Here's a number that may change the way you think about your nonprofit volunteers: $1374. That is the average dollar value of the time a volunteer donates to a nonprofit in Texas annually. If you are curious, the value of a volunteer in Texas is $26.43 an hour and volunteers average 52 hours of service a year.
Now go to your development staff and ask how much effort they would put into attracting and stewarding a thousand dollar donor. Why aren't you putting that level of effort into your volunteers?
Experts agree that volunteers join and leave nonprofits based on the overall volunteer experience they receive. Too often we treat our communications with volunteers like a monologue; we talk about our mission and then tell them the tasks we want them to accomplish. But recruiting and retaining volunteers needs to be about building relationships and you do that through real two-way conversation.
To help with that conversation, we've created a special report on best practices for volunteer communications.
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