Reimagining Service: How can nonprofits improve the volunteer experience?

Ann arrives every Monday afternoon at her local food pantry, putting together snack bags for students. The food bank serves more than 800 youth a week in the rural counties of their state. Ann’s volunteer role and her personal commitment are essential for the food bank to achieve their mission of ensuring every child is fed and set up for success.

Volunteers like Ann are critical to nonprofit program delivery. Yet, chronic underinvestment in volunteer infrastructure—including volunteer engagement staffing and the data and technology needed to measure outcomes—combined with changing interests in how people want to volunteer, has created a difficult landscape for nonprofits trying to meet growing community needs.

Between 2016 and 2025, the largest 10 independent and operating foundations allocated only 0.07% of funding specifically to volunteer engagement, even as the demand for nonprofit services increases.

To shift this dynamic, last September Points of Light set a bold goal: to double the number of people who volunteer in the United States from 75 million to 150 million by 2035. Reimagining Service 2035 will launch a national volunteer strategy for more effective volunteer engagement. As part of strategic planning, Points of Light recently surveyed more than 2,200 nonprofits and volunteers. Here’s what the new data, shared in the National Volunteer Strategy Survey Progress Report, revealed, confirming what many nonprofit leaders and volunteer managers knew.

1. Volunteers are crucial to program delivery, and nonprofits need to invest accordingly

As demand for nonprofit services rises, so does the need for strong volunteer involvement. Nonprofits say volunteers are essential for operations. And when organizations can’t engage volunteers in a way that gives them a sense of purpose, connects them with the mission, and retains them long-term, those volunteers often leave, and that significantly disrupts program delivery.

Points of Light’s survey found 52% of nonprofits said volunteers are necessary to meet their mission, while another 26% said they play “a big role.” This is an increase from other studies, including a 2025 Urban Institute study that found 23% of organizations depend entirely on volunteers and another 23% rely on volunteers for several key tasks.

These numbers reflect services to real people. One in three local Meals on Wheels organizations has a waitlist averaging four months. Big Brothers Big Sisters reports over 30,000 youth are waiting to be connected to a mentor—all of whom are volunteers.

2. Nonprofits need stronger infrastructure to engage and retain volunteers

Engaging volunteers well requires expertise, leadership, resources, and people power, just like every other aspect of nonprofit operations. That means dedicated staffing, training, and measurement, along with communication of volunteer value and outcomes, as well as funding to support volunteer engagement—all of which are lacking.

Last year, we shared how the lack of investment creates cyclical challenges. This year, we’re seeing this continuing trend, with 54% of nonprofits saying their volunteer efforts are “somewhat” or “very underfunded.”

And funding impacts the volunteer experience. Over three-quarters (76%) of volunteers said knowing they had a genuine impact is what made a volunteer experience feel meaningful. Yet, 54% of nonprofits identified training on measuring volunteer impact and communicating that value as a major gap in their work, even while agreeing it would benefit their staff.

3. The volunteer experience matters to engagement and retention

Creating a sense of belonging is one of the most important strategies for retaining volunteers and creating lifelong impact. Providing proper training, offering a welcoming environment, and helping volunteers understand not only what they’re doing but why it matters to the community all contribute to volunteers staying with an organization and volunteering more often.

Points of Light data clearly reflects the importance of improving the volunteer experience: 45% of organizations said they need to integrate more community building into volunteer programming to support belonging. That sense of belonging isn’t just a nice-to-have; it’s an essential part of engaging and retaining volunteers: 44% of volunteers said they decided not to volunteer at a nonprofit because they weren’t sure they would belong, and 43% said they quit because they felt they didn’t belong.

Together, these findings show improving volunteer retention is not only about recruitment but about investing in the infrastructure and experience that make people feel connected, valued, and impactful.

What can nonprofits do to improve the volunteer experience?

The Reimagining Service 2035 initiative seeks to grow and equip the nonprofit sector so that volunteers are supported with staff, strategies, and impact measurement to engage them. The national volunteer strategy will create a roadmap for stronger engagement and investment. Funders can support volunteer infrastructure, including investing in volunteer training and support. Nonprofit leaders can use the statistics in our new findings to advocate for the importance of these items. After all, volunteers are not just an extra pair of hands. They’re the heartbeat of nonprofit services.

Photo credit: Points of Light