Recognizing and Rewarding Your Volunteers
Volunteer recognition is an important piece of developing and maintaining relationships with your volunteers. When you view recognition as just one tool in your overall strategy of volunteer stewardship, you are able to integrate recognition tools more consistently. Volunteers who have a more consistent experience of feeling recognized tend to have a more favourable view of the organization, and are inclined to volunteer longer term.
Here are a few reward-focused tools for volunteer recognition:
- Personalized Thank-You Emails
This zero-cost method of appreciation does take time (and time is money), but is one of the easiest tools you can integrate into your routine. If you don't directly relate with the volunteer on a regular basis, connect with their supervisor and find out the specifics of how they are doing their job. These little details are extremely meaningful - a "thank you" is good, but a "thank you for taking the empty shift on Wednesday last week," will resonate more deeply.
While many of us are chronically busy, scheduling some time to periodically send personalized thank you emails is a way to help keep your mind connected to specific volunteer contributions, and demonstrates to the volunteer that their contributions are more deeply appreciated. Some organizations have a tremendous number of volunteers. Every little bit helps with volunteers seeing how their work is appreciated, or supports the overall purpose and mission of your organization.
Additionally, you can also send out emails to celebrate certain easy to track volunteer milestones, such as their 6 month anniversary, or when they've completed a certain number of hours or shifts.
- Create A Volunteer Yearbook
Collecting photos from various volunteer shifts, projects, celebrations or other events helps make clear the story of volunteer impact, even for those not featured. This is a great way to highlight special moments, connections, or even just the way volunteers support the backbone of operations for many organizations. Making these supports visible, even with a low-cost tactic like an online yearbook, is both a concrete and feel-good way to showcase volunteerism and the connections volunteers make with others. Yearbooks can also help serve a purpose in terms of recruitment or engagement with your organization. Just make sure you have your volunteers permission, ideally using signed waivers, if you ever choose to share pictures of them publicly.
Yearbooks give volunteers something tangible to reflect on their experience at your nonprofit and the difference they made, and can be a powerful incentive to continue or return to volunteering.
- Implement A Kudos System
A kudos is when someone is being acknowledged for doing an excellent job. Many of us offer kudos to volunteers on a limited basis whenever it occurs to us, or when we notice something above and beyond. But you can reach more volunteers if you develop a basic kudos system that allows peer-to-peer kudos between the volunteers themselves, not just from staff at your organization.
Allowing volunteers to give kudos to each other adds another layer to kudos - helping you see ways that volunteers may be doing a good job that you've missed, and building team spirit among the volunteers. If everyone has the opportunity to give kudos, you will have more of it for more people, which helps to foster a culture of gratitude and recognition that will last and grow. Kudos systems can be very simple: an appreciation board in your office, e-cards, sticky notes, special mentions in regular volunteer newsletters, and so forth. These tools can help more people feel like not only is their work as volunteers recognized, but deeply appreciated by everyone around them.
- Throw A Pizza Party!
There's nothing quite like throwing a party with free food to bring people together and have a good time. When you know a cohort of volunteers will be leaving (e.g., at the end of summer or school semester), throw a pizza party! People will love chowing down on classic comfort food and having the chance to see each other one last time before heading separate ways. In some cases, volunteers have started developing friendships or connections during their volunteering, and a pizza party (or similar social gathering) can be a good way to give the volunteers a chance to exchange contact information if they want to stay in touch or volunteer together in the future. At the very least, it creates a special memory of volunteering with your organization that can last and help draw volunteers to return, or promote volunteering for your organization to others.
And they don't just have to be good-bye parties! You can also throw pizza parties to appreciate longstanding volunteers, welcome new volunteers or celebrate the completion of a major project.
- Host An Awards Banquet
If you have the resources, host an awards banquet, luncheon or similar event to show your appreciation. Follow the same premise of a pizza party, except with a more formal approach and scale. You can host something like this in a relatively simple way, all along the spectrum up to including catering, dressing up, etc. Invite volunteers, their family, staff members and maybe even your clients to attend the meal and award presentation ceremony. The atmosphere in the room will buzz with anticipation and support, leading to better interpersonal connections and an improved sense of recognition. This can also easily be integrated as a portion of a general volunteer appreciation event, which in many organizations is held annually.
Some examples of awards you can offer include, "Most Inspirational," "Most Enthusiastic," or "Never Missed a Shift." Take your time planning what kind of awards to offer so that it matches the culture of your organization, and offers the maximum potential to give awards to a broad spectrum of volunteers. Give away group awards as well, as this will help encourage team bonding and recognize those who work well together, including those who might not get an award on their own.
- Provide Business Discounts
Some organizations will offer business discounts to other businesses and organizations (especially in their local neighbourhood). This can be as simple as the coffee shop down the street, where you know that many volunteers and staff stop to pick up coffee before their shifts. Depending on the types of services you provide, this could be a nice little surprise perk to your volunteers if they are available to receive business discounts just for volunteering. We recommend you survey your volunteers to see if this would be meaningful to them before setting up a complex discount program, but if it's just one or two local businesses, it could potentially be a nice surprise for volunteers.
- Draw For Better Parking
This won't be relevant for all organizations or situations, but in some cases having a recurring draw for a volunteer to get a more convenient parking spot can be a good tool to generate excitement (especially if you have a smaller parking lot). Additionally, if you have volunteers who regularly are loading or transporting heavier items, you may want to set aside some more convenient parking for volunteers in certain roles to help make their work easier. If you do a draw for better parking you can decide if everyone will qualify, or you may draw from people who's supervisors have given feedback about the volunteer either benefiting from better parking, or have performed especially well and would appreciate it (obviously it won't matter if your volunteer doesn't drive to your organization!).
Final Thoughts
Volunteers are essential to get nonprofits off the ground and reach their goals. They believe in your purpose and join your organization to do what they can to help you achieve your mission.
Unfortunately, volunteer retention is a key challenge for many organizations. To help retain exceptional volunteers while attracting new ones, try implementing some of these recognition systems. You'll be able to share your appreciation for your volunteers more easily, so they feel your organization notices and values their contributions. It is often more successful to have a few different volunteer recognition or rewards systems in place, as not everyone will be motivated by the same things.
Sometimes all a person needs to reignite their passion for their role and stick around longer is a simple thank you. These strategies are a great starting point to help foster an overall culture of gratitude, where volunteering is built into the foundation of your organization. A quality and consistent recognition system helps enhance volunteer engagement and retention in the long term, and also can help foster a more positive culture for volunteering overall at your organization!
Read the inspiration for this article here:
Mathews, K. (2018, August 28). 7 Reward Systems For Recognizing Your Volunteers. Retrieved from VolunteerMatch Blog: https://blogs.volunteermatch.org/7-reward-systems-for-recognizing-your-volunteers
