147 – Volunteer Recruitment Trends from Our New Report

January 30, 2025

Episode #147: Volunteer Recruitment Trends from Our New Report

In this episode of the Volunteer Nation Podcast, Tobi discusses the key volunteer recruitment trends from the 2025 Volunteer Management Progress Report. She explores the major challenges non-profit organizations face in recruiting and retaining volunteers, such as time constraints, lack of support, and alignment issues between volunteer roles and community interests. 

Tobi also emphasizes the importance of tracking marketing metrics to double down on successful tactics and offers insights on how organizations can improve their volunteer engagement efforts! 

Volunteer Recruitment Trends – Episode Highlights

• [00:45] – Introduction to Volunteer Management Progress Report 
• [01:27] – Key Challenges in Volunteer Recruitment 
• [04:00] – Volunteer Manager Salaries and Trends 
• [04:58] – Volunteer Recruitment Processes and Metrics 
• [06:27] – Biggest Challenges in Volunteer Management 
• [14:23] – Time Constraints and Volunteer Engagement 
• [20:11] – Roles and Matching Volunteers 
• [26:38] – Respect and Buy-In from Leadership 
• [32:45] – Volunteer Retention Issues 
• [36:03] – Opportunities in Volunteer Recruitment 
• [39:31] – Marketing Tactics and Metrics 

Helpful Links

• Volunteer Management Progress Report
• VolunteerPro Impact LabTM
• Volunteer Nation Episode #137 – Volunteer Stats, Trends, and Benchmarks We’re Researching Right Now
• Volunteer Nation Episode #87: Volunteer Research – Sector Trends & Our Latest Survey

Contact Us

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

Rate, Review, & Follow Us on Apple Podcasts

If you love the content Tobi shares on the Volunteer Nation podcast, consider rating and reviewing the show! This helps us reach more people – and help more good causes just like yours – successfully engage enthusiastic, dedicated volunteers with less stress and more joy.

Click here, scroll to the bottom, tap to rate with five stars. Then, select “Write a Review” and let us know what you loved most about this episode!

Also, if you haven’t done so already, follow the podcast so you don’t miss a thing. Follow now!

Subscribe to ProNews: Our Weekly Resource Roundup

If you’d like to stay up to date on all new podcasts, blogs, freebies, and deals posted on our Tobi Johnson & Associates and VolunteerPro websites, subscribe to our weekly ProNews newsletter.

Every Wednesday, we’ll send you a digest of our freshest content, plus a bonus! Once you confirm your subscription, you’ll get our [Free eBook] The New Volunteer Manager: The First 90 Days.

Episode #147 Transcript: Volunteer Recruitment Trends from Our New Report 

Tobi: Well, hey, everybody, Tobi here at the Volunteer Nation podcast. I cannot believe It is almost February already. This year is just cruising by. The days are just flipping over so quickly. I don’t know if you feel that way, but I just feel like time has sped up. I don’t know what is going on, but. It is almost February already, and it is the time when we release our volunteer management progress report survey. 

So today I wanted to talk about some of the trends from that new report, our volunteer recruitment trends specifically, because those are the specific trends we were tracking this year. Every year we kind of focus on a specific area and this year it was volunteer recruitment. And the reason is because so many organizations are still struggling to recruit volunteers, they need the right volunteers for their roles. 

And so today I wanted to talk a little bit about what are the key challenges that we found organizations are experiencing that might impact recruitment and capacity? What are specific recruitment challenges? And then what are the opportunities and gaps that I’m seeing based on the data that we collected? 

You know, we have over a thousand people participate in these surveys every year, and this year from 16 countries around the world, mostly from the US and Canada, but other countries as well. And so, it is a fantastic resource for all of you and I will share with you at the end how to get your hands on a copy of this report. 

It’s free to everybody and I’ll let you know where you can find it. First off, I always have to really thank and give my gratitude to folks who participate in our annual State of the Industry Survey. If they did not participate and some of these people might be you listening. If you did not participate in the survey, we would not have the data to share. 

I really want to thank everyone who took part in the survey. We just could not do it without you. So, my gratitude to you. Also, I want to express thanks to all our distribution partners, and they are all listed inside the report and on our survey page where you can get the report. You know, some of our distribution partners have helped us since the very beginning, spread the word on their networks about the survey. 

Again, we could not do it without you. If you’re a distribution partner, thank you so much. If you did help spread the survey and didn’t see your name in the report, at least let me know, shoot an email to wecare@valpro.net and we’ll make sure you get listed on our webpage. We ask folks at the beginning, when we begin the survey, if they want to be a distribution partner, we send out a form, but occasionally people help and we don’t know they’re helping. 

