Do you ever feel like you should be doing a better job responding to volunteer emails or sending newsletters—but there just aren’t enough hours in the day? You want to engage volunteers personally, but as your program grows, keeping up with individual needs becomes overwhelming.
If that sounds like you, there’s good news: The right technology can make volunteer engagement easier and more effective.
With the right tech, you can centralize communication, automate routine tasks, and ensure timely follow-ups—helping you stay connected, reduce frustration, and strengthen volunteer engagement.
If your number one challenge in managing your volunteer program was keeping your volunteers engaged, you are not alone. In fact, 46% of nonprofit leaders listed volunteer engagement as their number one challenge in running their volunteer program.
For many nonprofits, volunteer engagement feels like an uphill battle—not because they lack committed volunteers, but because managing and communicating with them efficiently becomes overwhelming. Without the right technology, several challenges arise that can frustrate both volunteer managers and volunteers alike.
Many volunteer managers already use technology in some form to run their programs. These tools seem convenient, especially when budgets are tight.
However, they often create hidden inefficiencies that can harm volunteer engagement, like:
Volunteer managers often find themselves drowning in emails, spreadsheets, and phone calls. They know they should be sending follow-ups, reminders, and updates, but there just isn’t enough time in the day.
The desire to maintain a personal, one-on-one approach conflicts with the reality of managing a growing list of volunteers. This leads to missed messages, delayed responses, and disengaged volunteers.
Many organizations assume that volunteers who stop showing up are simply losing interest.
In reality, many of these volunteers never received the information they needed because they:
These gaps create frustration, making volunteers feel like they aren’t truly needed or valued.
Without a dedicated system, nonprofits often rely on a mix of free tools—Google Forms for sign-ups, Excel for tracking hours, email for communication, and maybe a separate app for scheduling.
The problem?
These systems don’t communicate with each other.
When information is scattered across multiple platforms, it’s easy for things to slip through the cracks. Volunteer managers waste time manually transferring data, which leads to errors, inefficiencies, and frustration.
Volunteers need timely, clear, and consistent communication to stay engaged. However, nonprofits without the right tech struggle to keep up.
Some volunteers receive frequent emails, while others don’t hear anything at all. Important updates might be buried in an inbox, or volunteers might be relying on outdated information from a previous email thread.
Many nonprofits haven’t mapped out their volunteers’ journey from initial interest to long-term engagement.
Without a system to track this, they lose valuable insights into where volunteers drop off and why. Are volunteers quitting after the first shift? Are they never making it past onboarding? Without this data, improving retention becomes a guessing game.
Despite knowing about these bottlenecks and inefficiencies, nonprofits often think they have the tech they need to engage volunteers or don’t need an all-in-one system—but that's not always the case.
Volunteer leaders often assume:
While these tools can capture volunteer information, they don’t streamline the full volunteer lifecycle. Volunteers often submit forms that get lost in an inbox or require manual data entry, leading to missed follow-ups and frustration.
One-on-one interactions are valuable, but when volunteer managers rely solely on manual communication, they can become overwhelmed. This leads to delayed responses, volunteers feeling ignored, and disengagement.
Many organizations hesitate to invest in dedicated technology, assuming it’s too costly or difficult to use.
However, purpose-built tools often save time and resources in the long run, reducing administrative burdens and improving engagement.
Want to learn more about how volunteer technology can transform volunteer engagement? Watch our latest free webinar →
By switching to a system designed for volunteer engagement, organizations can reduce friction points, improve communication, and create a more seamless experience for both volunteers and staff:
All-in-one volunteer technology offers volunteers:
Learn more about Get Connected's Volunteer Impact Reporting tools
Volunteer technology offers nonprofits:
Get Connected offers every tool necessary for making volunteer engagement easier than ever—for both volunteers and nonprofits.
Schedule a free demo to learn more →