Jessica E. Sowa
Professor
University of Delaware

Volunteer Management: A Strategic Approach

The latest value of a volunteer hour is nearly $35, but are we fully maximizing the value of these hours? Volunteers’ time is often wasted and this hurts both the volunteer and the organization receiving their time and effort. How can organizations take a strategic approach to ensure that both volunteers add value to the organization and the experience benefits volunteers? In our recent book, we explore this question, with the goal of helping organizations—in particular nonprofits—maximize the volunteer experience so that everyone wins.

Taking a strategic approach on how to improve the relationship between volunteers and the organizations in which they are engaged, our book provides an overview of volunteer management from planning and recruitment to engagement and evaluation, considering both organizational and volunteer needs and capacity at each stage. We develop a strategic volunteer management approach for volunteering to benefit not only the organizations and communities served but also volunteers and society more broadly.

Research on volunteering has focused largely on recruitment. However, volunteers are a limited resource whose energy should be preserved and renewed. A negative experience can burn people out of volunteering not only for a given organization but also from the act of volunteering in general. Taking a strategic approach to volunteer management ensures volunteering benefits volunteers, the organization, and the community.

Volunteers do not just appear out of the ether. Most volunteers typically start volunteering because someone invited them to volunteer. However, certain people are more likely to be asked than others, such as those with more resources like a job and higher levels of education, while others may have more time to give but be excluded from networks circulating opportunities. Real strategic volunteer management requires thinking broadly about how to build the richest and most diverse pool of volunteers possible. In our chapters on planning for volunteers and recruitment, we discuss how to take a more active approach to recruitment and recruit broadly to ensure organizations are inclusive and recruit volunteers that meet their needs and the communities as well as offer opportunities to volunteers to benefit.

While volunteer research has been around for over 50 years, we have only recently begun to focus more on volunteer satisfaction and retention. Most volunteer management approaches take a universal approach borrowing largely from generic human resource management processes or a contingency approach tailoring management to organizational needs. While there are insights to be gained from those approaches, we are pushing back on this and arguing for our strategic approach that centers the volunteer and the volunteer experience throughout the volunteer management process.

Volunteer management should be tailored to the needs of volunteers, not just organizations—if we can do this, it should benefit organizations, the volunteers themselves, and the communities they serve. Bridging literature on strategic human resource management and people management with the literature on volunteering and volunteer management, we put forth a model of strategic volunteer management we believe can help organizations meet this call.

Our strategic approach ensures volunteers have the direction, guidance, and support to best serve the organization and community as well as to reap the individual benefits of volunteering. Centering volunteer experiences can preserve and renew volunteer energy as well as gain community perspectives, foster community ties, and build social capital.

For more about the book: https://www.routledge.com/Volunteer-Management-A-Strategic-Approach/Piatak-Sowa/p/book/9781032383668

This article is one of many resources dedicated to strengthening the nonprofit sector. Please be sure to check out NCNE’s website and LinkedIn page to connect with other nonprofit leaders and support on making wise decisions in nonprofit leadership.