The Complete Guide to Volunteer Management for Charities

Volunteer management is the structured process of recruiting, onboarding, coordinating, supporting, and retaining volunteers to deliver an organisation's mission effectively — and modern tools like Plinth are transforming how charities manage this entire lifecycle. This definitive guide covers everything you need to know about volunteer management in the UK charity sector.

What you'll learn: What volunteer management involves, why it matters, and how to build an effective volunteer programme from the ground up.

Key challenges: The biggest obstacles charity volunteer coordinators face — from recruitment and compliance to retention and impact reporting — and proven strategies to overcome them.

Modern approaches: How purpose-built software like Plinth streamlines every stage of the volunteer management lifecycle, from DBS tracking to geographic matching.

What Is Volunteer Management?

Volunteer management encompasses all the activities involved in attracting, selecting, training, supervising, recognising, and retaining unpaid workers who contribute their time and skills to an organisation's mission. It is a professional discipline that requires the same strategic thinking and operational rigour as paid workforce management.

Recruitment: Identifying volunteering needs, creating role descriptions, advertising opportunities, and attracting suitable candidates to your organisation.

Screening and onboarding: Vetting applicants through interviews and background checks (including DBS checks where required), then providing the induction, training, and resources volunteers need to succeed.

Coordination: Matching volunteers to appropriate roles, scheduling shifts, managing availability, and ensuring adequate coverage for your organisation's activities.

Support and development: Providing ongoing supervision, feedback, training opportunities, and pastoral support to help volunteers thrive and grow.

Recognition and retention: Acknowledging volunteers' contributions, creating a positive experience, and building long-term commitment to your organisation.

Effective volunteer management treats volunteers as valued partners in delivering your mission, not as free labour to be used and discarded.

Why Volunteer Management Matters

The scale of volunteering in the UK makes effective management essential. According to NCVO Almanac data (2021/22), approximately 12 million people in England volunteer formally at least once a year, with around 7 million volunteering at least once a month. The economic value of this contribution is worth billions of pounds to the UK economy.

Organisational impact: Well-managed volunteer programmes deliver more consistent services, reach more beneficiaries, and achieve better outcomes. Research from the National Council for Voluntary Organisations shows that organisations with structured volunteer management practices report 40% higher volunteer satisfaction.

Volunteer experience: Poor management is the primary reason volunteers leave. Studies consistently find that the top causes of volunteer attrition are feeling undervalued, lack of communication, disorganisation, and unclear expectations — all management failures rather than motivation issues.

Compliance and safeguarding: Charities working with vulnerable groups have legal obligations around DBS checks, data protection, and safeguarding. The Disclosure and Barring Service processed over 5.8 million checks in 2023-24. Without systematic management, compliance gaps create serious safeguarding risks and potential legal liability.

Funding requirements: Increasingly, funders require evidence of how volunteer time is managed, tracked, and valued. Grant applications and reports that demonstrate structured volunteer management are significantly more likely to succeed.

The Volunteer Management Lifecycle

Stage 1: Planning and Strategy

Before recruiting a single volunteer, you need a clear strategy that aligns volunteering with your organisation's mission and operational needs.

Needs assessment: Identify what tasks require volunteer support, what skills are needed, and how many volunteers you require. Be specific — vague roles lead to disengaged volunteers. The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) recommends treating volunteer role design with the same rigour as paid job design.

Role creation: Develop detailed role descriptions that include time commitment, location, skills required, training provided, and the impact the role will have. Clear expectations are the single best predictor of volunteer satisfaction.

Policy development: Establish clear policies covering volunteer rights, expenses, safeguarding, data protection, complaints, and recognition. These policies protect both volunteers and your organisation.

Resource allocation: Determine who will manage volunteers, what tools they need, and what budget is available. The average volunteer manager in the UK supports 50-100 active volunteers, though this varies significantly by sector.

Stage 2: Recruitment

Effective recruitment goes beyond posting opportunities — it requires understanding what motivates volunteers and meeting them where they are.

Motivation alignment: Research from the Institute for Volunteering Research identifies six primary motivations for volunteering: values (wanting to help), understanding (learning new skills), social (building connections), career (gaining experience), protective (reducing guilt), and enhancement (personal growth). Your recruitment messaging should address multiple motivations.

Channel strategy: Use a mix of recruitment channels including your website, social media, volunteer centres, community events, word of mouth, and platforms like Do-it.org. The NCVO Time Well Spent survey found that 49% of volunteers found their role through personal connections, while 23% searched online.

Inclusive recruitment: Actively work to recruit volunteers from diverse backgrounds. Research consistently shows that formal volunteering rates are lower among people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, disabled people, and some ethnic minority groups. Removing barriers — such as covering expenses, offering flexible roles, and using accessible language — helps build a more representative volunteer base.

