Managing volunteers can feel like a bit of a black box. Your full-time team is, well, full time. You’re in contact each and every day. You more or less have their schedule memorized or, at the very least, can take an educated guess at when they’ll be working. You know everyone’s strengths and weaknesses (hey, no one is perfect).
Your volunteers don’t exactly check all those boxes. They very well might not check any of them. But they’re still vitally important to hitting your goals and the success of your organization.
That’s a lot of weight on the shoulders of a nebulous shadow army. (BTW – try imagining your volunteers as a shadow army fighting for good. It makes the whole thing more fun.)
How do you make sure your volunteers are on track? What numbers should you even be looking at? And how can you even get at those numbers?
We’re here to help you find the volunteer insights you’re looking for.
Activity
What exactly is going on with your volunteers? Seems like the right place to start your monitoring. EverTrue allows you to click in to see exactly who any given volunteer has contacted, the results of the interaction and any gift that was made as a result. This gives you a snapshot of what’s actually happening, instead of relying on self-reported information or attempting to reverse engineer the process that led to your final donation numbers.
This can also help you identify your highest-performing volunteers for future initiatives, helping you maximize the results of your volunteer efforts.
Assignments
Not only can you see exactly what donors are assigned to which volunteers, but you can actually do the assigning yourself. (Volunteers can also assign themselves to a donor in case, for example, they already know that person.) For a metric, you can quickly get a split of assigned and unassigned donors to see if you need to do more work to get connections made.
Total Donors
Need a quick look at the total donors generated as a result of a campaign led by volunteers? No problem. With a few clicks you’ll know exactly how many donors your volunteers were able to drum up.
Total Dollars
And the other side of the donor coin is dollars. That’s what it’s really all about, so you need to be able to see it quickly. Well, problem solved. We figured if we were going to track the dollar amounts from each gift and generated from each volunteer, we might as well tally it all up. So we did. And you can easily see it. The best part? There’s absolutely no math for you to do.
Retention
Traditionally most institutions haven’t had insight donor retention numbers. If someone gave last year or the year before, did they give again this year? What percentage of past donors return and what percentage fades away? Knowing these numbers can change your strategy for outreach, targeting and a host of other tactics. So, yeah, it’s an important metric.
Performance vs Expected Asks
How are your volunteers performing compared to what you might expect? Maybe they’re wildly overperforming and deserve some special recognition. Or maybe you’re missing out on valuable dollars and need to rethink your approach in order to close the window.
Want to see more? Check out our recorded Volunteer Management demo here.