We’d love to acknowledge you as well. This year, the recruitment edition, there were So many things to talk about. Today I can only talk about a few of them, but you’ll want to download the final report. But this year we took a deep dive into how volunteer involving organizations prepare for and execute their volunteer recruitment strategies. 

We also talked about volunteer managers. salaries. We asked about that. It’s a perennial favorite and people had requested it from the year before. So, we asked about that. And in the report, we share trend data over several years. We started tracking salaries back in 2016. And so, you can see every few years we ask, and you can see whether salaries have gone up or down overall, but also in specific countries where we got enough responses to give a valid result. The main topics we covered in this year’s report were, as I said, volunteer manager salary trends, but also what’s the context of the work. You can get a sense of who are the folks who are responding to the survey. 

We also asked about volunteer capacity specifically as we build back from COVID. Some organizations still haven’t reached full capacity yet. We asked about volunteer recruitment processes, tactics, tools folks use so you can learn more about what the field is using in terms of onboarding, what kinds of digital marketing tactics, etc. 

And then we also asked about volunteer recruitment metrics and benchmarks. We’re trying to help people benchmark a little bit. We learned a lot from that. I will just spoiler alert, because I’m not going to talk about benchmarks and metrics on this specific episode. You can find them in the report. But what we really found was most organizations are not tracking their metrics, so it’s very hard to know what’s really working. 

But there are a few metrics we suggest in the report that you might want to start tracking to see, to really assess the effectiveness of your marketing strategies. You know, if we’re marketing without results or knowing our results, we’re really flying blind, and we can’t really focus our efforts. And then finally, we asked about the biggest challenges, both in general, but also related to marketing and recruitment. 

I’m going to share those as we kick off. Again, there are so many recruitment trends and insights that came from the data. Today I’m going to share just a few of my key takeaways, but I hope you’ll download the report. And. Really take a deeper dive into it. The two things I really want to focus on today are some of the biggest challenges and the greatest opportunities for growth in our sector when it comes to attracting and engaging volunteer talent. 

There were so many things I saw in the survey results where there are major gaps. in strategy that we are not taking advantage of. So, I want to make sure that everybody can get some ideas. And the good news is, a lot of these things really don’t cost, in some cases don’t cost any money, just a little bit of time to get set up. 

Let’s start with the biggest challenges, because this sets the stage. for how we go about recruiting volunteers but also managing and retaining them. Because as you know, volunteer recruitment and retention are two sides of the same coin. And the more you can retain volunteers and keep volunteers engaged with your organization; the less work you must do recruiting new talent. 

For the 10th year, we asked what’s your number one biggest volunteer management challenge right now? Please be as. detailed as possible. This is an open-ended comment that we hand code and last week I hand coded all 800 plus comments. We don’t want to presuppose that we understand what people are struggling with. 

We want to really hear in people’s voices what those are and then we categorize them. I want to share with you what the top categories are. The first category is volunteer recruitment. It’s been the perennial favorite challenge for everybody throughout almost 10 years. There was one year in the middle of the pandemic when supervision was the biggest challenge and mostly that was due to figuring out how to continue to engage volunteers remotely. 

So that was, you know, because folks really weren’t recruiting volunteers or bringing on more volunteers during the pandemic, or most organizations were not, that was not the top challenge. But this year was like many of the other previous years. Interestingly, last year, 31 percent of our respondents to this question noted recruitment as their top challenge. 

This year, it fell five percentage points to 26%. There were other pressing challenges that I want to talk about as well, because these are. really important for us to understand I think right now. But in terms of recruitment, recruiting volunteers that are available when they are needed, specifically in more traditional recurring roles, was a key concern. 

Also, many organizations are keen to involve specific populations or age groups with the intention of. either diversifying their volunteer team or connecting with volunteers that they believe will be more consistent in terms of their contributions. However, finding enough volunteers in general was what people most mentioned and it was the most just. 

Finding enough volunteers to meet the needs of the organization. We also asked in a multiple selection question, what’s your biggest recruitment challenge? Because we also wanted to dig into that a little bit deeper, specifically to get. more granular in terms of recruitment challenges. So, we offered a multiple selection. 

People could choose as many challenges as they wanted in this survey item. And what we found was time was the biggest challenge. So not enough time to do it all. or 48 percent noted that as one of their biggest challenges when it came to volunteer recruitment. Not enough responses to appeals, so recruitment strategies are not effective. 

That was 32%. A mismatch between volunteer availability and role, and we found that in the open-ended comments as well around roles and matching. I’ll talk about that in a minute. And we found that people did not have enough budget for paid ads. And when we get to tactics, when I, when I talk about tactics, I want to, I want to touch back on this because there are ways to get free advertising. 