Geographic matching: Tools like Plinth's geographic mapping feature enable you to visualise where potential volunteers live and match them to nearby opportunities, reducing travel barriers and improving attendance.

Stage 3: Screening and Onboarding

Thorough screening protects your beneficiaries, your organisation, and the volunteers themselves. Effective onboarding sets volunteers up for success.

Application and interview: Even for volunteer roles, a structured application process helps assess suitability. Informal interviews can be conversational rather than formal, focusing on motivations, availability, and skills.

Background checks: For roles involving children or vulnerable adults, DBS checks are legally required. Enhanced DBS checks currently cost £38 for paid roles (free for volunteers) and take approximately 14 days to process, though complex cases can take longer. Plinth provides built-in DBS tracking with expiry alerts to ensure compliance is maintained over time.

Induction: A structured induction should cover your organisation's mission, the volunteer's role, key policies, safeguarding procedures, and practical information. The Charity Commission recommends that all volunteers receive a written role description and understand the organisation's safeguarding policy.

Training: Provide role-specific training that equips volunteers with the knowledge and skills they need. This could range from a brief orientation for simple roles to extensive accredited training for specialist positions.

Probation: Consider a trial period (typically 4-8 weeks) that allows both the organisation and the volunteer to assess whether the role is a good fit.

Stage 4: Coordination and Scheduling

Day-to-day coordination is where many volunteer programmes struggle, particularly as they scale beyond a handful of volunteers.

Shift management: Create clear schedules, communicate them effectively, and have contingency plans for no-shows. Volunteer no-show rates typically range from 15-30% for regular shifts, so building in redundancy is essential.

Role matching: Use data on volunteers' skills, interests, availability, and location to match them to the most suitable roles. Plinth's shortlisting feature automates this matching process, saving coordinators significant time.

Communication: Maintain regular, clear communication through channels that work for your volunteers. A mix of email, messaging, and in-person contact typically works best. The key is consistency — 62% of volunteers who left organisations cited poor communication as a contributing factor.

Record keeping: Track volunteer attendance, hours, roles, and any incidents. This data is essential for compliance, reporting, and understanding patterns in your programme. Purpose-built software like Plinth makes this dramatically easier than spreadsheets.

Stage 5: Support and Development

Ongoing support is critical for volunteer retention and programme quality.

Supervision: Regular check-ins (at minimum monthly for active volunteers) provide an opportunity to address concerns, give feedback, and identify development needs. Supervision does not need to be formal — even brief conversations demonstrate that you value the volunteer's contribution.

Training and progression: Offer ongoing development opportunities. Volunteers who feel they are learning and growing are significantly more likely to continue. Consider creating progression pathways that allow volunteers to take on more responsibility over time.

Wellbeing: Pay attention to volunteer wellbeing, particularly for those in emotionally demanding roles. Provide access to support, encourage breaks, and watch for signs of burnout.

Conflict resolution: Have clear procedures for addressing disagreements, complaints, or performance issues involving volunteers. Addressing problems promptly and fairly protects everyone involved.

Stage 6: Recognition and Retention

Recognition is not just about saying thank you — it is about creating a volunteer experience that people want to continue and recommend to others.

Formal recognition: Awards, certificates, reference letters, and public acknowledgement all have their place. Research from the Institute for Volunteering Research found that 82% of volunteers rated personal thanks from staff as the most meaningful form of recognition.

Informal recognition: Day-to-day appreciation — remembering names, asking about their lives, involving them in decisions — often matters more than formal awards. Volunteers want to feel like valued members of the team, not outsiders.

Impact communication: Show volunteers the difference their contribution makes. Sharing stories, data, and feedback from beneficiaries helps volunteers connect their effort to meaningful outcomes. Plinth's reporting features make it easy to generate impact data that you can share with your volunteer team.

Retention metrics: Track your retention rates and understand why volunteers leave. The average annual volunteer turnover rate in UK charities is estimated at 30-40%, but well-managed programmes can achieve significantly better results.

Common Volunteer Management Challenges

Challenge 1: Recruitment in a Competitive Landscape

The volunteer landscape has shifted significantly since the COVID-19 pandemic. While the total number of people volunteering has broadly recovered, there has been a notable shift towards informal and episodic volunteering, with fewer people committing to regular, formal roles.

Solutions: Offer flexible roles, remove unnecessary barriers, leverage digital recruitment channels, and ensure your volunteer proposition clearly communicates impact and benefits.

Challenge 2: Compliance and Safeguarding

Managing DBS checks, training records, and safeguarding compliance across a large volunteer workforce is complex and high-stakes. A single compliance failure can have devastating consequences.

Solutions: Use software with built-in compliance tracking — Plinth's DBS tracking and expiry alerts ensure nothing falls through the cracks. Establish clear policies and regular review cycles.

