Volunteer Engagement in 2025: What the Latest Data Means for Your Program & How to Plan for 2026
- Nonprofit Learning Lab
- 5 hours ago
- 4 min read
By the Nonprofit Learning Lab
Table of Contents
Volunteer interest is rebounding and changing. Below is a quick tour of the most useful 2025 findings and what they mean for volunteer management, volunteer coordination, and corporate partnerships, with reflection prompts you can use in planning.
1) Volunteering Is Rebounding though Not Evenly
After the pandemic dip, formal volunteering jumped from 23.2% (2021) to 28.3% (Sept 2022–Sept 2023), the fastest two-year growth since national tracking began. It’s still below 2019, but the momentum of volunteer engagement is happening.
Why it matters
This is an opportunity to streamline volunteer onboarding, improve role clarity of volunteers, and expand flexible options so volunteer retention remains high for moments when organizations need volunteers to implement programs and services.
Reflection questions
Where are our current bottlenecks in volunteer recruitment and retention at your organization? Think about the volunteer management processes at your organization such as volunteer applications, screening, volunteer scheduling and training.
Which volunteer roles can be offered as micro, episodic, or hybrid commitments to meet new demand?
2) The Dollar Value of Time Keeps Rising
The estimated national value of a volunteer hour reached $34.79 (2024 data; released April 2025), a 3.9% increase year over year. Highlight the value of a volunteer for consistent impact reporting and budgeting.
Why it matters
Boards, funders, and corporate partners increasingly expect quantified outcomes. Standardizing this metric of the dollar value of a volunteer strengthens your case.
Reflection questions
Is our volunteer program consistently logging hours across programs?
Where can we connect hours to outcomes (clients served, materials produced, events supported)?
3) Corporate Volunteering: Bigger, More Structured, and Skills-Based
In 2025, many companies have brought back employee volunteering into strategic, structured efforts with measurable impact. Corporate volunteer participation continues to rise: a recent survey found that 77 % of companies reported increased workplace volunteerism in 2024, representing a substantial year-over-year jump.
Why it matters
A well-organized corporate volunteer program can bring high-leverage opportunities for nonprofits: corporate volunteers bring professional skills, recurring volunteer engagement, and measurable resource investments. When your volunteer program management can support corporate volunteer programs, the return on investment can be significant. Volunteers through corporate volunteer programs can become more engaged in your organization serving as long time volunteers, committee members, fundraising volunteers, donors or board members.
Reflection questions
Do we have “off-the-shelf” volunteer team projects and a pipeline of skills-based roles that corporate partners can plug into easily?
Are our orientation, risk-management, tracking and reporting practices robust enough to meet the expectations of corporate partners?
4) What Employees Want from Purpose Programs
Workplace volunteering is evolving: more skills-based, more flexible, and increasingly tied to business value and employee connection (including virtual/hybrid options rebounding from 48% to 57%).
Why it matters
If your organization can design roles that use professional strengths, provide visible outcomes, and fit hybrid schedules then you your volunteer engagement has the potential to rise.
Reflection questions
Which of our roles could shift from task-based to skills-based?
How will we capture and share the business-relevant outcomes employees care about (leadership, collaboration, problem-solving)?
5) Local Story: States Leading the Comeback
Colorado outperformed the national rate, with 34.7% of residents volunteering formally (vs. U.S. 28.3%) between Sept 2022 – Sept 2023.
Why it matters
Tailor recruitment messaging to your state’s culture of service and use marketing that is hyper local. In high-participation states, scale capacity; in lower ones, remove barriers for people to volunteer and emphasize flexible entry points.
Reflection questions
What state, city or county benchmarks can we use to localize appeals?
Do our recruitment messages speak to community pride and local impact?
Conclusion
The 2025 data makes one thing clear: volunteer engagement is gaining momentum, but it requires intentional planning to harness it. As interest rebounds, volunteer expectations shift and corporate partnerships expand. Nonprofits that invest in clear systems, flexible roles, and skills-based opportunities will be best positioned for growth in 2026. Use these findings and reflection prompts to refine your processes, strengthen your storytelling, and build a volunteer program that is responsive, resilient, and ready for 2026.
More Volunteer Resources
Recruiting, training and managing volunteers takes planning and strategy. The past few years have changed the way that individuals give their time, and it is important that nonprofits adapt to best practices for recruitment, retention, training and building a leadership pipeline of volunteers. How do you recruit volunteers? How do you eliminate the challenges that have hampered your volunteer programs? In this workshop, we will dive into strategies to mitigate challenges in dealing with volunteers. The content is applicable to one time volunteers, recurring volunteers, leadership committees, chapter based organizations, affinity groups, alumni groups and more.
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