I want to talk about that a little bit. Lack of people to do marketing and outreach, hence the not enough time to do it all. Lack of a comprehensive strategy. And getting one-time volunteers to return for those three challenges, about one in four mention those. There were certainly other challenges, and in the report, you can see all the ones that were checked. 

There are plenty of challenges for organizations when it comes to recruitment. Some of the challenges that were listed around strategy were not selected by folks. But when we looked at the strategies that folks were using, we could see that that digital marketing strategy is not, for many organizations, it is not yet mature. 

And that’s a, a major, that insight for me, is something that really attracted my attention when I looked at the survey results. Because if you think about it, most people get their information from the internet. Most people get their information from their phones. And they go on Google or other search engines and find information. 

If we don’t have as organizations a good strategy, because most people are going to find out about our organizations and our opportunities on their phones versus coming To our brick and mortar, you’re driving by our organization, et cetera, they’re not going to see us necessarily, our physical locations, the way they’re going to find us is on the internet. 

The internet has become our front doorstep when it comes to volunteers and attracting volunteers. and educating the community about our volunteer opportunities, but our front doorsteps don’t exist for volunteers or are not very welcoming, and we’re not really nurturing and welcoming folks in, explaining to them digitally, in using, you know, online communications about our opportunities. 

And so, we have a lot of work to do in this department. That was one of my major takeaways from this survey, that there’s a reason why our organizations are struggling. And it, we, it’s tempting to blame volunteers in the community for lack of support, but Bye. You know, I’ve mentioned before that people are still going on Google and typing in volunteer opportunities near me in the search bar. 

They’re still out there looking for opportunities. If people are out there looking for opportunities and they’re not connecting with our organizations, it can’t be the volunteer’s fault, right, if they’re looking and they don’t find it, or if they’re looking and our organization’s onboarding and application process is not as efficient as it could be. 

So, let’s go on to our next top challenge, the second most often mentioned challenge or cited challenge in this open-ended comment because the question, what’s your biggest challenge? Because I think this gives us some idea about why our digital marketing and our response time and our application processes, et cetera, are not working as well as they could. 

And that is time. About one in five, about 20 percent of Respondents, 18. 2%, found that lack of time to perform the many tasks related to running a mature volunteer strategy was a significant concern this year. So not only recruitment, but all the recruitment, onboarding, training, data management, just day in, day out, many people expressed guilt around not being able to keep and maintain personal relationships with every single volunteer, which in the end. 

In my mind, if you’re a volunteer services department of one, that is not your primary responsibility. Your primary responsibility is to insource volunteers into your organizations. So, many respondents identified as a department of one and mentioned it in their comments. And they noted little support from others to carry out this complex role. 

And many also noted that it needed more staffing. Others shared that they were overwhelmed managing competing priorities and split time between engagement of volunteers and other areas of responsibility like administrative areas or fundraising or communications. And if you think about it, when someone only has so much time, what’s going to fall by the wayside? 

Probably volunteer engagement if other things are presented as urgent. And so many people who were adding their comments to this open-ended question expressed concern with Their inability to be to engage in proactive planning and strategy, that volunteer inquiries were falling through the cracks because it’s simply too difficult to keep pass pace with the demands of the job. 

We really have to take a good look at this. I think a close look at this. Volunteer engagement has become much more complicated than it was in the past. There are just so many more elements to best practice. There are, we live in a very complex and noisy world, so breaking through with sophisticated marketing tactics is not easy. 

The community we are trying to reach is busy and overwhelming. Different software systems we’re now using that we didn’t use in the past. So that’s something to learn. Some organizations are using or hoping to engage more volunteers than they ever had in the past. And there are more nonprofits out there that are seeking volunteers. 

There’s a lot of reasons why this is more, a more complex job than it used to be. I think consumers are choosier and more selective. And, you know, volunteering has become a way of life for service-learning programs and students, at least to get credit hours. So, there’s a lot going on here. And when we short shrift the time people must be able to engage in really smart, proactive planning, people start to work in a very reactive way and become overwhelmed and are not working in the most efficient way possible because they’re just putting out fires and juggling and herding cats, basically. So that’s just not where we want to be. And so, our organizations must start thinking about volunteer services for the goals of our organization around volunteers. 

Do we have sufficient staffing? I don’t think that there is any other role in nonprofits that has such a wide scope of work, you know, volunteer managers, directors, coordinators are responsible for marketing, for data management, for risk management, for training and development, for program development. 

There’s just so much there for often being the point person for volunteers. So, if there’s a volunteer, core of a hundred people and that volunteer manager is the core person, then they are basically managing a hundred direct reports and that it requires so much time on, on the phone, on email, et cetera, and yes. 

