180 – 3 Smart Ways to Design Volunteer Service Awards

September 18, 2025

Episode #180: 3 Smart Ways to Design Volunteer Service Awards 

In this episode of the Volunteer Nation Podcast, Tobi Johnson explores smart, research-backed frameworks for designing meaningful volunteer service awards. Instead of relying on traditional recognition tactics, she shows how to align awards with what truly drives volunteers—their motivations, timelines, and the impact they create. 

Tobi introduces fresh ideas such as immediate recognition and milestone-based acknowledgements, while also breaking down six proven motivational factors that inspire volunteers. Packed with actionable strategies, this episode is a must for any organization looking to elevate its volunteer appreciation efforts and strengthen long-term engagement. 

Volunteer Service Awards – Episode Highlights 

• [01:39] – Diving into Volunteer Appreciation 
• [03:13] – Strategic Volunteer Service Awards Frameworks 
• [07:01] – Aligning Awards with Volunteer Motivations 
• [21:53] – Recognizing Volunteers Through Timelines 
• [29:34] – Designing Awards Around Volunteer Impact 
• [33:16] – The Power of Handwritten Thank You Notes 

Volunteer Service Awards – Quotes from the Episode

“We don’t have the luxury, especially in today’s context and in today’s environment of not having everything we do with volunteers be strategic. We need all hands-on deck. We need everybody in the community helping us, and we need our recognition activities to serve multiple purposes. And our volunteer service awards can be so creative and they can serve multiple purposes.”  

“ We need to remind people how special the work that they’re doing is, because most of the time it wouldn’t happen at all if those folks had not stepped up to make it happen.” 

Helpful Links

• Volunteer Management Progress Report  
• VolunteerPro Impact Lab  
• Volunteer Management Fundamentals Live!  
• Volunteer Nation Episode #176: Beyond Pizza Parties: Innovative Appreciation Ideas for Volunteers 
• Volunteer Nation Episode #024: The Best Volunteer Recognition is a Well-Run Program  
• VolunteerPro Volunteer Thank You Letter Sample Cheat Sheet  

Contact Us

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

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Episode #180 Transcript: 3 Smart Ways to Design Volunteer Service Awards 

Tobi: Well, hey everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Volunteer Nation Podcast. I’m your host, Tobi Johnson, and I am finally back on the East Coast, I spent the summer in the Pacific Northwest enjoying our property there and having fun, poking around in the garden, getting some work done, and doing a lot of work up and down the West Coast. 

And now I’m back in the east and excited to be here. Just want to say thank you to those of you who are listening. I know we have some very loyal listeners out there who listen to this podcast every week, and I just want to give you all a shout out. This is such a labor of love, and it is so nice to know that you’re out there listening because just sometimes you never know you’re sitting here alone in a room, recording on a microphone, wondering if anybody’s out there. And I know you are because I talk to you at meetings, conferences, sometimes I’m meeting with folks, and they talk about an episode. It’s just nice to know that the work has an impact that’s so important to all of us in our field. 

So today I wanna talk more about volunteer appreciation. I know a couple of weeks ago I talked about the best volunteer recognition, my best tips episode. 176, if you can believe it, beyond pizza party, innovative appreciation ideas for volunteers. And I got started on this conversation about appreciation and I’ve been thinking about it some more. 

And I have been doing some training this week with our volunteer Pro Impact lab members around board committee and advisory group recruitment and management, and. Was sharing some interesting appreciation ideas during that training. And I just wanted to circle back to this topic back in the day in episode 24, and this is episode 180, so I’ve been doing this for, let’s see, almost four years, believe it or not. I’ve been producing the podcast. It’s crazy. Time flies. But back in the first year, I posted an episode called The Best. Volunteer recognition is a well-run program, and I still believe that if you’re going to work on anything and you only have a little bit of time, obviously creating. An exceptional volunteer experience is just the best way you can thank your volunteers in my mind. 

