According to the Volunteering in America report released today by the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS), last year, 60.8 million Americans or 26.2 percent of the adult population gave 8.1. billion hours of volunteer service worth $157 billion.
These numbers are astounding, clearly we leave in a country where volunteering is a way of life for many people. But, this report also highlighted a problem plaguing volunteerism - it is a leaky bucket. In 2007, 21.5 million new volunteers served with organizations across the country. However, more than one out of every three volunteers (about 22 million) who served in 2006 did not volunteer in 2007. (Volunteering In America)
It's clear that the causes most important to our communities would be better addressed if the length of a volunteer's life-span increased. So, why do people stop volunteering?
The Volunteering in America Report found that people cited the following reasons for leaving volunteering:
- Volunteer opportunities aren’t challenging or meaningful enough.
- Volunteer management is inadequate. Most nonprofits don’t have volunteer managers or follow best practices. Volunteers aren’t free; it takes an investment and infrastructure to get the most out of volunteers.
- Volunteering is too rigid and needs to be more flexible to meet the demands of today’s volunteers. New models need to be weekends, nights, virtual, family, employee-supported, and voluntourism.
2 comments:
Have a look also at the Global Volunteer Management Survey which has some interesting things to say about those who manage volunteers and the resources volunteer involving entities put into volunteer management: http://www.pfts.com.au/
Retention is defined as an issue because the conceptualization of volunteering is as an ongoing activity. But everything we know about trends in volunteering these days is that it's becoming a short-term (episodic) activity. So, that the data reveals volunteers moving into and out of volunteering should have been perfectly predictable.
The problem might not be retention. The problem is, I think, our expectation that volunteers will stay. Isn't it long past time we gave up on the notion that volunteers are long term workers? ... the world HAS changed and we need to change our thinking. The management implications that follow include: rethinking what we want volunteers to do, redeveloping more short term positions with high-output. high value potential. Then stop measuring value, contributions and success by numbers of hours of service and start paying attention to what volunteers actually accomplish. I think in many situations, carefully placed high-skills volunteers are able to accomplish quite a lot more in a short time than many long term volunteers placed in low-level, routine positions.
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