Growth is welcome news for any nonprofit. But we’d be lying if we said it didn’t come with its fair share of challenges.
Take managing volunteers as a prime example.
As your locations grow, so too will your volunteering network. While that’s a great push for your cause, it’ll no doubt cause additional stress for yourself, your executives, and your volunteer managers.
Managing swathes of volunteers across your locations requires a herculean effort. And, at this scale, paper-based processes and basic Excel spreadsheets simply won’t cut it.
So, what’s the alternative? How can you simplify multi-site volunteer management without exhausting your resources?
Let’s dig into it.
11 best practices for managing volunteers
In this article, we’ll share 11 tips for modernizing your volunteer management, engagement, and coordination efforts.
1. Use one tool for communication and coordination
Forget disparate tools and piecemeal documents. To manage your distributed network of volunteers effectively, you need to condense your operations into one platform.
By operations, we’re referring to your 1:1 communications, documents, policies, processes, projects, training, and so on.
While it may be tempting to look into dedicated volunteer management systems, we’d recommend finding a more encompassing solution. A comprehensive multi-site nonprofit management software streamlines volunteer coordination and management without separating your volunteers from the rest of your network. This not only aligns your teams and strategic projects, but can help you create a more united culture.
2. Create volunteer profiles
It can be easy to lose track of who’s who when your volunteering network grows. That’s why digital user profiles are a must-have resource.
These content-rich profiles store volunteer details, including names, phone numbers, emergency contacts, and any other safety information (such as food allergies or special requirements). That way, you can put a name to every face and ensure your volunteers always feel welcome.
3. Streamline and standardize recruitment and onboarding
Volunteer recruitment and onboarding can be hard work — especially if you handle each registration manually. Fortunately, there are ways to ease the process with standardized processes and training.
We’d recommend:
- Creating universal onboarding checklists
- Assigning dedicated point of contacts for each location
- Automating key recruitment and onboarding processes, such as volunteer registration, with no-code e-forms and workflows
- Building e-learning courses and pathways to train volunteers on values, procedures, and policies
- Distributing helpful knowledge base articles to assist volunteers during their first weeks and months
The more self-service and self-sufficient your processes, the easier it’ll be to onboard new recruits in future. Best of all, it won’t require additional time from your busy volunteer project managers — many of whom operate as a “department of one”.
4. Create an engaging volunteer handbook
Volunteer handbooks — outlining roles, responsibilities, and procedures — are another key onboarding resource.
While you may already have one prepared, we’d advise revising it, updating it, and digitizing it.
Housing your handbook on a nonprofit software will make it easier to distribute, update, and access. This is especially important if your volunteers work in remote locations and only have access to their mobile phone.
5. Bolster volunteer compliance
Distributing handbooks and enrolling your volunteers into step-by-step learning pathways will help to instil compliance.
But these efforts are an exercise in trust. You have no real way of proving acknowledgement and understanding. And, for some nonprofit owners, that might pose some compliance concerns.
For added peace of mind, we’d recommend using a policy management application that:
- Manages the complete policy lifecycle, from drafts to revisions and distribution
- Captures acknowledgement with checkboxes
- Boosts volunteer understanding with an AI-powered Q&A assistant
With the right tool to hand, you can ensure your volunteers work safely and compliantly.
6. Share relevant communications
Volunteer management hinges on communication. But there’s a fine balance between over-communicating and under-communicating — especially when you’re managing a network of hundreds or thousands of volunteers.
You don’t want to bombard your people. Equally, you don’t want them to feel left out.
That’s why we’d recommend sharing company-wide and location-specific news articles, blogs, announcements, and events.
With the right nonprofit software, you can assign granular user permissions, set localization preferences, and deliver completely personalized content experiences. Meaning your volunteers in Texas and your volunteers in Calais receive updates that are relevant to their branch, as well as important organization-wide communications.
TIP: If you’re short on content creation resources, utilize generative AI to speed up the writing process.
7. Measure engagement
Engagement isn’t just important for volunteer management — it’s a crucial part of your nonprofit strategy. Despite this, a third of nonprofit organizations do not include volunteer engagement in their strategy.
This means volunteer managers and their volunteers often have no way of aligning their work with overarching goals. The result of this? Underutilization and missed opportunities.
Beyond incorporating engagement into your nonprofit’s strategy, you’ll need to find ways to monitor and measure volunteer engagement.
Consider distributing quarterly surveys to temperature check morale and highlight problem areas. With the right tool, you can also monitor volunteer behavior via audit logs, content interactions, and course completion rates.
8. Encourage volunteer-volunteer collaboration
Help your volunteers build resilience and confidence with 1:1 messaging, interactive discussion rooms, and task management tools.
These collaborative spaces empower volunteers from different locations to share advice, provide support, and keep on top of project work. All of which can improve your cross-location efforts.
For a more old school approach, you can also organize in-person events for networking and community-building.
9. Provide training opportunities
We’ve already discussed the importance of standardized onboarding training. But why stop there?
So long as your nonprofit software contains a comprehensive, easy-to-use learning management system, you’re free to create as many e-learning experiences as you’d like. That means you can deliver compelling, mobile-accessible development opportunities that engage, upskill, and retain your volunteers.
10. Rewards and recognition
Around 10% of volunteer managers say a lack of respect, support, and buy-in is one of their biggest challenges. In some cases, co-workers are resistant to welcoming volunteers into their teams.
A centralized digital workplace solution can certainly help to bring teams together. But to truly communicate how much you value your volunteers, you’ll need to take things a step further.
Network-wide thank you messages, skills-based badges, and blogs highlighting volunteer accomplishments are a few ways to show your appreciation.
11. Build dashboards for each location
When tracking performance across your multi-site volunteer management efforts, data is everything.
Ideally, you should be able to build location-by-location dashboards, detailing everything you need to know about your volunteering projects. This may include: volunteer registrations, training completions, policy and handbook acceptance rates, upcoming events, and important documents.
These quick overviews enable you to keep tabs on your nonprofit locations and flag any instances of non-compliance.
Revamp your volunteer strategy with Claromentis
Managing a large network of volunteers is hard work. But there are ways to ease the pressure without adding stress to your teams.
Yes, it’ll require rolling up your sleeves and revisiting your strategy. But, the good news is, most of your operations can be streamlined with just one solution.
With a centralized multi-site nonprofit management software like Claromentis, you can:
- Augment your volunteer managers
- Streamline and standardize recruitment and onboarding
- Enhance compliance and policy alignment
- Boost engagement, morale, and retention
- Improve relationships between employees and volunteers
- Monitor performance across every nonprofit location
All of which will strengthen your volunteer program and buy back more time for your busy teams.
It’s volunteer management, made simple.
To find out more about our one-of-a-kind nonprofit management solution — and to learn more about our exclusive charity discounts — book a quick 10-minute discussion call.
We’ve enabled many large nonprofit organizations over the last 25+ years, including Feeding America and SeriousFun Children’s Network. We’d love to see what we could accomplish with you.