As we always encourage, bring on volunteers to help manage the department, but there are some consistent roles and consistent tasks that need to happen where we need a team there to take it on. And so, I think organizations, if they are not getting the results that they desire when it comes to volunteerism, first, they must have the right strategy. 

That’s what we teach at our, in our volunteer pro impact lab and in my trainings. But also, they need to have staff capacity. Those things are not mutually exclusive. And so, I think time, a huge takeaway for me this year, is time went from being the fourth most common at 8 percent last year, to 18 percent this year, and the second most often cited challenge. 

And so, it’s becoming. an epidemic in our sector. The third area of biggest challenge is around roles and matching. Roles and matching were not even mentioned in last year’s survey results in the top five. But now, after being absent from the top five issues in the previous year’s survey, it has appeared again as a major challenge for organizations. 

While volunteers are interested in supporting organizations, their expectations, interests, and scheduling needs just simply don’t align with the opportunities that are on offer. Similarly, and sort of the other side of the coin, volunteer involving organizations are not connecting with volunteers who have the needed qualifications. 

interest and level of commitment that’s required for critical roles. So also, several folks mentioned the need to recruit and cultivate volunteer leaders, both from within and recruiting from the outside. And in this context, volunteer managers also struggle to design new roles that are both meaningful for the volunteers and have In impact on the organization’s mission, and that is sort of the crux of the challenge right there is in addition to leadership roles and being able to help build and expand capacity through leadership, organizations and communities are not seeing eye to eye on what a meaningful volunteer role looks like. 

And what people have a preference to do. So, some organizations are completely reorganizing their volunteer roles to best meet what the community wants. Other organizations are continuing to move forward and just trying to find the right people. And if that’s the case for you. You’ve got to, you know, when I look at this, I look to messaging, not only what’s in your volunteer position description, but what’s in your marketing messaging and who are you reaching out to? 

Who are you targeting with your marketing? Is it, are, is it? people who are most likely to be attracted to a role that has a specific type of task or has a specific schedule, et cetera, because you’re not, if you have a day, a role during the day, you’re not going to get. people who work nine to five, Monday through Friday, it’s just not going to happen because they’re not available. 

I think sometimes we try to fit a square peg into a round hole, and we keep pushing and keep pushing and keep pushing and hoping and praying that people will show up and, you know, I think we’re going to have to have a smarter, more sophisticated strategy. This was another big eye opener for me, roles and matching. 

It hasn’t been a problem recently, and now it’s emerged as a major problem. I think we need to be much better at finding the right people, speaking to the right people about our opportunities. We also need to educate the community much more about why these roles are needed. I think we assume that people know, but they don’t. 

And sometimes it takes, you know, not just one conversation or one email. Sometimes we need to nurture people and educate them about why this is a pressing need. I also think that the scales have really tipped towards the community. and their needs. And volunteers used to just say, okay, I’ll do whatever’s needed, but people have become choosier and that’s just the way it is, right? 

You know, there’s a lot of reasons for this. We live in a world where people can. You know, really choose to have things delivered quickly to them, to their doorstep. People can drive up to grocery stores in some areas and just have groceries delivered to the back of their car or truck. There are, when we, you know, buy things online. 

There’s a million and one options. So, we are in an era of consumer choice and that really comes, you know, kind of impacts and flows into people’s volunteer opportunities. I make the point often that volunteers are making their, they’re contributing their most asset, which is the minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years left in their life. 

We all get so many hours or so many days or so many years in our lives, and that asset is finite. And, you know, money, people think money is the biggest asset. It isn’t. It’s the time you have left. And so, when people contribute their time to your organization, they want it to have meaning. 

You know, there’s also a lot of work people are doing for their own personal wellness, on their own understanding of their needs and boundaries in life. I mean, I think after a global pandemic that was very existential for many of us. That people had a rethink about their lives and where they spend their time. 

And so, if our organizations are not ready and willing and able to provide a super high-quality experience, we are going to struggle. Because our volunteers are also consumers, and they also have choice. And so, you know, really the scales have tipped. And so, it really behooves our organizations to have a good, Consideration of what are the roles volunteers should play around here and are they the same that they’ve played in the past? 

And it’s a big question, I’m not denying it isn’t, but if your organization continues to struggle, you’ve got to take that, that big look. Okay. The fourth biggest challenge for organizations, and this one breaks my heart, it really does. respect and buy in, mostly from leadership and coworkers. Very little about respect and buy in for, from volunteers except around people not showing up for shifts, around retention, etc. 

