Recruiting volunteers when there is no money

Twelve percent of the volunteer programs surveyed in the 2023 Volunteer Management Progress Report have no budget at all. Not a small budget. None. Another 28.4 percent operate on somewhere between one and five thousand dollars for the whole year, and the mean US program budget in that survey falls between $5,001 and $10,000, out of which has to come recognition, training, background checks, coffee, and whatever software somebody signed up for in 2019.

In the same survey, of 1,247 responses across 36 countries, the most-cited challenge was volunteer recruitment, at 32.8 percent. Its highest reading since 2019.

Put those two facts next to each other and you get the shape of the problem. The thing the sector says it struggles with most belongs almost entirely to people who have no money to spend on it, and who mostly do not have the time either. Only 47 percent of volunteer managers in that survey spend more than three quarters of their hours on volunteer management. One in five is fully dedicated to it.

So most published recruitment advice is written for a program that does not exist.

”We need more volunteers” is usually a diagnosis, and usually the wrong one

When a coordinator says they need more volunteers, they have already decided what kind of problem they have. It is an audience problem: not enough people know, so more people must be told. The remedy follows automatically. Post more. Print something. Get on the local radio station. Ask the board members to share it.

I have sat in that meeting many times, and I have run that play myself. It almost never works in a way you can see three months later, and it is worth being honest about why.

Reach is the one input in recruitment that costs money and that you do not control. Wording is free and you control it entirely. The role you are offering is free to change and you control that too. If you have a fixed sum of effort and no cash, spending it on the variable that costs the most and moves the least is a strange choice, and yet it is the default.

What the research on the ask actually found

The most useful finding here is nearly thirty years old and comes from personality psychology rather than nonprofit management. Clary, Snyder and colleagues published the Volunteer Functions Inventory in 1998, and alongside it a claim they called the matching hypothesis: people rated recruitment messages as more persuasive when the message matched the function volunteering served for them personally.

Six functions, in their terms. Values, which is expressing genuine concern for others. Understanding, which is learning and getting to use skills. Social, which is being with and valued by people who matter to you. Career. Protective, which is easing one’s own difficulties. Enhancement, which is feeling important and growing. Their finding was not that some functions are better than others. It was that the same opportunity, described in six different ways, recruits six different people, and that the person whose experience later delivered what they originally came for was more satisfied and more likely to stay.

Read most volunteer recruitment copy against that and it becomes obvious what is going wrong. Almost all of it is written in Values language, because that is how the organization thinks about itself. “Help us make a difference for families in our community.” That is a fine message for a Values-dominant reader and close to invisible for the person who would have said yes to “learn commercial kitchen work on a real service, Tuesday nights, we’ll train you.”

You can rewrite a recruitment post four ways on a Thursday afternoon for nothing. I’ve written more about the six functions and how to hear them in conversation, because the same research is what makes an interview useful.

Your best recruiters are already on your list

Hager and Brudney’s 2004 study for the Urban Institute tested a set of volunteer management practices against how well charities retained volunteers. Four came out positively associated with retention: recognition activities, training and professional development, screening and matching people to tasks, and recruitment of volunteers by other volunteers.

That last one is a recruitment practice sitting in a retention finding, and I think it is the single most useful line in the study for a program with no money. Volunteers who were brought in by other volunteers stayed better. The same study found something else that ought to cheer up a small program: smaller charities retained volunteers better than larger ones, and a culture that visibly welcomed volunteers was associated with about eleven percentage points more retention.

All of this is correlational. Nobody assigned charities at random to run a peer recruitment program. It is entirely possible that organizations where volunteers recruit their friends are already the pleasant ones to volunteer at, and the friend recruitment is a symptom rather than a cause. I would still act on it, for the same reason I would act on most correlational findings in this field: the action it implies is cheap, reversible, and good practice anyway.

Here is the cheap version. Take your twenty most reliable current volunteers. Ask each of them, by name and in person, to bring one specific person to one specific thing. Not “spread the word.” Not a shareable graphic. A named ask, for a named shift, made by someone who already knows what the shift is like.

Most programs have never done this once. They have posted eighty times.

The other free pool is the people who already turned up once. If you have run an event in the last year you have a list of first-time volunteers, and converting them is cheaper than recruiting strangers, assuming you kept the list and wrote down what each of them enjoyed doing.

The role is the other half, and it is the half that lasts

You can improve an ask and still be recruiting into a role nobody wants twice.

The clearest evidence on this comes from national US data published in 2009 by Eisner, Grimm, Maynard and Washburn, using 2006 and 2007 figures. Volunteers doing what the analysis classified as general labor came back the next year 53 percent of the time. Volunteers doing professional or management-level work came back 74 percent of the time. I have written about what that does to a program over three years, so I will not repeat it here, except to note the recruitment consequence.

A program that loses half its people every year is running a recruitment campaign forever. A program that keeps three quarters of them is recruiting to grow. Those two programs can do exactly the same amount of outreach and one of them will feel desperate and the other will not. The 32.8 percent of respondents naming recruitment as their top challenge are not all underfunded. Some of them have a leak.

What I would do with zero dollars and four hours

Four hours, spread over two weeks, in this order.

Hour one: rewrite one role description. Pick the role you struggle most to fill. Write down what the volunteer will actually do, what they will not be asked to do, who they can call if they need to change something, and whether expenses are covered. Those are NCVO’s essential fields for a volunteer role description and they take about forty minutes. Keep it away from contractual language about required tasks, which creates real legal exposure in both the UK and the US.

Hour two: write the same ask three ways. One version leading on the cause. One leading on what they will learn and get to do. One leading on who else will be there. Post them in three different places rather than posting the same one three times.

Hours three and four: twenty conversations. Named person, named ask, named shift. This is the part everyone skips because it is slower and more uncomfortable than posting, and it is the part with a study behind it.

Nothing on that list requires a budget line. All of it requires somebody to decide that the recruitment problem is theirs to solve rather than the community’s to fix.

The honest limit of all this

None of this helps if you genuinely need forty people next Saturday and you have eight. That is a real situation and no amount of message-matching solves it in a week. When I have been in it, the only thing that has worked is cutting scope until the number you need matches the number you have, and then rebuilding.

Nearly ten thousand people volunteer across the organizations I work with, in around eighty countries, and the international camps in Norway run to more than five thousand participants staffed nearly entirely by volunteers. Not one of those roles was filled by a poster. They were filled by somebody who did it last year telling somebody who hasn’t yet exactly what it is like, and asking them directly. That scales further than it sounds like it should.