surveys for their stakeholder groups, whether it’s within their organization and they’re surveying volunteers or other stakeholders or clients. 

Or whether they’re a local volunteer managers association or a national group where they want to understand their, their needs of their constituents well, I thought it might be fun to just share what goes into something like this. So, if you’re, if you’re in the surveying business for any reason, you think you want to develop a survey, maybe this will help you think about how you approach it. 

And if you just love our report, maybe it’ll give you some interesting insight into the behind the scenes. Like what, what, how do they put this together? It is not an easy lift, but it’s also not impossible. We’ve gotten better and better and more and more efficient at it because we do it every year. 

The first year, the very first year was hard because we, I had to hustle around and go talk to people and meet with people and get people involved and then create the survey and all of that. And now we’ve kind of got a pretty good cadence and rhythm. So, the first thing we do is every year when we’re developing the survey, we pick a theme. 

Often, I’ll consult with friends and colleagues in the field and say, you know, what, what do we want to know this year about what’s going on in our field? As I said, last year was our leadership and workforce edition. That was our theme. And we looked at stuff like the average size of a volunteer services team, their budgets, who they report to, how the pandemic affected volunteer participation, to what extent volunteer leaders were leveraged, top challenges perceived level of support for leaders of volunteers and the intent to stay working in the field. And we don’t ask the exact same questions every year. We kind of switch them in and out. And last year we did not ask about salary. And we got a few comments in our, at the end of the survey, we always have it open at it. 

Is there anything else you’d like us to know? And people could put whatever they want in that question. And we often, whenever we don’t ask about salary, why didn’t you ask about salary? Well, because our salaries don’t change that much year after year. And there’s only so many questions we can ask in any given survey. 

The good news is, we’re going to ask about salary this year. So, if you’re wondering, have salaries increased since the pandemic, we did ask during the pandemic as well, so we’ll be able to compare our salaries on the rise or not. So, it’ll be interesting to see that. So, the first thing we do is pick a theme. 

And this year, our theme is going to be the volunteer recruitment edition. And we are doing a deep dive into volunteer recruitment. And later after the promo break, I’m going to share a little bit of what we’re asking in this year’s survey. Cause it’s super exciting. I am, this survey may be the most exciting to me as our 10th anniversary. 

We really had to go out big. So, I’m excited about it, partly because I do a lot of training and support around volunteer recruitment, and I want to be able to compare what we’re doing with what everybody else is doing. The second thing we do is enlist the support of our distribution partners. A distribution partner, all they do is share the survey link with their networks, and we provide a press kit that has copy and some creatives, so they don’t have to create graphics, they don’t have to write, they can cut and paste hashtags for social media. 

And we ask about a month before the survey, best case scenario, sometimes we’re behind the eight ball because we’re busy, but we’ll send an email out to everybody and you probably saw this if you’re on our newsletter list, I’ll ask people if they want to be a distribution partner and we have a little forum and all people have to do is put their contact information in and the distribution partners get listed in our survey report. 

They also get listed on our slides. So, we share a lot of love with our distribution partners. We appreciate them. And again, some of them have been supporters forever for a decade since the beginning. And we just so appreciate their help and getting the word to a diverse group of people.  

I think this is going out in the third week in November. Don’t quote me on that. But by the time this posts, we will still have a few weeks left for the survey link to be live because the survey link is live now or will be when this airs. And if you want to be a distribution partner, go to the show notes for this episode and there’s a link there to a form. 

You can go check it out. Or you can email us at wecare@volpro.net and just let us know and we’ll send you the press kit and let you know how to be a distribution partner so you can share that link with your network. It’s never too late, but we do sometimes get late requests to be a distribution partner and last year I think we forgot to add somebody to our final report. 

If you don’t fill out the form, we’ll probably miss you when we add you, when we, uh, list our partners in our final report, because it’s hard to keep track of random emails. So, if you want to be a distribution partner, or if you are a distribution partner, make sure you fill out that form, so we know to include you. 

All right. The third thing we do after we get our distribution partners mobilized is we craft and test the questionnaire. Now we use Zoho surveys because I used to use SurveyMonkey before that, I think I had another survey software. I used SurveyMonkey at some point stopped offering cross tabbing functionality, which is where you can kind of segment and compare groups. 

