In honor of National Volunteer Month, Independent Sector released the updated hourly financial value of volunteer service. The national wage replacement rate is now $33.49 per hour. It offers one way to make volunteer contributions more visible, a recommendation in line with recent research from the Initiative for Strategic Volunteer Engagement (ISVE). This rate is most powerful, though, when combined with other data to tell a more compelling story about volunteer accomplishments.
Volunteers can help nonprofits meet many of their most pressing challenges. They:
- are a valuable form of labor that supplements and complements paid staff;
- donate more than non-volunteers and often to the agencies where they serve;
- are especially effective ambassadors and “evangelists” for agencies’ missions and causes; and
- signal trust and goodwill in agencies.
Indeed, TCC Group, a social impact consulting firm, found that nonprofits that engage volunteers—and do so well—are more adaptable, sustainable, and capable of going to scale.
Just having volunteers is not enough to produce positive results, though: volunteers need to be engaged well. Like anything that advances a nonprofit’s mission, engaging volunteers takes time, expertise, planning, and funding. In short, it demands strategy. Too often, volunteer engagement falls short in these areas. It leaves the immense potential of people who want to contribute their time and talent untapped at a time when many agencies are experiencing an increase in service demand. If nonprofit leaders are going to fully embrace the renewable resource of human energy, they need quality data to support that work.
Strengths and Limitations of Volunteer Data
In the quest to make volunteer efforts more visible, many nonprofit leaders turn to quantitative statistics like volunteer numbers, hours, and financial value. These figures are useful for a variety of reasons that include the following:
- Volunteer numbers reflect the scope of community involvement and provide insight into how many people were introduced to or engaged in the mission.
- Volunteer hours show how much people power is needed for programs.
- Translating volunteer time into a dollar value means it can be included in financial statements and as an in-kind match.
However, many nonprofit leaders struggle to make a case for investing in volunteer engagement with these figures alone. That may be because these traditional statistics have limitations, too. For example, they:
- exclude the results of volunteer time;
- prioritize quantity and overlook quality of volunteer efforts;
- treat volunteers as an end rather than as a means and an end; and
- reduce diverse volunteer roles and outcomes to one general rate.
In short, if nonprofit leaders start and end with volunteer numbers and financial data, it may be difficult to justify volunteer investments internally and externally. These data can, however, be one component of a more well-rounded volunteer story.
Encouraging Investment in Strategic Volunteer Engagement
ISVE commissioned two studies in 2022, which both found that many funders are not investing in volunteer engagement, but are open to the idea. Several of the grantmaker participants offered recommendations about context that could make traditional volunteer numbers more meaningful. They include:
- Discuss what volunteer numbers and dollars mean to the agency. To what extent do volunteers help the agency meet its mission and serve the community?
- Share what happens because of volunteer time and talent. How do volunteer contributions influence the outputs and outcomes of the agency?
- Point out how volunteers are a source of leverage that help the agency achieve more than it could without them.
- Identify the diverse ways that volunteers are involved in the agency’s work and how they invite others to join as well through donations, service, and/or outreach.
Volunteers and their strategic engagement are often an undervalued resource in the philanthropic ecosystem. National Volunteer Month is the perfect time to amplify the multidimensional contributions that volunteers make — and ensure the data we select to tell their story make those contributions crystal clear.
About the Initiative for Strategic Volunteer Engagement
The Initiative for Strategic Volunteer Engagement is a joint effort of funders and nonprofits to transform the future of volunteerism. Through practical and research-informed tools and resources, the Initiative for Strategic Volunteer Engagement inspires nonprofits to intentionally engage their volunteer networks and funders to further invest in strategic volunteer engagement.
