Many fundraisers are strapped for time and resources; we have budgets to meet and timelines to heed. So is it worth taking on the task of “managing” volunteers?

When working at a national health charity I had the opportunity to manage a group of 38 volunteers. These are the activities they were tasked with and the results on our fundraising program.

Thank you calls:

Volunteers thanked donors, over the phone, for their gift, within a week of its receipt.

Result: retention +11%, donations + 7%.

Those with inclinations for research: did foundation prospecting, created a calendar of deadlines complete with application requirements and a recommendation of how much to ask. One even called the foundations to “warm them up” as he put it.

Result: 30% increase in foundation revenue.

The high school students, who in their spare time build a solar powered car, created a year’s worth of newsletters with seasonal themes complete with content.

Result: Guaranteed year-round stewardship.

The volunteer team handled all stewardship mailings. They helped at events. They called donors to ask them to monthly donations.

Result: Cost savings. Increased PAC revenue.

We even had volunteers answering incoming donor calls. Trained volunteers had access to Raiser’s Edge. All donor interactions were recorded on Raiser’s Edge. They sent out membership renewal letters. They called monthly donors whose credit cards were about to expire. They looked at records that had no stewardship action within the past six months and called them or sent them a note card. Penny Burke herself would have been proud.

Are these things you would like to do more of in your organization? Here are some things for you to do before you get started:

• Speak with your administration manager before you have volunteers making long distance calls across Canada.
• Ask about insurance to cover having volunteers in office and at events.
• Have up-to-date workplace, health and safety policies in place. Have volunteers review them and sign that they have read them.
• If volunteers are to handle donor data, give thought to police checks and non-disclosure agreements.

All of these things set the tone to a professional relationship.

To track the impact our volunteers had on the organization, I used a whiteboard to track all activities. It noted how many hours the volunteers worked, the number of Raiser’s Edge actions they had undertaken, and their direct correlation to the increase in donations over last fiscal. I factored in $12/ hour for every volunteer hour worked by them, which came out to be a few hundred thousand dollars’ worth of efforts. The whiteboard was displayed prominently. Everyone in the office knew what the volunteer donor relations team did for us. That’s what made the effort of working with them worth it for me.  

Author

Sourav Addy is Director of Philanthropy at WoodGreen Foundation. A highly creative and results driven non-profit management professional with a decade of experience managing operations and driving revenue generation for national and local non-profit organizations, he is always happy to share his experience and equally privileged to learn from yours. You are welcome to connect with Sourav on linked in: ca.linkedin.com/in/souravaddy or twitter.