You know, it became exorbitantly expensive. So, I did a fair amount of research, and Zoho Surveys I like a lot. It’s a great interface and it has good cross tabbing and what we call skip logic. So, sometimes in our survey I’ll design it so that if people don’t answer yes to something, the question related to that doesn’t pop up. 

So, for example, if I ask people, do you track your new volunteer conversion rate and people hit no, then they don’t have, they don’t have to read the next question, which is what is your new volunteer conversion rate? But if they hit yes, it will open. So Zoho has that. Ability to show only the questions that are relevant to that survey taker. 

So, I like to do that because it decreases respondent fatigue, what we call respondent fatigue. We don’t want people to get just burned out by our surveys. And our survey, if you haven’t taken it before, is long. It’s long, it’s about 40. Some questions long, it’s a long survey, everybody knows it is. It takes about 10 to 15 minutes to pull up a, you know, get a cup of coffee or get a cup of tea. But that’s how we create such a robust report and set of data for people is that we have this awesome report or awesome survey that collects awesome data. But most of the data. It does not require a lot of work, all you need to do is sit down and, and think. 

But there are, this year, a few benchmarks that we’re asking for. So, people can also stop the survey and come back to it later. Because we know people, oh, I don’t know what my conversion rate is, I’ve got to go look, look that up. Sometimes people need to step away from the survey and come back to it. So, we offer that with, with Zoho. 

So that’s why we like Zoho. And it can translate. the survey questionnaire into different languages, which we like to. Some of the questions, as I said, are the same to build trends data, and some are different related to our survey theme. I think I talked about that already. At the end, we always include that general open-ended question.

If you’re a survey designer. and you’re creating a questionnaire for your audience, this is best practice. So, I’m hoping to infuse a little bit of best practice in this episode so you can not only hear about what’s happening with the VMPR but also learn how to do surveying the right way. So, if you are sending a survey out to, let’s say, your volunteers, make sure you always include an open-ended comment at the end that says something like, is there anything else you’d like to share with us? 

It shows respect for your survey respondents by giving them some space to have their say. It also may help you understand a problem that’s going on in your survey. So, it’s a good idea once you deploy your survey to check that, from time to time, if people aren’t emailing you directly, a lot of times people will just email you directly and say, Hey, something’s broken. 

But sometimes they don’t. Sometimes it’s like, hey, I don’t understand. That’s X, Y, Z. Also, it’s a space for your respondents to qualify their answers. So, for example, we had a question about, uh, how much longer do you intend to be working in the, in the voluntary sector or do you intend, what’s the, what’s the, what’s the chance that you’ll be working here a year from now? 

Or I can’t remember the exact framing of the word or the question. Um, but there were people that said, I’m not going to be working next year. And then they qualified that in the open-ended comment and said, it’s because I’m retiring, not because I’m not happy. And so, we could put that little caveat in our survey report and say, now, so this is, some of this is due to people leaving the field because of retirement, not because they’re, they’re dissatisfied with our work. 

That’s really good best practice. The other thing we do is I always get feedback from a few practitioners who are usually good friends of mine that I know give me honest, their honest opinions. And so, they’ll go through the survey and look for typos, test the software, but also tell me if it has good flow. 

Now, I’ve been doing survey development for a long time, even before we did the VMPR, even before I did my consulting practice, I used to develop surveys for the programs that I ran. So, I’ve been at it for a while, so I have a very good intuition when I’m reading a survey for the flow. Does it flow well? 

Does it make sense in the order it; does it feel okay? There’s a certain type of gut feeling you have when you read a survey. And there’s things that we include like a progress bar at the top that says to show your survey taker how far they are through the survey. Those are the best practices. But it’s always good to have other people test your survey and tell you if anything is, doesn’t make sense. 

Or in today’s world also, as we are trying to be more inclusive. And make sure that our surveys are sensitive to the needs of others that, you know, as our language is evolving, I often will get, if I, especially if I’m asking demographic questions. Folks will give me information or advice or feedback about something that may not be phrased in a way that, that it might be a little insensitive or it just not, might not be a phrase that’s used anymore. 

