The Proper Care and Feeding of Ponies and Volunteers
Do you remember asking your parents for a pony when you were growing up? The scoffing of the adults in your life may have been heartbreaking at the time, but now that you can legally vote, don’t you feel a bit like scoffing? The things you didn’t consider when your eight-year-old heart pined for a Clydesdale, like where you’d source 20 pounds of hay a day or the zoning codes of your suburban neighborhood, are pretty embarrassing.
This is how I feel when organizations tell me they “just need some good volunteers” to get a job done. And do you know what, reader? It can often be the worst of jobs, like, “If only we had a volunteer to scan these 900 documents and appropriately label them in the cloud!” or “Wouldn’t it be great to have a volunteer clear this closet of this black mold?”
The truth is, just like the dream pony of our youth, volunteers are a gift that comes with lots of thought, care, and planning. Just like you, they will feel frustrated if their work is boring. They want to see the direct outcomes of their work and feel a tie to the mission of your organization.
Attrition is high. Thirty percent of the people volunteering with you this year will drop off in the next. But, just like donor attrition, this doesn’t necessarily mean humans are bad at commitment. Often it means that we as nonprofit leaders have not done the work we need to in order to encourage longevity.
We fail to train volunteers, to pair them with jobs that match their skills, or to see them for all they’ve given. Imagine coming into your first day at a new job for an agency you care a lot about, all nerves and questions, and finding that you’d be working in a closet on someone’s donated old IBM. At the end of the day, you’ve been bored to tears for hours and so lonely. This is what we ask of volunteers in so many agencies! And their frustrating experiences are likely to be discussed.
In reality, volunteers need to feel supported, valued, and recognized. And if this sounds like a lot of work, well … heck, yes! It is! But did you know that beloved volunteers beget volunteers? And that 70% of nonprofit volunteers become donors? And that it can be a source pool for engaged committee members and donors? And that it can link to meaningful community partners?
Volunteers are hard to come by and even harder to keep. But a well-loved volunteer is an asset in a thousand ways. So, let’s sit ourselves down and write a late Valentine to those we have, and perhaps a pining love poem to those we have not found yet. Because it matters!