I’ll talk about that in a minute. But in terms of Um, folks struggle about one out of 10, 10 percent mention respect, support, or buy in in their open-ended comments as their biggest challenge. Now this is their biggest challenge. So, we ask people, what is your biggest challenge? So, one in 10 for their biggest challenge is support from inside. 

And that is heartbreaking because in this world of volunteer engagement, it’s a challenging job. And if your biggest challenge comes from within Um, that is pretty sad, really, because, and I know I’m speaking directly here, but I think it’s important for us to understand. We are doing work that is very challenging, and that is valuable. 

It is a skill to be able to engage the community in providing basically free labor for our organizations. It’s not easy. And so if your biggest challenge is people in your organization, not buying into what you’re doing or being resistant to what you’re doing, or in some ways being completely ignoring what or being indifferent to what you’re doing, that In something that has such a profile in the community, that’s hard. 

And I know those of you that are listening to me who are experiencing this, you know, are nodding your head right now. So buying in was down one percentage point from last year. It was mentioned last year, and it was, buy in was actually the third most often. challenge. So, it’s gone down one point, so maybe that’s an improvement, but people are experiencing indifference or active resistance to volunteer initiatives, either from executive leadership, program leads, and coworkers. 

It is a perennial challenge. This challenge has been mentioned since day one of this survey. So many noted a lack of understanding and investment, as well as strategic direction for the volunteer Enterprise from executive level folks, C suite folks. Others shared their frustrations with the hesitancy of coworkers to bring volunteers into their department, or a lack of attention to volunteer needs and support within the program. 

And still others mentioned the lack of skills to manage volunteers once placed. That’s something we’re going to take on this year. I have a training. I just noticed it the other day. I was like, wait a minute. I have a training on volunteer supervision. I have an online course on volunteer supervision. 

We just haven’t really offered it lately. So, we’re going to offer this again. Stay tuned for that. But if you have coworkers who are not skilled yet in leading volunteers, we have a solution for that and I’m going to let everybody know when that’s available. So that’s something we can help with. I think also there are certainly Leaders in our organization and coworkers need to come to their own conclusions about volunteerism. 

But we as leaders of volunteers are the internal consultants and we do need to step up and be able to educate. And I’ve found through the years of working with our volunteer pro community, which is now our volunteer Pro impact lab, that I have watched our members. Develop their leadership skills and suddenly it appears as sudden, but it’s not. 

It’s through their own work that they get invited to certain meetings that they’re in, included in the strategic planning, that they are given more budget or given more FTEs. And I, I would say, not given, but people have decided that it’s needed. And I think people, once they start to professionalize their strategy and their program through many of the things we teach. You know, I was a nonprofit director before I started.  

I was a program director before I started my consulting practice. So, I know what’s in the heads of leaders, and I’ve been there myself. And so, I teach inside the Impact Lab a lot about leadership development, a lot about how to have those conversations, how to set goals boundaries, how to negotiate, because I think we’re trying to do it all and we’re not asking others who are also responsible for volunteers to step up. And so, I’d love to see this change in our sector because again, it is heartbreaking, but there are things we can do. You know, it, you certainly can move to another organization if you’ve, you know, been trying and trying and trying and trying and it just never changes. 

There’s always that availability, but I also think organizations need to understand your value and you need to show that value. So, respect, support, and buy in. If you’re an executive who’s listening, I hope you take this to heart and make sure that not only your volunteer managers, but your volunteers understand how important they are and that every staff person, you know, your volunteers are major donors, basically. 

And we would never expect our staff to be indifferent to a major donor. Volunteers, considering the fact You know, if you look at what the economic contribution is to your organization, the FTEs that volunteers provide, they are major donors. And so, let’s treat them with the respect that they deserve. 

Let’s talk about our final challenge, challenge number five, which is volunteer retention. Now retention dropped several points this year. So, it was 12%. This year it was 9%, but it still is one of our top five challenges. Um, general volunteer turnover and maintaining an active, engaged volunteer base was a chief concern. 

And there were complaints related to the commitment of volunteers once they completed training. So there still is that challenge of transitioning from onboarding and training and completing the application process to becoming an active volunteer and contributing time. And so Many people specifically called out younger volunteers as students as those most likely to renege on commitments, mis shifts, and disappear without alerting the organization. 

Now, I don’t know if that’s true or not, but it’s certainly, many people mentioned it, so I don’t know if it’s an overwhelming truth about young people, I would hesitate to make that assertion. It seems biased to me, but people are saying they’re having that experience. I think we always need to be careful when we’re, we’re making a broad brushstroke assertion about a whole population of people. 