It’s hard to keep up when you’re doing a global survey and trying to figure out demographic language for a global audience is very difficult, very difficult. We do the best we can. But I do want to shout out this year’s reviewers were Patricia Gentry and Jennifer Bennett and I just, you know, they just gave me great feedback.  

They’re super smart women and so they’ll be acknowledged. You’ll hear their names again because they’ll be acknowledged as I’m presenting the results. So, we do that. We craft and test the questionnaire and then we open and promote the survey for about a month. This gives our partners enough time to include the survey in at least one monthly newsletter, because a lot of our distribution partners have monthly newsletters. So, we need to give them enough time to get into their editorial calendar. Now for volunteer surveys, if you’re doing volunteer surveys, I do not recommend you leave it open for a month. 

It’s too long. I would say two, two weeks max, but when we’re doing a global survey, it’s a little different, we must let it, it percolates and get into everybody’s sort of communication networks. So we let it, we, we let it out there for about a month or I’m sorry, a month, yeah, a month, about four weeks and we’ll promote it and we’ll, I’ll keep an eye on it, make sure that we’re, we’re still getting, but we’re still getting responses and usually I’ll get a lot of responses the first week and a lot of responses the last week and not so many in the middle. 

So, it’s quite possible that we could do just as well with responses in two weeks, but we would have to be very, very proactive and very, very up ahead of the curve with our distribution partners in terms of getting the survey ready. And honestly, gang, we never have it ready ahead of time. It’s too hard to do that. 

I don’t know about you. Do you have that project? Then, you know what, you always know it’s going to come around and you always think you’re going to get ahead of the game, and you never do. This is one of those projects. So anyway, all right. So then once, once the survey has been up, we close it, we crunch the numbers, and we create the report. 

And this takes about a full week of work. It takes, I would say it takes about 40 hours of labor. To put together to crunch the numbers and put together the report there. There’s a fair number of things that go on. So, if you’re deploying surveys, I’ll tell you our process and maybe it’ll help you think about how you do your data. 

So, the first thing we do is look through the entire results and look for trends. or look for things that make you go, Hmm, what’s that? Oh, that’s interesting. So, I usually do a broad brushstroke and sometimes I’ll do it with some of the folks that are working, my collaborators on the survey. And we’ll talk through what, what is it? 

What are we seeing here? Broad brushstroke, because that will determine. often what I might want to cross tab. So, well, I wonder what this group of people, if they’re, they’re thinking about this or their perceptions about this is different than this group of people, or what impact does this have on this? 

Is there a correlation between this and this? First blush review helps me think about what, what are the correlations and things I want to explore. So, we do that. We do hand coding of the open-ended comments. Now if you’re doing a survey, I do not recommend having a lot of open-ended comments. I’ve seen surveys where every, every question is an open-ended comment. 

There are very few use cases where that is a good idea, and I’ll tell you why. Number one, your, your respondents are going to get burned out, because they’re, you’re making them work hard. The second thing is the hand coding of multiple open-ended comments is rough. And even with multiple selection questions, you should be judicious about that other including that other category and allowing people to fill in more data because that means more hand coding. 

We did a lot this year survey. I added more other options with people’s ability to fill in. then I usually do. And the reason is because we really don’t have a very good idea at all about what the broad range of volunteer recruitment trap tactics are. So, we had to do it. And so, you know, often when you add another category, people will type in something that belongs in the categories that are above that in the multiple selections. 

So, then you just must go through and like hand to add everything. It creates a lot of labor on your part. And so, you’ve got to be smart about this. So, so we will code them, we have the biggest challenge question we ask every year. What is your biggest challenge when it comes to engaging volunteers? Be as detailed as possible. 

That’s our, our, uh, tip for folks. And we will hand code them. And this can be anywhere from six or 700 responses last year to the year before, I think we had 1600 responses. We are reading your experience, if you are a leader of volunteers, we are hearing you, reading you, feeling you, and we code these. What we will do is find the primary theme, the first challenge that’s mentioned in the comment, and we will give, assign it a code, and we have probably about 30 different codes that are in big categories and big chunks, and then we report some of them out in a chart in the report. 

