Recognising & Rewarding Your Volunteers

Recognising and rewarding your volunteers should be a key part of your strategy for volunteer retention. There are also some pitfalls that you also need to avoid.

You should absolutely have a simple process for volunteers to claim out-of-pocket expenses, and you should encourage them to do this. It may seem easier just to offer a flat payment, but you shouldn’t be offering any sort of financial ‘reward’ – this is simply as this could be interpreted as them being ‘paid’ and lead to all sorts of legal complications.

There are other ways in which you can recognise and reward your volunteers:

• If you run retail outlets, you could offer a discount card for any purchases
• Host an awards evening or other appreciation event, where employees and volunteers can come together
• Have Recognition Certificates for your volunteers
• Include them in any training – paying for volunteers to attend training as fine, as long as it is related to their volunteering
• Provide regular feedback – and give them the chance to contribute and feel part of you organisation!
• Thoughtful gifts, such as flowers or chocolates, can be great to celebrate volunteering milestones
• Look out for reward schemes for volunteers – we used the Room To Reward scheme to show our appreciation for our Admin volunteer, Opal - Opal's Award

In all this, remember that you should avoid the expectation of regular rewards, and any tokens of recognition should be just that – thoughtful rather than expensive.

For more on volunteer retention, see here.

Has your organisation successfully found a way to recognise and reward your volunteers? We’d love to share your stories, so please get in touch with us: [email protected]