Volunteer Retention: Skills Matching

Posted by mark on Jan 26, 2012 in Volunteering | No Comments »

Volunteers with valuable and specialized skills are often dispatched to do manual labor rather than tasks that use their professional talents.  When a volunteer provides a service that is outside of their core skill set, they often don’t get much out of the experience.  Many of these volunteers get an empty feeling when they know that the job they’ve been given is make-work or a photo op.

Despite the fact that a volunteer may have a certain skill-set, it may not be the skill they want to provide in a volunteer capacity.  For example, you may have a volunteer that has excellent phone skills because he works as  a telemarketer.  However, being that he is on the phone all day in his professional capacity, he may not want to work on a phone campaign for your annual appeal.

Allowing volunteers access to online volunteer coordination software where they may self-identify skills and interests, and even allowing them to assign themselves to specific volunteer opportunities improves the volunteer’s experience and effectiveness.  If the responsibility for coordinating volunteers falls on your shoulders, matching the right people with the right needs is a major key to successful volunteer management.

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More than one-third of those who volunteer one year do not donate their time the next year at any nonprofit (CNCS Analysis of Volunteer Supplement to the Current Population Survey, 2007). That adds up to an estimated $38 billion in lost labor.  The 2004 Volunteer Management Capacity Study conducted by the Corporation for National and Community Service, the Urban Institute, and the UPS Foundation provides some clues.  Despite the willingness of charities and congregations to take on volunteers, challenges prevent them from meeting their full potential. A number of actions will improve the ability of charities to work effectively with and take on new volunteers.