So, we know exactly what’s going on with the field. Sometimes the comments are heartbreaking. I just have to say, because some leaders of volunteers do not feel supported inside their organizations. And that pain is very clearly communicated in the, in these open-ended comments. In other cases, you read it and you think, wow, this is such a great organization. 

This person really understands the core problem that they’re trying to solve, and it’s not that their biggest, biggest challenge is within their own organization. So, it’s always fun to read them. It’s always fun and not fun to read those open-ended comments. You know, I’ve had new team members join, and I’ll tell them, you know, you know, to better understand our audience, read the answers to this. 

But I always preface it with, do not be overwhelmed or be depressed about what you’re reading because the question is, what’s your biggest challenge? So, people are going to be, we’re giving people a license to complain, which they need to for us to understand how to give them solutions. Anyway, that’s just a little bit about that, what we do for hand coding. 

And then, as I said, we do cross tabbing where we’ll compare segments to, to dig in deeper. The open-ended comment at the end also takes a little bit of thick skin when you, I mentioned, you know, adding that. What else do you want us to know? Because people will tell you the boldfaced truth from their perspective. 

And so, I’ve asked a lot in a lot of surveys. We’re not asking this year, but it meant for about eight years, we asked demographic questions, for example. And I would have angry people in the open-ended comments asking why demographic information was important to volunteer engagement and why it was being asked on this survey. 

And they were literally angry. You could feel the anger. And I think it’s important. And you’ve heard me probably on this podcast, talk about this before, you know, when we are a homogenous profession. My question always is, does that in return or correlate with having a homogenous population of volunteers? 

And it’s a question we all need to grapple with. And I, I don’t make any bones about it. I think we need to grapple with this question. And the wonderful thing is we have wonderful, diverse leaders coming up in our field. And I’ve interviewed some of them on this podcast. And so, I think we can always. And, and will not suffer from taking that hard look at who we are as a group of professionals. 

So, if you are doing a questionnaire with your volunteers, you may hear some things from your volunteers that take a thick skin to read. You know what? You asked. You’re going to get the info. If you don’t want the info, don’t ask, right? But it’s important that we ask, and we, it’s important we don’t take the, the responses personally. 

Okay. It’s not a personal attack. People are just sharing what they feel. So, the final thing we do is share the results. So we post the report for download on our website, but the first people who get the results are the survey takers themselves. So, at the end of the survey questionnaire, all you need to do is at the very end, when you hit submit, it will take you to a zoom registration page where you complete just sign up for our webinar this year. 

It’s going to be on January 22nd, 2025, and we’re going to share the early results. We believe that the people who participated and contributed their perceptions and ideas. And experiences to the survey as well as our distribution partners should by all rights be the first people to hear the results. 

And so, we’ve always done it this way. We’re not going to change that. And then once our survey participants have heard the results, then we release it to the general population. And we do this during what we call our early sneak peek early results webinar, which again is on January 22nd. And so, when you take the survey, it will at the very end link you to the place to RSVP for that. 

And then we’ll, you’ll get reminders, and you’ll get the link. We like doing that. And sometimes during that webinar, people will bring up questions or ideas for deeper analysis and we’ll add that to the report. So that’s why we always call it the early results because it’s not the absolute final, final, final. 

That’s our process. Again, you can go to our website at volpro.net Just hit research, and you can go to that page and look and download all our past surveys. Also, if you want to hear about the rundown and key takeaways from our past surveys, check out Volunteer Nation episode 87. I’ll link to it in the show notes. 

And we’re going to take a quick break. And after the break, I’m going to come back and tell you just between you and me, our dear listeners of the Volunteer Nation podcast, I’m going to scoop what we’re asking this year on our volunteer recruitment survey. We have some really good things. We’re really excited about gathering these data. Don’t go anywhere. We’ll be right back, and I’ll share more about volunteer stats and what we’re researching in this coming year’s survey, which is open now. So don’t go anywhere. I’ll be right back.  

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Okay, everybody. We are back with my briefing on volunteer stats, trends, and benchmarks and an overview of what we have been doing with the volunteer management progress survey for the last decade. Yes, folks, it is our decade anniversary. We’ve been doing this for 10 years. Again, it’s blowing my mind a little bit. I’m like, really? Is it really that long ago? You know, I’ve only had my consulting practice for 15 years, so it’s two thirds of our consulting practice time. Let’s get started talking about this year’s Volunteer Management Progress Report. 