Challenge 3: Measuring and Demonstrating Impact

Funders and stakeholders increasingly expect charities to demonstrate the value of their volunteer programmes with data, not just anecdotes.

Solutions: Implement systematic hour logging, track outcomes linked to volunteer activity, and use reporting tools to translate raw data into compelling impact narratives. See our guide on tracking volunteer hours and demonstrating impact.

Challenge 4: Scaling Without Losing Quality

As volunteer programmes grow, the informal management approaches that worked with 10 volunteers become unsustainable at 100 or 1,000.

Solutions: Invest in volunteer management software before you reach breaking point. Plinth is designed to scale — Camden Council manages 2,500 volunteers across 45 charities on the platform, while Volunteer Centre Kensington & Chelsea coordinates 3,000 volunteers across 163 organisations.

How Plinth Supports Volunteer Management

Plinth provides purpose-built tools for every stage of the volunteer management lifecycle:

Volunteer profiles: Comprehensive records including personal details, skills, interests, availability, and compliance status in one centralised system.

DBS tracking: Built-in DBS check management with status tracking and expiry alerts, ensuring your organisation maintains safeguarding compliance at all times.

Geographic mapping: Visualise where your volunteers are located and match them to nearby opportunities, reducing travel barriers and improving attendance.

Shortlisting and matching: Automatically identify the best volunteers for each role based on skills, location, availability, and preferences.

Multi-organisation collaboration: Enable councils, volunteer centres, and partnerships to coordinate volunteering across multiple member organisations — a unique capability that sets Plinth apart.

Reporting and impact: Generate detailed reports that demonstrate volunteer programme value to funders, trustees, and stakeholders.

Frequently Asked Questions

What qualifications do you need to manage volunteers?

There is no mandatory qualification for volunteer management in the UK, but several professional development options exist. The Institute of Leadership and Management (ILM) offers volunteer management qualifications, and NCVO provides training courses. Many successful volunteer managers come from backgrounds in HR, community development, project management, or social work. The most important qualities are strong organisational skills, empathy, communication ability, and a genuine commitment to volunteer development.

How many volunteers can one coordinator manage?

This depends on the complexity of roles and the tools available. As a general guideline, a full-time volunteer coordinator can effectively manage 50-100 active volunteers using manual methods, or significantly more with purpose-built software. Plinth enables coordinators to manage larger programmes by automating administrative tasks and providing tools for efficient communication and tracking.

Should volunteers have contracts?

Volunteers should not have employment contracts (which could create unintended employment rights), but they should have clear volunteer agreements. These non-binding agreements set out mutual expectations regarding the role, time commitment, expenses, training, and support. The NCVO recommends volunteer agreements as best practice for all formal volunteer roles.

How do you handle difficult volunteers?

Address issues promptly, privately, and with the same professionalism you would use with paid staff. Have a clear volunteer policy that covers expected behaviour, the process for raising concerns, and the steps that will be taken if expectations are not met. Most issues can be resolved through honest conversation, but in serious cases, organisations have the right to ask volunteers to leave.

What insurance do charities need for volunteers?

Charities should have public liability insurance that covers volunteer activities, and employers' liability insurance may also be required in some circumstances (even though volunteers are not employees, some policies and situations require it). Additionally, consider personal accident insurance for volunteers and professional indemnity insurance if volunteers provide advice or services. Check with your insurer to ensure your policy explicitly covers volunteer involvement.

Conclusion

Effective volunteer management is both an art and a science. It requires genuine care for the people who give their time freely, combined with systematic processes that ensure consistency, compliance, and impact at scale.

The fundamentals: Clear roles, thorough onboarding, regular communication, meaningful recognition, and systematic tracking form the foundation of any successful volunteer programme.

The technology: Purpose-built tools like Plinth transform volunteer management from an administrative burden into a strategic capability, enabling organisations to do more with their volunteer workforce.

The outcome: When volunteer management is done well, everyone benefits — volunteers have a better experience, beneficiaries receive better services, and organisations can demonstrate their impact with confidence.

Ready to transform your volunteer management? Book a demo of Plinth to see how our platform supports every stage of the volunteer management lifecycle.

Recommended Next Pages

• Best Volunteer Management Software for UK Charities – Compare the top platforms to find the right fit for your organisation.

• Volunteer Management Software vs Spreadsheets – Understand when it is time to move beyond manual processes.

• How to Recruit and Retain Volunteers – Data-driven strategies for building and sustaining your volunteer programme.

• DBS Check Tracking for Volunteers – A complete guide to managing DBS compliance for your volunteer workforce.

• How to Track Volunteer Hours and Demonstrate Impact – Practical guidance on logging hours and reporting to funders.

• Volunteering Features on Plinth – Explore all of Plinth's volunteer management capabilities in detail.

Last updated: February 2026

For more information about implementing volunteer management in your organisation, contact our team or schedule a demo.