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Retention: Understanding Volunteer Motivation

In addition to a positive volunteer experience and an opportunity to make their community safer and healthier, your volunteers may have other, more personal reasons for volunteering.

There are several reasons why people volunteer—these reasons can be loosely grouped into four categories:¹

1. Achievement
2. Affiliation
3. Recognition
4. Power/Leadership

The majority of volunteers have a complex combination of reasons that they volunteer; only a few volunteers apply to only one category. Ensuring that the volunteer experience is rewarding means ensuring there are opportunities where these needs can be met.

Retaining the Achievement-motivated Volunteer—Ensure your unit’s volunteers know what they have achieved, while updating them on what the volunteers, the unit, and the national MRC program have achieved. Maintain records of utilization statistics, and remind your volunteers that they are the reason for the unit’s successes.

Retaining the Affiliation-motivated Volunteer—This volunteer needs to know that he or she is part of a bigger organization—the opportunity to train, exercise, and assist at community events as part of the MRC will be attractive to this volunteer. When communicating with volunteers, inform them that their MRC unit is part of a national movement sponsored by the Office of the Surgeon General. Also, take the opportunity to celebrate the successes of other MRC units in your area. The affiliation-motivated volunteers will enjoy the opportunity to discuss the MRC and demonstrate their affiliation in the community—if you can give them something that identifies them as MRC members, these volunteers will wear it publicly.

Retaining the Recognition-motivated Volunteer—Although annual awards dinners are not a poor way to thank volunteers, the real work of volunteer recognition occurs daily. There are various ways to recognize volunteers’ contributions, ranging from the simple, personal “thank you,” to more public forms of recognition such as newspaper articles, community awards, notes to their families and/or employers, etc. Not all volunteers want to be publicly recognized, but each volunteer needs to know that he or she is valued by the organization (see Recognition and Appreciation, below).

Retaining the Power/Leadership-motivated Volunteer—There should be opportunities for volunteers to assume leadership roles in the unit. When appropriate, delegate responsibilities to volunteers that have appropriate skills and have expressed interest in working on new projects—these leadership-motivated volunteers can be your greatest spokespeople if you utilize them well.

¹ Sources: Motivation and Organizational Climate, David C. McClelland and John W. Atkinson, and The Effective Management of Volunteer Programs, Marlene Wilson.

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Last Updated on 9/5/2006