Working as a volunteer coordinator is an honorable and rewarding job. Our previous article explored the importance of fostering volunteer coordinators from within your community and strategies for doing that. Capacity Building: How to Turn Volunteers Into Coordinators
In Qela we make it our mission to help movement managers and volunteer coordinators deepen their relationships with their communities and make sure they achieve their institutional goals. Through increasing volunteer retention and recognizing your supporters’ strong suits we assist our clients in overcoming their biggest everyday challenges. Let’s talk about the problems volunteer coordinators face in their work and solutions to them.
Challenges Faced by Volunteer Coordinators and Ways for Overcoming Them
Volunteer retention
It’s very difficult to have a steady growth of an organization when there are not enough local community members who have been involved with it for a long time. Investing in teaching and onboarding new volunteers all the time is tiresome and discouraging. However, keeping supporters engaged is one of the biggest challenges for community managers.
Qela offers its clients a tried and tested solution for volunteer engagement and increased supporters retention. Our unique solution allows you to reward the most active volunteers with Vote Weight points that give them more influence over decisions that the organization wants them to participate in. The more points the person has, the more power over the final decision in the vote they will have.
By feeling responsible for the organization’s trajectory, supporters will feel more engaged and involved, motivating them to stick around to see how their decision influenced the organization. Learn more about our solutions aimed at increasing volunteer retention rates here: https://www.qela.app/
Volunteer burnout
This might be the second biggest problem volunteer coordinators face daily. People actively involved in grassroots advocacy fighting social justice issues tend to give their all to the cause — and burn out because of it. It is especially common for young volunteers to experience this, so this issue is a big one to consider if you are involved in youth engagement.
Some reasons for volunteer burnout can be a lack of boundaries, excessive expectations, lack of recognition, or ineffective task delegation.
To avoid this problem, make sure that you set a limit for how much time your volunteers dedicate to your organization. Remember, it is better to have a supporter help you consistently for a year than burn all their energy in one month. Make sure your volunteers prioritize their rest, especially if your movement works with sensitive topics.
Share success stories and organizational wins with your community. One of the biggest motivations to keep going even in trying times is understanding the meaning behind one’s work.
Celebrate and reward your volunteers regularly and consistently. Even the shortest shout-out on social media can show your supporters that what they are doing matters.
Mismatched expectations
This is one of the causes of volunteer burnout and an overall problem coordinators face in their work. Organizations can’t run successful programs when supporters and community managers have different understandings of volunteer roles and responsibilities.
To prevent this problem from arising, craft comprehensive orientation sessions so that your supporters know what is expected from the get-go. Make sure to have a personalized approach and assign tasks depending on your volunteers' strengths. Using volunteer management software can help you level the supporters' expectations and optimize task delegation.
In Qela, you can assign tasks to your volunteers in the form of quests with game elements. Additionally, our unique talent feature calculates your supporters' greatest skills and interests, so you can target tasks to people with specific strengths. Sign up for a free 30-day trial here: https://www.qela.app/register
Volunteer coordinator jobs come with a bunch of challenges. But you don’t have to solve them alone, let us help you! With Qela you can build trusting relationships with your community, improve volunteer retention, and save a whole lot of time on communication. Explore our volunteer management tool here: https://www.qela.app/