Volunteer Retention costs money but it's not as exciting as recruitment so a lot of people don't prioritise it. It's often hard for CEO's and management to understand why it's necessary since Volunteer Retention is often full of things we don't do for employees (but should!).

In this lecture I'll explain why Volunteer Retention is so important and why you need to make it an official part of your Volunteer Program.

In the resources you'll find a document I created several years ago as part of a city-wide study I did into volunteering in the Green sector. I have found the results from this survey useful in all different volunteer settings, I hope you find value in it.

Volunteers are people, with busy lives and stressors outside your organisation. Often for volunteers your organisation is their special place, somewhere they can feel useful or more impactful than their daily lives, but that doesn't mean they don't also need to feel appreciated.

This lecture will explain why saying 'Thank You' is important, but it's not enough by itself to retain your volunteers.

In this lecture I'll identify and talk about the different elements of your Volunteer Retention system. Of course recruiting the right volunteer is a great place to start, but what happens next is just as important.

The longer volunteers stay with your organisation (and we want them to stay for a long time!) the more likely they will change their tasks, roles, take on new tasks or even move around the organisation. Providing flexibility for growth and change will ensure there is always a place for volunteers in your organisation.

To enable your volunteers to feel confident and satisfied in their roles they will need appropriate training. But training also ensures your volunteers understand where they fit into your organisation, what impact they have and what exactly your organisation does and why. This knowledge ensures your volunteers can become the most passionate recruiters and fundraisers for your organisation.

As we discussed in the Understanding Volunteers course, many volunteers look for company, community and alleviation of loneliness when they start volunteering. Although not all volunteers will want to be part of a tight knit team, for most this will be a key factor of their retention.

It's important that your volunteers feel heard. Make sure that you have various ways to collect and track their feedback. Where possible act on their feedback. If relevant be sure to raise points they have made at meetings with leadership and employees, this reminds everyone that you have volunteers, it also ensures volunteers know they have someone advocating for them. All this builds trust and makes volunteers feel more valued.

As well as feeling appreciated your volunteers need to feel heard! You need to have a system to recognise, evaluate and track their ideas and feedback so that it can be taken into account and, wherever possible, implemented.

Volunteers who feel their time is wasted, or their feedback is not appreciated, are less likely to feel satisfied and less likely to stay with your organisation for the long haul.

In this lecture I'll discuss the simple and easy ways you can implement all of the methods of volunteer retention we have discussed so far, as well as giving you some additional ideas to help volunteers feel more appreciated.

While volunteer retention should be a well thought out and organised part of your volunteer program, demonstrating your appreciation should be simple and regular.

In this lecture I'll give you lots of ideas for when and where you can implement your volunteer retention.

You can't keep volunteers forever. While, of course, the point of volunteer retention is to try and keep volunteers engaged and inspired over time, sometimes things go wrong and sometimes life happens.

In this lecture we'll discuss how to prepare for and manage this sometimes very difficult part of your Volunteer Management experience.

Thank you so much for participating in this course on Volunteer Retention. I really hope you found it useful. Feel free to leave any suggestions or comments so I can improve this or future courses.

I hope you can now see why volunteer retention is such an important part of your volunteer program, worth spending time developing and worth investing in.