But there’s also things we wanna do to just say thank you, to show our gratitude to reward them. And I am really into. Thinking about frameworks, and so today we’re talking about volunteer service awards frameworks. So, what if you set a system in place? What if you set a program in place? I know a lot of folks are out there just trying to get tips and tricks around volunteer appreciation, but I think it can be strategic. 

And I want to share three ways today about how to think strategically about volunteer service awards. Again, a few weeks ago on my beyond pizza parties, I talked about a couple of different ways to think about how you approach volunteer appreciation and volunteer service awards. One was to align those service awards with core human needs, and I talked about safety connection. 

And purpose and really considering the essential human needs we have that drive a meaningful and rewarding volunteer experience. And then aligning your recognition with those needs. So that’s one strategic approach. And again, I’ll, as always, I’ll post a link in the show notes for that episode, and you can check that out another strategic way. 

I talked about volunteer service awards and volunteer recognition was aligning them with core organizational goals, like program quality, customer or patient satisfaction, community outreach staff and volunteer collaboration, innovation, capacity building, data collection, partnerships, advocacy. You name it, if you have an aspirational goal, you might. 

Align your volunteer appreciation and your volunteer service awards around those key goals. Like I mentioned during that episode, DEIJ leadership spotlights, where you could highlight volunteers who champion inclusivity and help the nonprofit better serve diverse communities. So that might be one way. 

Another one is a Growth Catalyst award. So really people who are aligned with your pro program growth goals. So, celebrating volunteers who’ve helped launch or expand a service might be a way to appreciate volunteers. So, first framework’s really about core human needs. Second framework, I mentioned in that episode was around aligning with core organizational goals. But I also want to talk about a few different other ways. I have three more strategic ways of thinking this through. I want us to really get beyond just sort of tips and tricks and finding things on the internet and just buying gifts for folks just because they’re cute and cuddly, but. 

We don’t have the luxury, especially in today’s context and in today’s environment of not having everything we do with volunteers be strategic. I just don’t think we have that luxury right now. We need all hands-on deck. We need everybody in the community helping us, and we need our recognition activities to serve multiple purposes. 

And our volunteer service awards can be so creative, and they can serve multiple purposes. So. I want to share some different ways to have that happen. So, I’m going to dive into three methods you can use as frameworks to design smarter volunteer service awards. We want to be intelligent in our design here and work smarter, not harder, right? 

So, let’s talk about the first way. The first way is to design around volunteer motivations so we can design our volunteer service awards around research backed functional volunteer motivations. Now, fun what I mean by functional, and this has been researched quite in depth through multiple studies, but there are basically six reasons or six functions that volunteering provides or serves in people’s lives, and one of them is values. So, a values function. It’s a way for people to express their altruistic and humanitarian values. So, what would you do? In terms of aligning an appreciation activity with that, well, it might be leading self-reflection exercises with volunteers around how the connecting with the organization’s mission connects with their personal values. 

So, that’s a way that self-reflection of making meaning about that volunteer experience could be a way to provide some appreciation and some recognition. So when people, another interesting way to express one’s altruistic and humanitarian values and align that with a functional, that’s a, if that’s a functional motivation of your team and you know, you have to do a little bit of investigation and figure out which of the functional motivations of the six I’m going to go through which ones resonate most with your team. 

Values are a big one for most volunteers, but through surveying and through listening, you can figure out the top two or three for your team. Most teams have two or three that are their tops. It could be that you give people in a humanitarian award. Right, that’s aligned with that value-based motivation. A second motivation, a functional motivation for volunteers is career, especially our younger volunteers and volunteers who are getting ready for the workforce or trying to get promoted in the workplace. 

Sometimes volunteering can help them with their resume with if they’re leading things, maybe employee volunteer program projects, those kinds of things, that gives them some experience. So, if it’s a way to, if that motivates your volunteers, a way to improve career prospects, then maybe the volunteer service award should include something around a skillset that they have achieved, or the reward could be either a small grant for some specific training that they’d like, or providing them skills training or dev, or developing a leadership program that those volunteers could get involved in. So, you’re really, when you’re being strategic about these volunteer service awards, you’re really thinking, what could I give somebody who’s motivated by these things? 

