Working Volunteer

About Working Volunteer

Paid staff give notice, have exit interviews and appear in turnover data. Volunteers leave silently, which is why most organisations do not know why they lose them.

An employee who becomes dissatisfied works through a fairly visible sequence. They raise something, or they do not and their engagement drops in ways a manager can observe, and eventually they resign, giving notice and a reason. The organisation records it. Somebody may ask what happened. There is a data trail, however imperfect.

A volunteer does none of this. They miss a shift, which is unremarkable. They miss another. They reply more slowly, then not at all. At no point do they announce a decision, frequently because they have not consciously made one, and at no point does anybody in the organisation record that a person who used to help no longer does. The loss is invisible, the reason is never captured, and the same cause continues operating on everybody else.

Working Volunteer is about running volunteer programmes and about volunteering itself: recruitment, induction, boundaries, recognition, burnout among the most committed, and finding out why people stopped coming.

The editorial position is that volunteers leave silently rather than resigning, that this single structural difference explains most of what is distinctive about managing them, and that treating unpaid work as a favour rather than as work makes it impossible to set the expectations volunteers say they want.

This publication is independent. It is not affiliated with any charity, volunteering body, membership organisation or software provider, it does not accept payment for coverage, and it does not recruit or place volunteers.

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