Improving Volunteer Recruitment with Data: 6 KPIs to Look At
- Nonprofit Learning Lab
- Apr 25
- 6 min read
This is a guest blog.
To build a thriving volunteer program, you first need to find volunteers! However, this first step can already present challenges, with 62% of nonprofits stating that volunteer recruitment is “a big problem.”
If your nonprofit struggles to recruit volunteers, start by looking at your data. With a data-driven approach, you can understand what parts of your volunteer recruitment process are working, what needs to be adjusted, and what opportunities you can tap into.
To help you make sense of your data, we’ll explain six common key performance indicators (KPIs) and how they might impact your volunteer recruitment process.
1. Retention rate
Before bringing in new volunteers, assess if you have a leaking boat situation. Essentially, determine if you’re facing recruitment problems because you have high volunteer turnover.
How to calculate it
You can find your retention rate by selecting a given period of time and dividing the number of volunteers you have at the end of that period by the number you had at the beginning. For instance, if you had 150 volunteers in January of 2024 and ended 2024 with 90, you would have a retention rate of 60%.
Why it matters
If you retain a majority of your volunteers, you won’t need to rely as heavily on recruiting new ones to replace them. Additionally, organizations that build up a loyal base have an easier time managing those volunteers. This is because retained volunteers tend to be reliable, knowledgeable about the nonprofits they volunteer with, and willing to help with recruitment efforts themselves.
Poor retention occurs for a number of reasons, and the best way to discover why it may be happening at your nonprofit is to survey your current and recently lapsed volunteers. This will help you understand what part of your volunteer experience may be lacking and how to improve it.
2. Outreach engagement rate
To improve your recruitment process, you need to know how prospective volunteers interact with your outreach materials and job postings.
How to calculate it
“Engagement” is a general term that refers to the number of people who interact with your content and how they interact with it. Engagement can be measured in several different ways. You can take a granular look at your marketing engagement by tracking:
Impressions are the number of people your content is shown to, regardless of whether they interact with it. For example, if you pay Facebook to show an ad for your volunteer program to 1,000 users, you would have 1,000 impressions.
Click-through rate (CTR) measures how many click on a link in an ad, email, social media post, or piece of content. Compare your CTR to your total impressions to assess if your outreach materials are resonating with your audience.
Interactions include likes, comments, shares, and whatever other types of engagement the platform allows. High interactions indicate a high level of audience interest and might even point you toward specific volunteer leads.
For email and text messages, your marketing software should record these metrics for you. For social media marketing, each platform should provide at least some data about your posts’ performance.
Why it matters
Engagement tells you whether your recruitment messages are reaching your intended audience and if your audience is reacting positively. Low engagement indicates a need to rethink your outreach strategy, while high engagement but low conversion means reworking your marketing content.
3. Conversion rate
Conversion rate measures the number of individuals who engage with your recruitment content and actually sign up to volunteer.
How to calculate it
For any given outreach material, divide the number of impressions by the number of volunteer sign-ups that can be attributed to that piece of content. Tracking codes and analytics tools improve your ability to connect sign-ups to individual ads.
However, be aware that raw numbers may not tell the whole story of what caused a volunteer to sign up. For instance, they might have seen multiple pieces of content from your nonprofit that eventually pushed them to volunteer, rather than any one individual ad changing their mind.
Why it matters
Conversion rate tells you whether your recruitment outreach materials drive volunteer sign-ups. As such, it is one of your most important metrics.
If you have a lot of impressions or engagement but low conversions, that can indicate a few potential problems:
You aren’t reaching the right audience. You might create a recruitment post on a social media platform with high shareability, like TikTok. However, while the content gets seen by a lot of people, metrics might indicate that they live in the wrong geographic location, are too young to volunteer, or have values that differ from your organization’s.
Your ads are giving potential supporters the wrong impression. If your outreach material drives traffic to your website, but visitors quickly click off your volunteer information page, there’s a chance your recruitment posts or program might be misaligned.
Your volunteer sign-up process is turning potential supporters away. Use your web analytics tools to monitor how visitors engage with your website, particularly your volunteer registration form. If you have strong impressions and traffic but high levels of form abandonment, then chances are it’s your website that needs improvement.
As these tips show, KPIs don’t exist in a vacuum, and you’ll need to look at a range of metrics to determine what is influencing a low conversion rate.
4. Participation rate
Of the volunteers you recruit, how often do they participate in volunteer opportunities, and what types of opportunities are they participating in?
How to calculate it
Participation rate is related to your conversion and retention rates but primarily measures specific volunteers’ activity and how popular different volunteer activities are.
For instance, a political campaign might notice that of its 50 volunteers, 38 signed up for a phone banking session, and the remaining 12 signed up to canvass. To calculate the participation rate for phone banking, the campaign would divide the number of volunteers who signed up by its total volunteers (38 / 50 = 0.76, or 76%).
That same campaign might note that one dedicated volunteer reliably turned up on time for every shift they signed up for. That volunteer would have a 100% participation rate and a 0% absenteeism rate.
Why it matters
Participation rate tells you what types of roles volunteers are interested in. If participation is low for specific activities, that might indicate they have a more difficult volunteer experience. Or, you may you need to reconsider the target audience for those roles.
Additionally, participation rate provides an overview of the state of your volunteer base as a whole. You might have many volunteers who are inactive or only participate in one or two opportunities a year, or you might have a small but dedicated community that you can count on to reliably fill open positions.
5. Hours
Nonprofits should track both individual volunteers’ hours and the total number of hours all volunteers contribute.
How to calculate it
Volunteer hours are simply how many hours were spent performing activities for your nonprofit over a given period of time. You might look at hours for individual volunteers, your program as a whole, or hours spent on specific programs.
Your volunteer management software should enable volunteers to check in and out for their shifts or log time spent volunteering.
Why it matters
Having a record of volunteer hours is necessary for maintaining a professional program that attracts new volunteers. Additionally, many corporate volunteer programs require nonprofits to share volunteers’ hours.
For instance, some of your volunteer recruitment materials might emphasize how some supporters can generate donations for your nonprofit while volunteering, thanks to volunteer grant programs. Then, to participate in those programs, you would need to track their hours.
6. Satisfaction rate
Satisfaction is not a quantifiable KPI like the other entries in this list, but it is essential for understanding how volunteers feel about your nonprofit and why they support you.
How to calculate it
Survey your volunteers to ask them for their feedback. Include a mix of multiple-choice and open-ended questions to get both quantitative and qualitative data.
For example, an advocacy group might ask volunteers to rate their satisfaction with its program’s canvassing scripts on a scale of 1-10 but also give them the chance to explain their response. This helps provide context for individual responses and alleviates issues of different volunteers having different interpretations of your multiple-choice options.
Why it matters
Strong volunteer programs are built on feedback—both volunteer managers giving it to their teams and volunteers giving it back to their managers. When your organization listens to volunteers and makes changes to improve satisfaction, you’ll have an easier time recruiting and retaining new supporters. Additionally, you can count on your current volunteers to bring in new ones.
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Volunteer recruitment requires understanding how prospective volunteers engage with your outreach, what opportunities they’re interested in, and why your current volunteers joined up in the first place. With this knowledge, you can create data-driven outreach materials and make targeted improvements to your program so new volunteers stick with your organization long-term.