Something of value. It’s almost like speaking their love language, right? The third area of functional volunteer motivations is social. It’s a way to develop and strengthen social ties. So now I will say that it’s not just social ties between one another, but it’s also strengthening the social ties between ourselves and people we care about. 

So, let’s say, in my case, my grandmother. Was an avid volunteer and if she were alive today, I would love to talk to her about my current volunteering, and that would feel really rewarding to me. When you think about that social motivation, getting acknowledgement from highly respected peers or inviting family members to celebration events, I used to train a volunteer team. 

And every year the volunteer coordinator, I’d go there once a month and train I, I trained around my region, and she would organize a volunteer luncheon once a year as a celebration and invite the spouses of the volunteers. And so, it really made it even more meaningful because those volunteers were able to feel good about what they were doing and their spouses, their partners were able to see their, their partners in a different way or appreciate them in a new way. 

It’s interesting my husband over the summer. My husband spent some time when we were in Washington State. He wasn’t at work every day. He was working out of his home office. I was working outta my next home office next door to his, and he saw me in my real work environment because it doesn’t usually see me. 

Usually, he goes off to work and comes home and he sees me at the computer. When he leaves, he sees me at the computer. When he comes home, he doesn’t know what happens during the day and he star, he got to see me in action. And sometimes I cheer myself on. If I have a lot to do, I will say things I will, I’ll get myself revved up. 

There are all kinds of things I do to be productive. And he just said to me, I have so much respect for what you do and how you do it. And that meant so much to me because it was, that’s something that I’m proud of. I’m proud of what I’ve built, and nobody really gets to see it. I’m behind the scenes. I’m at home. 

I work from my home office, and it’s something that I create on my own and with obviously with colleagues and partners, but when I’m working alone, I’m working alone. So that was a social motivation that I wanted to look good in my husband’s eyes. So interesting stuff. The fourth functional. Motivation is understanding a way to gain knowledge, skills, and abilities. 

And this motivation is very near and dear to my heart because I used to train volunteers on healthcare advocacy and healthcare navigation and insurance and all that, and it was very complicated. The rules changed every year. There were layers, layers of healthcare, and now it’s a little bit easier with the Affordable Care Act, but there’s still quite a bit with Medicare, Medicaid, et cetera. 

And so, our volunteers were quite adept and interested in learning because they’re, they would start with like 35 hours of bootcamp style training. It was very intense. And so, I would go around and train them and update them every month because things were changing that rapidly. And we wanted them to be at the forefront of the knowledge so that they could give the best service to our clients. 

And so, I’m well versed with people who are motivated by this understanding motivation, and in fact, in our master gardener group where I volunteer. Our, we love to learn new things. In fact, we’re constantly sharing new things. My volunteering has to do with sharing information on Facebook Lives every Saturday morning, and we have monthly meetings where speakers come in and tell us about all kinds of things people always want to learn, so it’s a wonderful motivation too. 

Align with when it comes to your volunteer service awards. So, there’s lots of different ways to do that. You can award people by offering them participation in a training. You can also reward people by offering the opportunity to present a training, and so that also acknowledges what they’re learning and what they’ve gained through their work with your organization. 

So understanding is a really fun one to play with and figure out, you know, what, what would be the best things we could do for our volunteers? Protective motives is an interesting functional volunteer motivation. It’s a way of protecting the ego from the difficulties of life, and that sounds like cryptic, but many people volunteer to heal. 

I often give the example of my aunt who volunteered where my grandmother passed away, and that was her way of honoring my grandmother’s memory at a hospice where she was volunteering. But my aunt wasn’t volunteering before my grandmother passed away, but afterwards, she decided to volunteer there. And so, part of the recognition or reward in volunteering for people who are. 