The volunteer stats that we are collecting this year are around volunteer recruitment. So, we’re taking a deep dive into how volunteer involving organizations prepare and execute their volunteer recruitment strategies. We’ll also be asking about volunteer manager salaries this year, y’all. So those that you were complaining that we didn’t do it last year, we’re doing it this year. 

It is a perennial favorite. We understand that, but there are other people gathering salary info as well. Other organizations you can check out as well. But let’s talk about what we’re going to talk about, we’re going to ask this year that you can expect when you click on the survey link, which is in the show notes right now. 

So, you can go over there right now and start taking the survey. I am hoping this is inspiring you to get a cup of coffee, sit down or a cup of tea or maybe your favorite bevy and just sit down and like share your perceptions with us. We would love it. Let’s talk about what. But we are asking this year. 

So, here’s some of the things we’re exploring. Now I just want you to think, think about these and I’m hoping that these are ringing bells for you that you’re like, yes, excellent. I really do want to know that because if it’s not, then we’re not doing our job. You know, you can let me know that, but I really hope we are doing our job here. 

First of all, what are the biggest challenges for leaders and volunteers right now? That’s our open ended, we read and hand code every response. We talked about that question before the break. What are the current salaries for leaders of volunteers, and have they improved since the pandemic? This, we have data from the pandemic, so we can compare from before and now, which I will do and put in the report. 

This will help you advocate for change, if need be, inside your organization about your salary. We will see to the extent we will do cross tabbing. We’re not asking about certifications, so we won’t be checking that. I don’t know if we’re asking about job titles. But we will probably be cross tabbing around organization size. 

Don’t quote me on that. We haven’t done the data crunching yet, so we don’t know, but that’s something we’re asking now. In as far as recruitment goes, we’re going to ask about what the specific recruitment tactics organizations are using to attract volunteers. And we have a laundry list of checkboxes check boxes. 

You can check in the survey and say, yep, we do that. Yep, we do that. Yep, we do that. But don’t check the ones you’re not doing. Because it won’t give us good data. Recruitment tactics, biggest roadblocks to effective. uh, recruitment. This gives, you know, people like me, a lot of information about new content, like podcasts, blog posts, training, and handouts, and freebies, and all the things that you would need. 

So, we need to know what your roadblocks are. We also are going to ask about which recruitment methods you find to be the most effective, and we’re asking for some outcomes metrics. So what results are you getting. Effectiveness is an interesting thing to ask on a questionnaire. This is just a little side note. 

Because people are not the best evaluators of their own success, but we have to ask it anyway. I would not say that this survey is the be all end all to assess the effectiveness of volunteer recruitment across our field. What it does explore is what our perceptions of our success are. I know it’s a subtle thing, but it is a thing that matters, right? 

It’s not objective, it’s subjective. But still, I think it is important. And then we’re going to ask, what do you have in place before you recruit for the role? This will help you all see what you might be missing, because we have all kinds of interesting things that you might think about having in place before you start recruiting for a role. 

We ask about what the plans are. Most popular software and websites for posting volunteer opportunities. So, the software provider folks who are listening are going to, their ears are going to perk up and say, Oh, that’s good. I want to know if people are using our website if they have posting capability. And if you guys are thinking about where you want to post your opportunities, this will be a good thing for you as well. 

To what extent organizations are using paid advertising and what kinds of paid advertising. So that’s good. If, you know, we get good results with this, and I can cross the tab between paid advertising and success, then maybe that might make the case for you to get investment in paid advertising. I don’t know if that’s going to be the result yet, but we’ll find out. 

We will find out how organizations are using email to communicate and how often we’re asking on frequency, what digital marketing metrics organizations are using to track their progress and improve results. So, we are asking a little bit about metrics, and we are fully aware that many people are not tracking and that’s good information to gather as well. 

We don’t expect that a hundred percent of everybody will have digital marketing metrics. It’s important to know to the extent to which our field is using best practice when it comes to digital marketing, which is doing what the data tells you and reflecting on the data. And then what are the conversion rates for new volunteers? 

