🤝 Managing Volunteers Effectively with Project Management Tools
- Nonprofit Learning Lab
- Jul 9
- 3 min read
This is a guest blog by Monday.com
Volunteers symbolize everything great about nonprofits. Their passion for the cause is often what keeps an organization afloat. And while the bills wouldn't get paid without donors, volunteers are giving you something even more precious than their hard-earned cash - their time. There are an infinite number of ways to make money in this world, but outside of science fiction, no one's ever figured out how to earn more time! This makes it imperative to manage your volunteers in as compassionate and efficient a way as possible. We may not provide them a salary but at least we owe them this.
But managing volunteers can be an exhausting prospect. It's not uncommon for an organization of a dozen staff to work with hundreds of volunteers and with these kinds of ratios you can quickly see where the challenge lies. For all their goodwill, volunteers still need to be interviewed, approved, trained, assigned work, and assessed. Anyone who is recruiting and onboarding volunteers regularly will know that this part of the process can be especially time-consuming, especially when the approval rate isn't as high as you'd like it to be. This is why getting more out of the volunteers you've got is so important - it's always going to be easier to work with someone already in the system who understands your way of doing things than training new volunteers each time you launch a new initiative. This doesn't mean you should be working your volunteers to the bone and bleeding their goodwill dry. Rather, it highlights the need to keep a good relationship with them and to really understand what motivates them.
It's impossible to manage all of this without a good software tool behind you and good volunteer management software can cost as much as the salary of the staff member they're replacing. This is where monday.com and our dedicated volunteer management solution come in.
Firstly, the price is unbeatable. The Nonprofit Program allows 10 people to use the full platform entirely for free, with a 70% discount off extra seats. Maybe even better is that it also allows for an unlimited number of free guests - perfect for your volunteers. Guests can't create new projects of their own, but can do everything any other user can do on the specific boards you invite them to. There are also two volunteer management templates; a simple registration tool and a more comprehensive management solution, both offered for free and both easily customized to fit your needs. You can create your account and apply to join our Nonprofit Program here.
Secondly, the platform has all your volunteer management needs covered in one place. For example, the Nonprofit Program comes with unlimited use of WorkForms, where you can build custom registration forms for your volunteers to submit general expressions of interest, sign up for specific work, or give their feedback. You can also create open, public views of specific boards, so if you prefer not to have your volunteers in the system, whether as full users or just as guests, they can instead see upcoming events or their schedule with a simple URL. You can also manage the work they will be doing from monday.com, eliminating the need for yet another platform. Best of all, everything mentioned also integrates with dashboards so that generating reports is a breeze.
Data empowers you when working with volunteers. Not only does it give clarity into where your volunteers are in the training process or where in your city they live, but it allows you to grasp difficult-to-understand notions like what motivates your volunteers or how fulfilled they are feeling. These are the real game changers that totally revolutionize how it feels to work with volunteers!