Most volunteer role descriptions are missing two fields

A role description that reads “help out at the Saturday market stall, friendly team, all welcome” is an advertisement. It tells someone what the afternoon will feel like and nothing about what they will be responsible for. Which means that the first time a customer asks for a refund, or a child wanders off, or two volunteers disagree about who is closing up, there is no line anyone can point at.

Most programs have a folder full of these. They were written quickly, usually by the person who was already doing the job, and they get copied forward for years because rewriting them never reaches the top of anyone’s week.

I think this one document carries more weight than its length suggests. Here is the argument, and then the actual contents.

Why the document earns an hour of your time

The strongest reason to care about role design is a comparison buried in an analysis of US national volunteering data published in the Stanford Social Innovation Review in 2009, by Eisner, Grimm, Maynard and Washburn. Volunteers doing what the study classified as general labor returned the next year 53 percent of the time. Volunteers doing professional or management-level work returned 74 percent of the time.

That is 2006 and 2007 data, and I say so every time I use it, because it gets quoted as though it were current. It is not, and nothing at that scale has replaced it. It is also a difference between groups rather than a controlled experiment, so read it as a strong signal rather than a law. I have written elsewhere about what the role you give someone does to retention.

The role description is where a task becomes a role or fails to. Nobody sits down and decides to build a program out of disposable jobs. It happens one hurried paragraph at a time.

The fields that need to be in it

NCVO publishes the most usable short list I know of, and I would not add much to it:

• Role title. A real one. “Saturday stall lead” beats “volunteer.”
• Aims and expectations. What this role is for, and what a good version of it looks like.
• Tasks and responsibilities. An outline, not an exhaustive schedule.
• Role boundaries. What the volunteer should not do.
• Policies that apply. Safeguarding, data protection, health and safety, whichever are real.
• A contact point for discussing modifications to the role. A named person.
• Expenses. What is reimbursed, how to claim, how long it takes.
• How the role will be measured. What you will look at when you review it.

Six of those eight get written most of the time. The two in the middle, role boundaries and the contact point for changing the role, are the ones that go missing, and they are the two I would fight for.

What the volunteer should not do

Boundaries feel negative to write. There is a worry that listing what someone cannot do sounds like distrust before they have even started.

In practice the opposite happens. A volunteer with no stated boundary has to guess where the edge is every single time, and most people manage that anxiety by doing less than they could, or by asking permission for things nobody needed to approve. The person who knows they can issue a refund up to twenty dollars but must call the coordinator above that will act faster and more confidently than the person who was told to “use your judgment.”

Boundaries also protect the volunteer. On a youth program, “you do not drive young people in your own car” and “you do not message participants on your personal account” are not insults. They are the two lines that stop a well-meaning person from ending up in a situation they cannot explain afterward. Anyone running roles that involve minors should be reading these alongside a proportionate screening process, which is a different problem than most people think.

The test I use: could a new volunteer, reading this alone on their phone the night before their first shift, tell me one thing they are expected to escalate rather than handle? If not, the boundaries section is decoration.

The named contact for changing the role

This is the field almost nobody writes, and it is the one that quietly determines whether you keep people.

A volunteer’s life changes. The Tuesday shift stops working because of a new job. The physical part of the role gets harder. The two-hour commitment turns out to be four hours in practice and they are too polite to say so. NCVO’s guidance says the role description should name a contact point for discussing modifications to the role, and I would go further: name a person, put their first name and their actual phone number or email on the document, and say in one sentence that asking to change the role is a normal thing to do rather than a failure.

Without that line, the volunteer’s only two visible options are to keep doing something that no longer fits, or to stop. NCVO’s Time Well Spent 2023, based on YouGov fieldwork with 7,006 UK adults, found the largest named reason people stopped volunteering was having less time because their circumstances had changed, at 37 percent. Some of that is unavoidable. Some of it is a role that could have been reshaped by somebody who was never asked.

The wording is a legal question, not only a clarity question

Here is the warning NCVO puts in bold and most programs read past. A volunteer role description is not a job description, and it must avoid language that implies a contract to perform specific tasks.

In the UK, wording that looks contractual can inadvertently create employment rights, with everything that follows from that. In the United States the analogous exposure is worker classification: an unpaid person performing work under obligations that look like employment, particularly for an entity that is not a nonprofit, is where classification disputes start. I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice, but the drafting habit is simple enough that there is no excuse for getting it wrong.

Words to keep out: contract, employment, must, required to, obliged, duties, terms, salary, appraisal, disciplinary. Words that do the same job safely: hope, expect, usually, we ask, we would like, review, conversation. “The stall lead is required to arrive at 8am and remains on duty until close” becomes “we normally open at 8am and hope the stall lead can be there for setup.” You have lost no clarity. You have removed the shape of an employment obligation.

A weak one, rewritten

Generic example. A community food pantry running two shifts a week.

Before:

Volunteer needed. We are looking for friendly volunteers to help out at our food pantry. Duties include sorting donations, serving clients, and other tasks as required. Volunteers must be reliable and are required to commit to a minimum of six months. Report to the pantry manager.

Everything wrong with that is in the last two sentences. “Duties,” “required,” “must,” “minimum commitment,” and a reporting line. It reads like an employment contract written by somebody who has never seen one, and it still does not say what the person will actually be doing.

After:

Role title: Wednesday evening intake volunteer

What it’s for: Wednesday is our busiest evening. This role is the first person a family meets when they come through the door, and it decides whether the next twenty minutes feel dignified or not.

What you’d be doing: Welcoming people at the desk, checking them against the appointment list, walking them through to the shelves, and answering questions about what is available that week.

What you wouldn’t be doing: You are not assessing anyone’s eligibility, and you never turn someone away. If somebody is not on the list, or is in distress, or asks about anything to do with money or housing, that goes to the shift coordinator. Do not give out other people’s information, including whether someone else is a client here.

Time: Wednesdays, roughly 4:45 to 7:30pm. Most people do two a month.

Policies you’d need to read: Safeguarding and data protection. About twenty minutes, and we go through them with you.

If you need to change anything about this role, talk to Dana on 555-0147 or at the address below. People change shifts, drop to one a month, or swap to a different role all the time, and it is a much better outcome for us than losing you.

Expenses: Bus fare and parking are reimbursed. Claim on the sheet by the kettle, paid within two weeks.

How we’ll know it’s working: We ask intake volunteers after six weeks whether the handover from desk to shelves is clear, and we look at whether Wednesday runs to time.

Roughly twice the length, and it took maybe twenty-five minutes. The version on the left will be filled by anybody. The version on the right will be filled by somebody who understands they are being trusted with the front door, and that person is much harder to replace, which is the entire point.

What to do with it after it is written

Two things, both cheap.

Give it a date and review it once a year, alongside your screening decisions for that role. Roles drift. The intake volunteer who is now also managing the appointment spreadsheet is doing a different job than the one on paper, and nobody notices until they leave and the handover falls apart.

Then use it as the reference point in any hard conversation. A written boundary and a named contact are what make it possible to say “this isn’t working” without it becoming personal, and they are why asking someone to step down is survivable when it has to happen.

A good role description will not fix a program where nobody has time to supervise anybody. It will not rescue a role that has no consequence attached to it. What it does is stop the slow version of failure, where a capable person spends nine months doing something adjacent to what you needed, and neither of you ever says so.