What are organizations seeing now? This is good for benchmarking. You can benchmark yourself. I always recommend you benchmark against yourself. Like what is, what is our conversion rate now? And can we improve on that? But it also just gives you a general guide, like, well, geez, all these organizations, we’re doing better than all these organizations. 

This is great. We should congratulate ourselves. Right? Or, wow, we’ve got work to do. So, it’s just one more data point. It doesn’t tell you totally all the information about your success. And there’s more in the survey as well. But I’m hoping that at least some of those areas of exploration of volunteer stats that you’re interested in, I hope we’ve ticked some boxes. 

I really do because I’m really excited about this one. And I want to just end this conversation with a call to action for you. Okay. And the good news is this call to action doesn’t cost you a dime. Usually, you know, I’m promoting something like our membership or our vision week bootcamp or recruitment bootcamp. 

But right now, I want to call you to act on something that doesn’t cost you a dime. And it’s probably obvious what I’m going to ask, right? You may ask, how can volunteer pro report on such a plethora of volunteer stats so that we all have the information to inform our practice. Where does all this data come from? 

It’s so amazing that we have all these data that we can make decisions. A big chunk of people participated. So, the data is undeniable. It’s verifiable or reliable. I shouldn’t say it’s verifiable. I should say it’s reliable. When you have a thousand people participating in a survey, then you know what, you can hang your hat on those results. 

So how can we do this? Well, gang, we do it in collaboration with you. Without your participation in this survey, we don’t have the data to share. It’s simply that simple. It’s just that simple, right? This is going to be the most comprehensive, or it is the most comprehensive survey on volunteer recruitment tactics that I’ve seen in recent years. 

I have not seen any other surveys that go this deep with these many questions. And so, I want to invite you, and this is my call to action, to participate and add your voice to our 10th annual survey. The survey will be open until December 20th. And so, by the time you get this, you still have a few weeks to go, so you’re okay, but now’s a good time. 

Why not just get a cup of coffee, take the survey. Anybody who takes part gets free access to our early results webinar on January 22nd. Just hear about how this, what our research results are first. If you can’t make it that day, it’s okay. We will send you a replay, so don’t worry about it. But so, register when you finish the survey. 

And I just want to really encourage you to share the survey link with folks, to help us promote it, and to make sure we have good, robust participation this year. I really want to make sure we have good data. Because I need to have a lot of participation so that I can do cross tabbing. 

Because once I start slicing and dicing the data, if we get segments that are too small, they’re not reliable. So we must have a lot of participation. If you’ve enjoyed this podcast and any other of the helpful free content that we at Volunteer Pro and Tobi Johnson and Associates have offered you recently or over the years, I really hope you’ll pay it forward. 

You know, we’re in a relationship here. I’m providing you with information. I’d like you to help me out as well. Right? It’s a two-way street. So, please pay it forward by helping us continue to build volunteer stats and research that we can share to help everyone better engage their communities in volunteerism. 

This continues to be, the Volunteer Management Progress Report, continues to be the largest crowdsourcing of data for volunteer managers on the planet. I’ve never seen anybody else doing this. We are not a big organization. We’re a tiny little boutique consulting firm, but we do this because we love you. 

And we do this because it’s important that we understand our profession. And so again, if you’ve enjoyed anything, if you’ve enjoyed the pod at all, would you do me a favor and take the survey? I would really appreciate it. So, the survey link is inside the show notes. Uh, we will be promoting it via social media and in our newsletter, et cetera. 

You’ll probably hear about it from the podcast. other organizations as well in our field. And I want to thank you for listening. This is a labor of love. We may or may not continue after this year. This is our 10th year. So it’s great, you know, it’s kind of nice to leave on a high note, but maybe not. 

Maybe we’ll continue to do it. I still haven’t decided, but for this time. This is our 10th anniversary. Let’s make this the best survey ever. The best survey, the best volunteer stats we can offer you. So, thank you so much for listening. If you liked our episode today, would you share it with a friend and give us a rating and review? 

You know what? We have an average of five-star rating. I love that. I would love to have more people giving us five stars. It feels good. I can’t lie. We’ll be back next week, same time, same place on the volunteer nation. Thanks, everybody.