Using volunteering as a healing resource in their lives is the work itself, the work, the ability to be there and start to think through and process their grief in these, in this case. But it also couldn’t be if you know that many of your volunteers are doing this. And volunteering is serving this function in their lives. 

Then maybe one way to reward would be to put together a wellness program for them so that they can do this type of healing with ease. Lots of ways to think about that protective motive and how to reward it. And once people do heal, then their motivations will change and transform as they grow with the organization if they stick around. 

The final research backed volunteer motivation is enhancement. It’s a way to help the ego grow and develop. Now, when you think of enhancement, it’s often around power, not power in a necessarily, in a misused way, but you know, some people want to have a bigger say and volunteering allows them to do that. 

If you have a group of volunteers who are back, who are motivated by enhancement, then it’s all about leadership development and leadership opportunities, and that’s what they’re going to find the most exciting and. Inspirational in terms of volunteer service awards, so developing a leadership pipeline, helping people figure out where, how they can get to the next level, or just inviting people to focus groups to participate in surveys, and then responding back and letting people know what you’re going to do with. 

Their advice, those kinds of things. So, there’s lots of ways, even getting volunteers involved in committees to set up events, those kinds of things can be coveted roles for people who are motivated by enhancement. So those are our six. Functional volunteer motivation. So, the first way you can be smart about developing your volunteer service awards is by designing them around those six volunteer motivations. 

And I’ll go through them again just so you can think them through a little bit. Values are the first one. Career social. Understanding protective motives and enhancement. So, think about how you might strategically align your volunteer motivation or your volunteer appreciation with one or more of those based on what your drives your team. 

So, all teams are different. Usually there’s a few that are at the top of most teams. Motivational structure or motivational. What motivates them? If you’re a volunteer pro impact lab member, I’ll shout this out to our members. We have an ebook in the community called Volunteer Appreciation: 50 Simple Ways to Show Your Love. You can download it from the Community resource library and inside that book we, that ebook, we break down all those 50 suggestions. Into these six categories. So, it’s a huge resource for folks who are looking for ideas and know, you know, they’ve done a little bit of work, they’ve figured out who, what their key motivations are on their team, and they can quickly go and get some ideas. 

So, shout out to my Impact Lab members. Go check that book out. It’s in the resource library. You can just go to the search field at the top of the page and just type it, type in volunteer appreciation, 50 simple ways to show your love, and it’ll show you where to go Grab it. Let’s take a pause for from my top tips for developing smarter volunteer service awards. 

After the break, I’ve got two more frameworks to think about in how you might develop and design your volunteer service awards. So don’t go anywhere. I’ll be right back.  

VOLUNTEER PRO IMPACT LAB 

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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 Volunteer Pro 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 we’ll 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 interested in learning more, go to volpro.net/join and we’ll share how to get started and what’s involved.  

Okay, we’re back with my top tips and frameworks for developing smarter volunteer service awards. My next framework, before the break, we talked about aligning around volunteer motivations. Now I want to talk about. Another very simple way to design, and it’s around timelines. So, this is really the smart design element of this, is that it saves you time because it helps you keep track of vol, your volunteer service awards. 

So, if you design around timelines, I’m not talking about the timelines of or length of service of your volunteers, this. Is a framework that I was teaching this week inside the Impact Lab on managing boards and committees and advisory groups. It’s particularly helpful when you’re managing teams and it’s sort of around the team cadence, so it’s a great framework for teams because teams. 

The primary organizing principle of teams is meetings, right? So, when they get together to do their work. So that’s why it makes sense in that kind of context. So, let’s look at this. So, there are different buckets when you’re designing around timelines. The first bucket would be immediate recognition. 

Recognition either during a team meeting or within 48 hours of that team meeting. So, you can recognize people when you’re kicking off a meeting. You can text or email acknowledgement of specific contributions. You can do quick social media shout outs for quick, timely achievements. You can do verbal appreciation in your next team communication. 