So just, just calling that out a little bit, but students are, have very busy lives. And organizations are saying that they’re having difficulty. Still, others were concerned with the turnover of older, more veteran volunteers who could no longer perform their roles in competing priorities that made volunteering less attractive to our older volunteers. 

So it may be that volunteering is less attractive. It may be that, but the volunteering roles aren’t as meaningful. So, there’s a lot of reasons here, assertions about why volunteers aren’t coming back. Of course, we’ll never know completely unless we survey and get feedback from volunteers. We’re making our best guesstimates. 

But there are trends in this area around retention that I think are important to address. And we’ve got to take steps. Maybe it’s not. And yes, of course, not fulfilling a commitment is an issue, and there are people who don’t fulfill commitments, so we can’t say it’s all on the organization’s part. 

Certainly, volunteers have a part to play in fulfilling what they commit to, but it’s something that is still a challenge for at least On an average, one out of 10 organizations. For me, that was really a continued sort of problem-solving area for organizations to wrap their heads around. Because, you know, you can’t really change people, but you can change your processes, and you can change. You know how you’re communicating, and you can change who you decide to appoint as a volunteer. 

You can’t really change people as much as we’d like. So, retention is a tough nut to crack for that reason. All right. Let’s take a quick pause from our conversation and my takeaways from and volunteer recruitment trends from my 2025 volunteer management progress report. When we come back, I want to switch gears and talk about opportunities. I know we talked about challenges. It’s not always a fun thing to talk about, but there are so many insights into those challenges around where we are as a sector and really gives us some ideas about what steps to take forward. So even when we look at challenges, I see opportunities, but after the break, I’m going to talk more about opportunities. So don’t go anywhere. We’ll be right back.  

Volunteer Pro Impact Lab 

Hey, are you looking to upgrade and modernize your volunteer program or maybe you’re building one from scratch and you’re just not sure where to start? If so, we’ve got the perfect resource for you. The Volunteer Pro Impact Lab. Having built several direct service programs from the ground up, I know that it doesn’t happen by accident. 

It’s a clear process that takes careful attention with a focus on impact. In the end, you need a system in place that’s clear. standardized, efficient, and that gets results. In addition, and maybe this is the most important, you need a volunteer program design that directly contributes to your organization’s most critical goals. 

That’s where the VolunteerPro Impact Lab comes in. When it comes to effective volunteer engagement, our bespoke volunteer strategy success path model, which is the heart of our resources and strategic advising, will help you transform your volunteer strategy from fundamental to a fully mature what’s working now approach and all in less time. 

With our online assessment, you’ll quickly gain clarity on precisely where to focus your efforts and will provide recommendations for the exact steps needed. for sustainable growth. Regardless of how large or small your organization is or what your cause, impact, area, or focus is, our program development and implementation support model will help you build a strong foundation so volunteerism can thrive at your good cause. 

If you’re volpro.net/join and we’ll share how to get started and what’s involved. 

I’m going to focus mostly on volunteer recruitment. I also wanted to mention that you can download all of our past surveys off our website and click on the research tab at the top of the page and scroll down to the web links at the bottom of the page and you can download every one of our surveys from the past 10 years. 

That’s on our volunteer pro website. I also did a full rundown and key takeaways from our past surveys on Volunteer Nation Episode 87, Volunteer Research, Sector Trends, and our latest survey. So, if you want to check that out, I’ll link to that in the show notes if you want to get a, just an audio rundown of some of the past surveys. 

But I want to talk about some opportunities. And areas that are gaps that we might fill and that we, we might be able to take advantage of in terms of volunteer recruitment. So, one of the things we wanted to understand was, what are the specific requirement tactics of volunteer involving organizations are using to attract volunteers? 

And with that question, it really helped me understand where our gaps are. I do a lot of communication audits for our consulting clients around their volunteer recruitment. I call out and can see in their work where there are gaps and I create a report and we discuss it, and I share where the gaps are. 

Our clients can figure out where to take next steps. This report in some ways is sort of like a global comms audit, especially this question where I asked about what your key marketing tactics are, digital marketing tactics, because I saw a lot of areas for opportunity here. So, So, in terms of marketing tactics, the number one marketing tactic is referrals and word of mouth. 

88.2% noted that and chose that. Now people could pick as many of these boxes, they could tick off as many boxes of tactics they’re using, but referrals and word of mouth was the number one. And that we hear anecdotally all of the time. And I wonder if that’s a tactic at all. Because it really is, we’re just sort of hoping and praying that our volunteers provide referrals in word of mouth. Unless we have a word-of-mouth marketing strategy, then it is a tactic. If we’ve created a word-of-mouth marketing campaign, then it is a marketing tactic. But if we’re just You’re randomly relying on word of mouth to maybe happen or not happen, then it’s not really a tactic. 

