Taking the time to recognize volunteers is essential to increasing retention and recruiting new supporters. As your nonprofit’s online hub, your website can be an effective marketing tool for showing volunteer appreciation and engaging with volunteers year-round.

Haley Levesque, Program Coordinator and Trainer, manages Ridgebury Riders' highly successful volunteer hippotherapy program. Here is what sets them apart!

Creating change requires a large network of people working together to get the job done. While your employees perform valuable mission-driven work every day, so do your volunteers! 

Your volunteers are a key part of your organization, and they deserve to be appreciated for all their enthusiasm and hard work. Most volunteers devote their time to a nonprofit because they’re motivated by the cause or interested in the organization’s work. To sustain that dedication and motivation, however, they need to feel appreciated.

Every follower on your organization's social media is a potential volunteer—they just might not know it yet. Building and maintaining a social media presence, especially in a small organization, is not without its challenges. That is why we compiled 7 ways to level-up your social media strategy to recruit more volunteers:

Guest Post by Courtney Tull

“Volunteers Needed.” After seeing this ad pop-up on your social media page for the fifth time this month, you decide to give your favorite nonprofit a call, and get signed up to volunteer. Volunteer, to do what, exactly? The post was extremely vague, so you aren’t sure what you might volunteer to do. All you know is that you’re free every Monday and you believe in their mission.

The September issue of the Chronicle of Philanthropy highlighted some current challenges in volunteer engagement with two in-depth articles. In the article “Why and How Charities Should Revive a Declining but Vital Resource ... Volunteers” reporter Ben Gose interviewed me, along with many others working with and leading volunteers, to bring some perspective and insight into what’s changed and what’s stayed the same since the pandemic. He asked insightful questions and did a great job framing up the story. I want to share a little more on our discussion, where we are as a field and a profession, and some things to consider moving forward.

Hi Jennifer-

I just listened to your excellent webinar, “The New Volunteer Managers Toolkit.” I am a retiring psychologist and have decided I’d like to focus some of my time and energy on volunteer retention. I’m not yet sure how to narrow the field, but I learned so much from your webinar and you sounded so receptive and encouraging, so I thought maybe I’d start by contacting you.

Guest post by Wendy Kirwan, Kars4Kids

For any organization that relies on volunteers to accomplish their mission, recruitment of volunteers is only the first step. The big question is how to keep the volunteers you've recruited active, engaged and committed to the cause. We’ll share with you five of the most important things you can do to keep your volunteers engaged:

With the recent discovery of the Omicron variant, you may be looking for ways to navigate through this latest uncertainty. We are continuing to provide several resources to help you overcome the challenges you are facing. Here are 9 resources to support you during this time.