MMHA 6452 Week 10 Retention and Recognition Plan Example

Keeping Volunteers and Thanking Them Are Different Jobs: A Retention and Recognition Plan for Westfall's Volunteer Program

Student Name

Walden University

MMHA 6452: Board Governance and Volunteer Management

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Keeping Volunteers and Thanking Them Are Different Jobs: A Retention and Recognition Plan for Westfall's Volunteer Program

Two Questions

This plan answers two questions for Westfall Community Health Center's volunteer program, and keeps them apart because they have different answers. The first is why volunteers stop coming, and what conditions would keep them. The second is how the center recognizes the volunteers it has. Organizations often treat recognition as their retention strategy, holding an appreciation event and expecting it to keep people. Recognition matters, but it rarely fixes the reasons people leave. The plan therefore spends most of its length on conditions and less on recognition.

Why Volunteers Leave

Westfall's program is new, so the center does not yet have its own departure data. The plan therefore sets up two sources from the first month and uses published research in the meantime. The first source is exit conversations: every volunteer who leaves is offered a short conversation with the coordinator, using the same four questions each time, about what led to the decision. The second is the pattern of who stops appearing without saying so, read from the schedule: volunteers who miss two consecutive shifts without notice receive a call, and the reason, if given, is recorded.

National data show that formal volunteering rates fell in the decade before 2015, with declines across many cities and states (Grimm & Dietz, 2018), which suggests that recruiting replacements is getting harder and that keeping the volunteers the center has is worth effort. Research on volunteer management points to reasons that are largely within an organization's control: poorly defined roles, little contact with a supervisor, schedules that do not fit volunteers' lives and work that differs from what was promised (Studer, 2016). The plan's conditions address those reasons directly.

Conditions That Keep Volunteers

Schedules that fit. Westfall's busiest hours are weekday mornings, but many of the volunteers offered by the congregational coalition work weekdays. The coordinator will ask about availability before placing volunteers and will create a second shift pattern, late afternoon until the main site closes at 7 p.m. on two evenings a week, if enough volunteers can only come then. Volunteers may swap shifts with each other through the coordinator without penalty.

A supervisor who can be reached. Every shift has a named front desk supervisor, and the supervisor's first task when a volunteer arrives is to say hello and confirm the plan for the shift. The coordinator calls each new volunteer after the first and third shifts. A volunteer should never spend a shift unsure whom to ask.

Work that matches the description. The role description promised wayfinding and waiting room support, not filing or envelope stuffing. Site supervisors are reminded that volunteers are not a spare pair of hands for unrelated tasks, and the six-month review asks each volunteer whether the work matched the description. If staff have drifted into asking for other tasks, the coordinator addresses it with the site manager.

A route to more responsibility. Some volunteers want more. After six months, a volunteer may become a lead volunteer who helps orient newcomers during their shadow shift and who joins a quarterly meeting with the coordinator to suggest improvements. Lead volunteers do not supervise anyone; the role recognizes experience and gives it somewhere to go. Volunteers who feel their contribution is meaningful and that the organization uses their abilities tend to remain longer (Hotchkiss et al., 2014).

Recognition

Recognition is the smaller half of this plan by design. At orientation, the coordinator asks each volunteer a single question: how would you prefer to be thanked, if at all? Some will want public acknowledgment, some a note from a patient or the CEO, some a reference letter for school or work, and some nothing at all. The answer is recorded and used. For volunteers who want it, the center will add their names to an annual list in the newsletter and offer a letter of reference after six months of service. The center will not hold a single large recognition event each year as its main gesture, because one standard event suits some volunteers and not others. Instead, small thanks tied to individual preferences will be given throughout the year, often by the front desk supervisors who see the volunteers' work most closely. Motivations for volunteering vary widely from person to person (Musick & Wilson, 2008), and recognition that ignores those differences is easy to give and easy to dismiss.

The Measure

The plan will be judged by one measure: the share of volunteers who start in a given quarter and are still active six months later, taken from the coordinator's schedule records. Active means having worked at least one shift in the last month. The coordinator reports the measure to the CEO each quarter and to the board twice a year as part of the program report required by the board policy. A single measure is chosen so that the result is easy to follow and hard to dress up. The coordinator will also note how many new volunteers left within their first month, since early departures usually point to orientation or scheduling rather than to the work itself. The exit conversation themes accompany it, so that a falling number comes with some explanation of why.

What Recognition Cannot Repair

Recognition cannot make up for a schedule that does not fit, a supervisor who is never available or a role that turns out to be different from what was promised. A volunteer who spends a morning unsure what to do will not be kept by a thank-you card. If the six-month measure falls, the first place to look is the conditions above, not the recognition program. The plan names this limit so that, under pressure, the center does not reach for a recognition event as a substitute for fixing the conditions that send volunteers away. The same logic applies to the board's reading of the plan: if the twice-yearly report shows volunteers leaving, the board's question should be which condition failed, not whether the center thanked them enough.

References

Grimm, R. T., Jr., & Dietz, N. (2018). Where are America's volunteers? A look at America's widespread decline in volunteering in cities and states. Do Good Institute, University of Maryland.

Hotchkiss, R. B., Unruh, L., & Fottler, M. D. (2014). The role, measurement, and impact of volunteerism in hospitals. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 43(6), 1111-1128. https://doi.org/10.1177/0899764014549057

Musick, M. A., & Wilson, J. (2008). Volunteers: A social profile. Indiana University Press.

Studer, S. (2016). Volunteer management: Responding to the uniqueness of volunteers. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 45(4), 688-714. https://doi.org/10.1177/0899764015597786