So, there’s just all kinds of ways to just integrate. Appreciation into those meetings. And right after the follow-up, after those meetings. The second bucket when you’re designing around timelines is just regular recognition, whether it’s on a monthly or a quarterly basis. It really depends on how active your team is. 

But if they’re active, then monthly might make sense If they’re only meeting quarterly. Then maybe quarterly is fine, but here’s some things you can get into your editorial calendar and that of anybody who’s working on newsletters, et cetera, communications for your organization. So regular recognition might happen. 

In newsletter features and volunteer spotlights in team meeting acknowledgements when the whole team’s together in peer nomination programs, you could set up pass the baton rituals. That’s what I like to call them. Pass the baton rituals when you’re doing regular recognition. We used to do. This was kind of a fun thing we did with our team, is we had this little stuffed pillow. 

It was like a little star, a little yellow star. It was pretty big. It was about, I don’t know, maybe eight inches a foot across, and it was shaped as a star, and it was kind of puffy, and you could write on it and. Anybody who had the pillow had been awarded the pillow. So, at every quarterly staff meeting, because we worked across our state and we only got together once a quarter, this person who had the pillow could award it to a fellow team member. 

And it was for whoever was the most helpful, the whoever they felt was an exceptional team member during the previous quarter, and that person would sign the pillow, date it, and then they would get a little squishy yellow. Sort of stress balls made from foam like that, but they were shaped like little stars, just like the shape of the pillow. 

I think you can get these at a lot of different inspirational kind of motivational shops online, but then you would get one that you got to keep, and so the pillow, after a while, the pill got so ratty because so many people had signed their names. Do it. Our team wasn’t that big, so some people were signing their names twice on that. 

They were getting the pillow twice, but you got to keep the pillow in your office until the next quarter where you would bring it to the meeting and you would decide who was going to get awarded the pillow. Nobody else got to decide only the person who got the pillow last time. So that’s what I’d call a pass the baton ritual. 

Right. So, there’s something you can award like that where the person who receives the award gets to give the award next time. All right, so that, those are some examples of regular recognition. Another type of regular. So, we talked about immediate, and at the meeting recognition, we talked about regular recognition occurring monthly or quarterly. 

Now we can talk about also milestone recognition. Annual or achievement-based recognition, so an anniversary, celebrations and service awards, major project completion ceremonies and leader leadership transition acknowledgements. Those are all things that happen on teams, and I think sometimes we don’t take enough time to just stop and pause. 

And remind people how special the work that they’re doing is, because most of the time it wouldn’t happen at all if those folks had not stepped up to make it happen. And there’s something very cool about that of people being the sparks for transformation. And I think sometimes when we’re all for volunteers who’ve been volunteering for a long time, for staff who’ve been working with volunteers for a long time, we kind of take for granted that this is just going to happen. 

But it doesn’t just happen. People must come together and decide that it’s going to happen, and that doesn’t always happen. So, I think that milestone recognitions are important. All right. The fourth bucket in the design around timelines is to, uh. Recognize people without a timeline. Surprise, recognitions, unexpected moments, paying it forward. 

Just random appreciation, gifts or notes. Spontaneous celebration of break, breakthrough moments, unexpected opportunities or access to respected people. Having somebody come visit a meeting that nobody was expecting was going to be there a couple days ago. I. My husband came home from work, and I was feeling good and positive about some developments in my business and things were going well and I wanted to celebrate, and I said, you know what? 

We’re going out to dinner, we’re going to go fancy. We’re not going to worry about the cost. And I’m treating you to dinner tonight and we had such a great time together. I maybe you do this all the time, we don’t usually, we’re hardworking people and usually we’re tired at the end of the night, but I just really wanted to celebrate so that spontaneous. 

Date night that wasn’t planned. Actually, turned out to be a really nice time together and my husband was super appreciative, and we had a really nice time. Surprise, recognition, surprise and delight, your volunteers. It’s always a good way to go. Alright, so we talked about designing around volunteer motivations. 

