Communicating with volunteers without becoming noise

Only 55 percent of organizations reimburse volunteer expenses. Sixteen percent of volunteers did not know whether their own organization had a policy on it. And 20 percent of young people named expenses as a barrier to volunteering at all.

Those three numbers come from NCVO’s Time Well Spent 2023, based on YouGov fieldwork with 7,006 UK adults in late 2022, and together they describe something more specific than a funding problem. The middle number is the one to sit with. Sixteen percent of people who are currently giving their time to an organization cannot tell you whether that organization will refund their bus fare.

Somebody wrote that policy. It exists in a document. It was almost certainly mentioned at an induction. And a sixth of the people it applies to are guessing, which means a share of them are quietly paying for the privilege of volunteering and a share of them stopped coming because they could not afford to keep guessing.

That is the whole subject of this article. Not whether you communicate. Whether the specific thing a person needs in order to act ever reaches them in a form they can use.

The finding that should make you nervous about sending more

Hager and Brudney’s 2004 study for the Urban Institute is the largest look anyone has taken at which volunteer management practices go with retention. Four practices came out positively associated: recognition activities, training and professional development, screening and matching people to tasks, and recruitment of volunteers by other volunteers.

Supervision and communication came out negatively associated.

I want to be careful here, because that sentence gets misquoted. This is correlational survey data from 2004. It does not show that communicating with volunteers causes them to leave. The most obvious alternative reading is the reverse: programs with a churn problem respond by adding supervision and communication, so the two travel together without one causing the other. Any program that has just lost half its Saturday crew will tell you the first thing they did was schedule more check-ins.

The authors offer a second reading that I find harder to dismiss. Heavy structured oversight makes volunteering resemble the paid workplace, and volunteering is not the paid workplace. NCVO found 26 percent of volunteers saying their volunteering felt too much like paid work, up from 19 percent, and 24 percent reporting unreasonable expectations of them, up from 17 percent. Nichols, writing in Voluntas in 2013, argues that a volunteer’s unwritten contract carries an expectation of relative freedom, and that this is exactly the expectation formal management practice tends to erode.

So the question is not how much you send. It is whether what you send reads as an organization helping people do a thing they chose to do, or as an organization managing staff who did not apply for the job.

A borrowed structure, and I am labeling it as borrowed

The most useful way I have found to sort volunteer communication comes from Herzberg’s two-factor theory, published by Herzberg, Mausner and Snyderman in 1959 and developed from research on paid employees.

It splits the things that affect people at work into two groups. Motivators are achievement, recognition, the work itself, responsibility, advancement and growth. Hygiene factors are policy and administration, supervision, working conditions, relationships, status, security and pay. The claim is that hygiene factors do not make people satisfied when present. They make people dissatisfied when absent.

I need to say this plainly, because plenty of volunteer management writing does not: there is no well-regarded empirical study applying Herzberg’s theory to volunteers. None. What you are getting here is a sorting device lifted from research on paid work, and it may not hold in a setting where nobody is paid. Use it because it is useful for organizing your own sending decisions, not because it has been tested on your people.

With that caveat in place, it does explain the expenses finding neatly. Nobody has ever volunteered anywhere because the mileage policy was clear. Plenty of people have stopped because it was not, and because asking felt like begging. Clear expenses information buys you no goodwill and its absence costs you volunteers, which is what a hygiene factor looks like.

The practical implication: hygiene information should be boring, findable and repeated, and it should never be bundled with the interesting material. When you put the parking arrangements in paragraph four of an inspiring update about the new outreach program, you have made the parking arrangements unfindable.

What belongs in a shift reminder

Six things, and nothing else:

When. Date, start time, and the time it ends. The end time is the one people leave out and the one that determines whether someone can say yes.

Where, precisely. Not the building. The door. “Side entrance on Miller Street, the green one” beats a postal address every time.

Who will be there. A name and a phone number of a specific person who will physically be present. Not the office line.

What to bring or wear. Including the negative case: nothing needed, wear anything.

What you will be doing. One sentence. People rehearse this in their heads on the way.

How to cancel. Make it easy and say it plainly. A volunteer who cannot find a graceful way to say no will often just not turn up, and then feel too awkward to come back at all.

If your reminder contains a fundraising appeal, an announcement about the new website, or gratitude for a different event, it is not a shift reminder any more. It is a newsletter with an appointment hidden in it.

What deserves its own message, and what should never be a group message

Its own message: anything that changes what a person is expected to do. A change of location or time. A new safeguarding requirement. A role handover. A policy that affects money, including expenses. If it requires an action from the reader, it travels alone.

Never a group message: anything about one person’s performance. Anything correcting a mistake that a specific identifiable person made. Anything that reads as a reprimand to a room in order to avoid one conversation with an individual.

That last pattern is the most damaging thing I see in volunteer programs, and it is always well-intentioned. Somebody left the fridge open, so an all-volunteer email goes out reminding everyone about the fridge. The person responsible knows it is about them and feels publicly told off. Everyone else learns that this channel carries low-grade blame and starts skimming it. You have spent the credibility of a communication channel to avoid ninety seconds of discomfort.

A related case: never announce someone’s departure, promotion or reduced hours in a group message before you have told the people it affects directly. In a volunteer program the affected people are usually the ones on their shift, and they will hear it from each other first regardless. Get there before the group chat does.

Telling people things is not the same as giving them what they need to act

This is the distinction the expenses finding is really about.

An organization that has emailed its expenses policy to everyone has told people the thing. An organization where a volunteer standing in a train station at 7am with a receipt in her hand knows what to do with it has given her what she needs to act. Those are different achievements and only the second one shows up in retention.

The test I use is simple. Take any message you are about to send and ask what the reader is supposed to do differently having read it. If the honest answer is nothing, the message is there for you, not for them. Send it anyway if you like, but count it against your budget of attention, because that budget is finite and you are also going to need it on the day the venue changes.

The other half of this is the standing answer. In practice the most reliable communication mechanism in a volunteer program is not a channel at all, it is one named person somebody can ask, consistently, without feeling like a nuisance. Written material is how you reduce the number of questions. A person is how you handle the questions that survive.

What I do about languages, which turns out to be a general lesson

The productions I have worked on go out to around eighty countries in more than twenty languages, and that forces a discipline I would recommend to any program that only operates in one.

If a sentence has to survive translation into twenty languages and still produce the same action in every country, you find out very quickly which sentences were doing real work. “Please make every effort to arrive in good time” does not survive. “Be at the side door by 6:15” does. The first is a mood. The second is an instruction, and anyone can carry it out without deciding what you meant.

You do not need translation to apply that test. Read your next volunteer email and mark every sentence that would change what someone does tomorrow. Then look at what is left over and ask whether it earned the space it took, in a message that a volunteer is reading on a phone, standing up, between two other things.

Most programs find that their communication problem was never volume. It was that the acting information and the atmosphere were mixed together in the same paragraph, and people learned to skim both. The volunteers who are quietly drifting away without giving a reason are often the ones who stopped being able to find the practical detail.