Nonprofit Squeeze: Donations Down, Volunteers Up

Nonprofits unprepared for what appears to be a historic influx of volunteers risk sending those folks home underappreciated and losing them forever--not just as volunteers but also as cash donors when the economy revives, says John Power, executive director of the Volunteer Center in San Francisco. Power is seeing more volunteers turned back to him by agencies that can't handle the larger numbers. Furthermore, he says, a chief concern now is that as nonprofits look to cut their budgets, the first heads to roll may be the paid staff that oversees volunteers. Suddenly volunteers won't get the training they need, and their whole experience goes downhill from there. One in three volunteers does not return, according to federal data, and a bad experience is a factor in low volunteer retention.

At the Greater Twin Cities United Way in St. Paul, Minn., Sue Moyer manages 44,000 volunteers a year with the help of one full-time and one part-time employee. Losing either employee would be devastating, she says. So far, there is no indication of cuts to come at her group, which just closed out its 2008 fundraiser about even with the previous year's. But Randi Yoder, the organization's senior vice president of donor relations, is bracing for a funding shortfall in 2009 even as she anticipates that volunteer numbers will rise by as much as a third. That's a tough combo. Still, says Yoder, "if someone tells us they don't have money but they have time, we'll find a way to plug them in."

Kadlec is a co-author of With Purpose: Going from Success to Significance in Work and Life (2009), which explores the emerging volunteer revolution