In my time at Vome I have worked with thousands of organizations, and almost every leader of volunteers I talk to says the same thing. They need more volunteers. Most of them are in truth getting applications. The applicants are just not making it as far as a first shift.
The pattern looks like this. Someone fills out your form on a Tuesday night. Nothing happens for two weeks. Then an email asking for a police check. They reply. Someone replies with an orientation date that does not work. A few more emails, an attempted phone call, maybe a text. Another form attached to an email they are supposed to print, sign and scan.
By week three they are gone, and not because they changed their mind about helping. They lost the thread somewhere in the middle and nothing came along clear enough to pull them back.
The sector reads this as a recruitment problem. Carleton’s Charity Insights Canada Project found 59 per cent of charities had lost volunteers in recent years, and 57 percent were finding recruitment hard. I believe the first number. I suspect a real share of the second is people who applied and never made it through, which is a different problem with a different fix. This stretch of the volunteer journey gets a fraction of the attention that recruitment does, and from where I sit that is backwards.
Think about what they already did. They volunteered their time just to fill out your form. That was the ask, and they said yes. From there the work should sit with your program, and instead they end up chasing you for the next step.
Here is the part people do not love hearing. Most volunteers want to be spoon-fed from there, and I do not think that is unreasonable. They are volunteering. They have jobs, kids, a commute. If finishing your onboarding means tracking a thread with three staff and remembering what they owe you, many will let it slide and you will not hear from them again.
Most coordinators already know this. The gap is not awareness; it is that no one has given them a way to run the process. When onboarding lives in an inbox, a spreadsheet and somebody’s memory, you cannot see who is stuck, and the person who needed one nudge in week one surfaces in week seven, once they have moved on.
That is a tooling problem more than a people problem, which makes it fixable. Put every requirement in one place the volunteer can log into and see what is left. Give each a due date and let the system remind them before it is late rather than after. On your side the whole group sits on one screen, so you can see who is moving and who needs a call, and most of the back-and-forth stops being necessary.
Then count the days from application to first shift. Most programs have never measured it. Pick a target, watch it a few months, and you will learn whether the process works or is just familiar.
An application is only ever a maybe. What turns it into a volunteer is everything that happens after it, and that part belongs to the program, not to the person who applied.
With this knowledge and experience, we build the tools for exactly this, from guided onboarding sequences and automated reminders to the analytics that keep that number in front of you.
Ron Segev is VP of Partnerships at Vome, a Canadian volunteer management software platform designed to eliminate administrative tasks and elevate the volunteer experience. r.segev@vomevolunteer.com · vomevolunteer.com