We talked about designing around timelines. The last area I want to talk about in terms of. Smarter ways to design your volunteer service awards is designing around volunteer or team impact. So, we talk a lot about volunteer impact, but do we align our appreciation with it, our recognition, our volunteer service awards, are they aligned with impact? 

If that’s the most important thing, then perhaps. We should align our awards around it. Now, it may not be the most important thing. There are debates around that, but if volunteers feel that making that difference is the most important thing, then this type of recognition makes a lot of sense. Rather than hours and or years contributed. 

How about volunteer service awards that acknowledge the difference that was made? So these can be adapted with stories or data points. So, you can talk about we, this team helped 200 families access safe housing. Or this team developed a process that we now use agency wide. So, these awards need to be really personalized and mission driven. 

So, they we’re not making things up. Right. And we’re not being very super general. Right. I’m going to give you a few examples of potential volunteer impact awards. So, one might be a legacy impact award that’s given to a volunteer team whose service has left a measurable, lasting difference that will benefit others well into the future. 

So, this is about those ripple effects that that volunteer is making that’s going to have a legacy effect, a Delta award. That highlights a volunteer whose involvement significantly changed lives. It could be an individual, could be a family, could be the human community. So that’s a Delta Award. Its name as its name suggests, it is all about change. Couple more. You might decide to offer Advocate or change maker Award. So, recognizing a volunteer or a team who has amplified voices, champion causes, or influence systems for the better. Now, these could be. Inside your organization, or they could be outside in the community or in society at large. 

That change Maker award could be either Barrier breaker award. I like this one. This is for the ruckus maker. You could call it the Ruckus Maker Award reward if you want, or award. This one recognizes a volunteer or team who helps remove obstacles, open doors, or made access possible for underserved individuals or groups. 

So, this is a champion of inclusivity. If you were to the Barrier Breaker award, if you were to give it, it would be for that. So, I love all these types, these ideas for rewards. I had fun thinking them up. I was thinking, what are the different ways? That you could reward volunteers for making an impact, what kinds of impacts might be made? 

And so, I had a lot of fun making these up and then like deciding what I’d call them. So, feel free, steal these ideas and get out there and start appreciating your volunteers. Now I have one thing. You might also use a resource for you because really the most important. Acknowledgement aside from a well-run program is just. 

Individual expressions of gratitude, I think thank you. Notes have become a thing of the past. Everybody’s doing texting, emails, voicemails, even video emails. But I’ve got to tell you the handwritten note when it’s done, well people save those. I have a folder, and I save little notes people give me. 

It’s important. I like to remember that like what I’m doing matters and everybody who is trying to contribute something in this world, I. Really wants to know that it makes a difference, that it matters. Great big accolades are great and sometimes well warranted and fun to give, but those little thank you notes mean so much to people and they’re so rare. 

How? When was the last time you got a thank, you note in your mailbox at home? Or at work even. I have a volunteer thank you letter and sample and cheat sheet that gives you a very simple framework to create. Really fantastic, simple, but impactful, heartfelt appreciation. How to write something that really has a quick impact on folks. Volunteer appreciation doesn’t have to be difficult.  

Alright, so that’s what I’ve got for today. I’m such a fan of being strategic with everything we do. Again, we don’t have the luxury anymore of just. Doing things and not being strategic. Things have to serve multiple purposes as we move forward in this world, and your volunteers do deserve a well-designed and well-run program, but they also deserve well designed. Well run volunteer service awards, and so I hope through this episode and back to episode 1 76, beyond pizza parties. 

I think between the two of these, you should have plenty to get you started thinking about your next volunteer service award. So, I hope you’ll join me next week. I hope this has been really helpful to you, just giving you more, a more of a strategic way of thinking about appreciation. And I hope if it helped you, I hope you’ll share it with a friend. And I hope you’ll join us next week. Same time, same place on the Volunteer Nation.