Recognising & Rewarding Your Volunteers

Recognising and rewarding your volunteers acknowledges the vital part they play in your organisation and your activities and impact. It should be a key part of your strategy for volunteer retention. There are also some pitfalls that you also need to avoid.

Here are some great ways you can recognise and reward your volunteers:

• Host an awards evening or other appreciation event, where employees and volunteers can come together. Special thank you events at key times like a summer picnic or Christmas party to thank volunteers are often very popular; they help volunteers to get to know one another and feel part of a team.
• Have Recognition Certificates for your volunteers
• Acknowledge birthdays, special events in a volunteer's life and thank them for significant efforts and achievements
• Thoughtful small gifts, such as flowers or chocolates, can be great to celebrate volunteering milestones
• Include volunteers in significant organisation events and in training (paying for volunteers to attend training as fine, as long as it is related to their volunteering)
• Provide regular feedback and the chance for two-way conversations; give them the chance to contribute and feel part of you organisation
• 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
• Reimbursing volunteers' out-of-pocket expenses is always recommended, and you should encourage them to claim. This isn't a reward, just a way of ensuring everyone can afford to volunteer, but it does help volunteers to feel appreciated and supported. (Since you shouldn’t be offering any sort of financial reward that could be construed as payment, make sure your system reimburses reasonable actual expenses incurred whilst volunteering)

Remember that you should avoid the expectation of regular rewards, to avoid any interpretation of a contractual exchange in return for volunteering. Any tokens of recognition should be just that – thoughtful 'Thank you's rather than financially valuable.

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]