But we put it on the survey anyway because I know people often that is the number one way volunteers hear about us. The second tactic is social media posts, which I found interesting because social media in terms of organic social media. is not very effective in meeting or reaching your follower base. 

They’re estimating nowadays that about 5 percent of your posts show up in the news feed of your followers on Facebook. That’s not a very good result. Unless you have a very, very engaged follower group that are posting and reacting, then you’re, the algorithm’s going to favor you. But if you’re just posting to post, then they’re not really seeing your results. So, it’s not the best place in my mind, the most effective place to post recruitment postings, but you’ll know whether or not it’s working for you if you’re tracking, if you’re tracking, uh, social media referrals or where volunteers hear from you. So if it’s working for you, keep doing it. But there are other areas where you might get better traction, volunteer posting websites. 

That’s about 73.9%, so three quarters of our organizations are using aggregator websites. The top website, aside from people’s own websites, was Volunteer Match, now to become Idealist. I don’t know if you heard about that, but they’re merging. My pal Jennifer Bennett has been sharing that information out. So, volunteer posting websites, most people are using. 

I think we could, that’s an area, if it’s working for you, great. If it’s not, then it’s time to look at your strategy and maybe improve your posts. Community events or fairs. Another 71 percent are using that. Community partnerships, 64%. Recurring emails like newsletters, broadcast emails, 54%. And community presentations, 54%. 

And then there are several others that you can find in the report. The ones that I’ll call out that I think are major gaps are search engine optimization and paid Google ads. Those are a couple that, if you think about it. Lots of people are typing into Google volunteer opportunities near me. Certainly, if you’re posting on those aggregator sites, those sites generally show high, display high on a search engine result, but if your organization does as well, you’re ahead of the game. 

So we’ve got to really make sure that our webpages, first of all, that they include our volunteer opportunities and information about volunteering, that they’re well organized, and that they’re optimized so that the bots that crawl, the Google bots that crawl our websites start to index us at the top and the algorithm shows us at the top of results. 

Now there’s a quick way to hack those results and that is through paid Google ads. And I heard from a lot of folks, one of the areas of challenge was budget and lack of funding. Google ads are free to nonprofits. You can get up to 10, 000 in ads a month from Google. And your marcoms people, if you’re in a larger nonprofit, you probably already have a Google ad. 

If you’re a smaller nonprofit, it’s time to get one. And that’s a place where you can, in search results, you can choose the search terms, the keywords people type in, and you can have your volunteer opportunities displayed on Google. And so it’s the number one place people go to search for information. So, it’s sort of a no brainer. 

So that was the area that I thought was. key and only really paid advertising included Facebook, but search engine optimization, only 14 percent are doing any search engine optimization on their website, which is a basic thing that all websites really should have. Another area of opportunity that I found really interesting what that was missing, only 4% of respondents use automated drip email sequences or email automated emails. 

And that is such a way, if everybody’s struggling with time and doing onesies twosies emails, there are so many ways you can use automated drip email sequences to do a welcome campaign for volunteers, to do a series when anybody joins your mailing list. That doesn’t take extra time on your part. And the software to pull this off is very inexpensive. 

Volunteer management software does not have this functionality. Too bad. I wish it did, but the software that can help you do this, this customer relationship management software, is very inexpensive. You know, the CRM is, they’re very inexpensive nowadays for, you know, you’re not going to have 10, 000 people on your list like we do, but you’ll have hundreds or maybe a thousand and it’s just not that expensive. 

So that’s absolutely in another area of opportunity that really called out to me. I also think testimonials and endorsements, that social proof, only 33% of all nonprofits use social proof to market as a marketing tactic. And that is just the way of the world nowadays. We need to start gathering feedback from our volunteers and sharing their stories more. Social proof is such, you know, we do what we see other people doing. It’s such a great nudge factor for people who are on the fence. And so, this is completely underutilized as a marketing tactic. There are a few others here, but those, those are the ones that are calling to me big time in terms of areas that we could. 

start to implement these and really see an uptick in our volunteer recruitment results. The other thing I want to quickly talk about is the area of opportunity was our marketing metrics. What are we tracking? Certainly, you can ask your new volunteers, you can put this on your application form. How did you hear about us? 

You know, sometimes people don’t. So, it’s a great idea to track digital marketing metrics and really, you can use what’s called a UTM platform. web address to start to track where you can set up different ones to track from which sources you’re getting volunteers, whether it’s social media, your website, or I wouldn’t say using your website per se, but email marketing, flyers you’re using, whatever, you can set up specific web addresses and then have. 

be able to track specifically where people clicked from. So that’s helpful. But there are also other, obviously, other metrics. And in this question, less than half of the people we asked, what marketing metrics are your organizations using to track their progress and improve results? Six hundred and 55 respondents answered, but 739 skipped and we told people, instructed people to skip the question if they don’t track at all. 

