Why did we do the study?
Health TAPESTRY relies on volunteers to complete visits with clients in their homes. With any volunteer role, sometimes volunteers decide to no longer participate with the program, whereas others volunteer for a long time. Keeping volunteers is important to organizations as it allows them to continue to provide services and keeps training and onboarding costs lower, among other reasons. To understand who continued to volunteer with Health TAPESTRY, we looked at the differences between the people who stopped volunteering (i.e., left the program) and the volunteers that continued with the program (i.e., stayed).
What did we do?
We conducted interviews and focus groups, asked volunteers to fill out surveys on a variety of related topics, and also looked at demographic and recruitment information. We then compared volunteers that stayed and volunteers that left.
What did we find?
We found that volunteers that stayed were more likely to be a little older, have more years of experience volunteering (in any role), and identify as male. Unexpectedly, we found that those who left had more positive attitudes towards older adults at baseline compared to those that stayed with the program. We also found that volunteers that stayed were more likely to have described the following reasons for choosing to volunteer with the program: enhancement (i.e., personal growth), social (i.e., wanting to socialize with others), and protective (i.e., using volunteering to reduce negative feelings).
From the interviews and focus groups, we found volunteers that stayed felt that Health TAPESTRY was reaching the people most in need of it and felt they were able to provide people information on community resources. When asked what wasn’t working, volunteers that stayed were more likely to describe functional or administrative elements such as completing the surveys and goal setting exercises, rather than problems with the program as a whole.
What do our findings mean?
Overall, Health TAPESTRY volunteers that stayed likely had a personally meaningful reason for volunteering, as well as the reasons common amongst any volunteers such as volunteering to help others and contribute to society.
We recommend two key things for future volunteer programs to consider to help with volunteer retention:
1) Communicate positive impacts that volunteers may experience as a result of volunteering (so that volunteers can choose the volunteer opportunity that best fits with their personal goals and needs);
2) Communicate any impacts that client experience to volunteers to reinforce volunteers’ purposes for volunteering (to reinforce that the work the volunteer is doing is meaningful).
The full article can be found here:
Gaber, J., Clark, R. E., Lamarche, L., Datta, J., Talat, S., Bomze, S., Marentette-Brown, S., Parascandalo, F., Di Pelino, S., Oliver, D., Price, D., Geoffrion, L., & Mangin, D. (2022). Understanding volunteer retention in a complex, community-centred intervention: A mixed methods study in Ontario, Canada. Health & Social Care in the Community, 30, 2259– 2269. https://doi.org/10.1111/hsc.13775