In-Person Volunteering in the Times of the Pandemic: Lessons for Organizations Dependent on Essential Volunteering

This research note focuses on the experience of nonprofit organizations that relied on in-person essential volunteers during the pandemic to conduct their core, mission-related programs. We use unique case data from a survey of a single organization's volunteers before and during the pandemic. We found that there were very few socio-demographic differences between volunteers before and during the pandemic. However, the organization's volunteer administrative data revealed important differences in the modes that volunteers engaged with the organization. While the total number of volunteers decreased significantly, the number and frequency of individual volunteers volunteering alone increased during the pandemic, and the decline in volunteers overall was driven by the many organized groups of volunteers that the organization depended on pre-pandemic, which declined precipitously. Individual, committed volunteers became more essential to the organization during the pandemic to help sustain the organization when their stable flows of revolving volunteer groups ended. The prior volunteer management inattention to core, individual volunteers before the pandemic and over-reliance on revolving volunteer groups left the nonprofit vulnerable at the time of the pandemic disruption, which provides lessons for many similar organizations. Our findings suggest that organizations that benefit from steady volunteer groups should do more to promote individual volunteer loyalty while also managing the revolving door of groups.