Half of our organizations are not tracking our marketing metrics at all of those who are tracking marketing metrics. Social media marketing, of the half that are, about 62 percent are tracking social media engagement. Now, that doesn’t mean, just because people are liking or commenting on your post doesn’t mean they’re applying for your volunteer opportunities. 

So that’s sort of a mid-level tracking metric. Email open rates, website visits. Email click through rates and email contact list sizes are also metrics that some organizations, and not very many really, are tracking. And so those again are intermediate. Now clicking through rates on an email can tell you whether that’s a more effective way of looking at impact or it’s sort of a more lagging indicator, but you know, we still have some work to do to figure out what’s most effective. 

I think we’re mostly throwing spaghetti at the wall still trying to figure out what works. Sometimes we know anecdotally, you know, we’ll, we’ll run an email campaign and all of a sudden, we’ll get a bunch of volunteers, or we’ll post a bunch in social media, and we’ll get a bunch of volunteers and we’ll kind of make the association that, okay, that must be working well, or I went to a presentation, and I had five volunteers step up. That’s easy to see, but we still have a lot of work to do, I think, in figuring out what works best so we can double down on it and not waste time. on strategies and tactics that aren’t working, like leave those be, or making targeted improvements to them. 

But I’m a huge fan of doubling down on what already works, what’s already proven to work, do more of, spend more time on. And again, it’s up to organizations to figure out how to have enough time to help the volunteer manager get their hands on these metrics. That doesn’t have to be the volunteer manager that’s the person assembling these metrics. 

It could be your marketing and communications folks. Could be your IT folks. It could be a very savvy volunteer. It could be a volunteer you recruit from Catchafire to help you develop. a system to track marketing metrics. That would be a great volunteer role for a skilled volunteer. So there’s a lot of ways to crack this nut. 

But again, we are absolutely spinning our wheels if we do not know why and how people come to us. A couple more things I wanted to just mention, or one more thing I wanted to mention before I close out, of an opportunity. And that is, we asked what your most successful recruitment tactics are and we left that open and did. 

So, as I said, let’s double down on what’s working. Well, word of mouth came up as absolutely the most successful recruitment. So, when we think about word of mouth, as I mentioned earlier, are we doing, uh, creating purposeful word of mouth campaigns? Inside the VolunteerPro Impact Lab, we do training on this. 

We talk to people in our When we do volunteer recruitment, Boost Camp, we talk about in our online training, we talk about testimonials and word of mouth. Having a purposeful campaign can absolutely help you convert more people. Helping your volunteers talk more in a more informed way about what you do, providing them with the tools can really help. 

You know, word of mouth marketing is very effective. Because the horse’s mouth is more effective than anything. But if we’re just kind of relying on it and rolling the dice that our volunteers are going to talk about us, you know, maybe happen, maybe won’t. So, if it’s an effective strategy for you, if a lot of referrals come from word of mouth, why not spend a little more time and effort working on that and creating something very purposeful? 

So, those are my opportunities, key takeaways, volunteer recruitment trends from our 2025 Volunteer Management Progress Report. I hope this has been helpful to help you, give you ideas and help you think about volunteer recruitment at your organization. If you like this episode, be sure to share it with a friend, a colleague, maybe some folks inside your organization that could help you think through, maybe your marketing and communications folks. 

And you can order your personal copy of the 2025 volunteer management progress report, the recruitment edition for free, click on the research link at the top of the page in the menu, and then add your email to the request form and order your copy. Be sure you confirm your email. 

If you have not been on our mailing list before, you’ll get an email to your inbox that will ask you to confirm you want the report, and then once you confirm it will be sent to you. If you’re not seeing things, come through, make sure you check your spam folder because it might have gone there.  

We will also provide the link to that page in our show notes. So, if you’re ready to go grab that report, just go ahead and head over to the show notes and enjoy the report. Love to hear what you think of it. And I hope that it provides some value, some insight, some ideas, and some areas for advocacy inside your organization around your volunteer engagement needs around volunteer recruitment.  

When we look at volunteer recruitment trends, there’s still so much more we can take advantage of in terms of tools and tactics. We are not done, and I don’t think our communities are done volunteering. I think there’s plenty of opportunity out there if we use the right tactics. So, with that, I’ll leave you and I will be here at the same time, same place next week on the Volunteer Nation. Take care, everybody.