Volunteer Journeys: Tools and Techniques to Transform Supporters into Super Fans

Volunteer Journeys: Tools and Techniques to Transform Supporters into Super Fans

Conference presentation, delivered by Johann Shudlick, Chief Operating Officer at Golden

Individual giving is stagnant, with downward pressure on retention and recurring giving, but there is some encouraging news: volunteerism is on the rise, particularly among younger generations. Volunteers are twice as likely to donate when solicited as people who don't volunteer, and volunteers give three times as much in individual donations as non-volunteers. Volunteerism can also lead to other forms of generosity, including advocacy. Even if your organization doesn't have a mature volunteer program today, there are compelling reasons to think about how volunteering could become part of a broader engagement strategy.

The Problem With Transactional Volunteering

A lot of volunteering is principally based on convenience. People choose opportunities based on where they are and when they have availability: “I have Saturday morning free. What can I do?” That can make the experience feel transactional because the relationship is built around filling a shift rather than understanding why someone wants to participate.

Volunteering can also be superficial: someone paints a room, receives a thank-you, and that's the end of the interaction. The volunteer function is often segregated from the rest of the organization as well, with development and program teams operating separately. Technology sometimes reinforces this structure by treating volunteers as records that get handed off into a CRM or drip campaign. But there is much more potential in the relationship.

The mindset shift is to stop thinking about volunteering as a transaction and start thinking about it as the beginning of a journey of mutual discovery. The volunteer is figuring out what they believe, how they support the organization, and how they want to engage. At the same time, the organization has an opportunity to understand what motivates that individual and what meaningful, longer-term engagement might look like for them.

Strategy 1: Understand Your Volunteers’ Intentions

The first strategy is to understand your volunteers' intentions. People's experience of something is often less about the absolute experience and more about how it compares with what they expected. Meaning is deeply personal, so a one-size-fits-all volunteer program will inevitably leave some people behind.

That doesn't mean customizing the entire program for every individual. It means understanding, at a broader level, why people come to you and what they find meaningful about their experience. Instead of focusing only on when someone is available and where they can show up, ask thoughtful questions: Why did you choose to volunteer with us? Which of your skills are you most proud of? What have been your most meaningful moments? Those answers can help you meet volunteers where they are and create experiences that align more closely with their expectations.

Find the Meaning Behind the Volunteer Experience

For me, that became clear through my own experience volunteering at a soup kitchen. At the time, I was working on Wall Street, dealing with highly technical derivatives contracts and spending my days in an abstract, conceptual environment. On Saturdays, I would go to the soup kitchen and work with 200 pounds of ground beef, actually creating something physical with my hands. That experience was incredibly meaningful to me, and it kept me coming back week after week, month after month, and year after year.

At the time, I couldn't have articulated exactly why. Looking back, I realize that I was drawn to the creativity and the physicality of producing something real in contrast to my day job. That insight is powerful because if an organization can understand what people are getting from the experience—what need or desire it is fulfilling—it can nurture the relationship in a much more meaningful way.

Strategy 2: Capture Meaningful Information at Scale

Understanding individual intentions sounds great, but the challenge is doing it at scale. When you give people opportunities to share information in an open-ended way, you can learn much more about their motivations than you will from a form filled with dropdown menus.

There's a tension here because organizations and their technology systems need structured data. The answer isn't to choose between rich narratives and structured information. Technology can help you collect richer information in ways that can ultimately be translated into useful, structured data. The goal is to make it easy for people to share information and easy for your team to turn that information into action.

At Golden, for example, we're exploring natural-language chat interfaces that ask volunteers about their intentions: What brings you here? What's meaningful to you? We also use gamification around skills and abilities, allowing people to identify things they're proud of, such as being CPR-certified or having legal training. Those profiles can help organizations identify meaningful volunteer opportunities while also giving volunteers a way to express aspects of their identity that would be difficult to capture through a conventional donation form.

The key is that narratives are useful, but they ultimately need to be stored in a structured way if you want to unlock their potential. Rich information about motivations, skills, and identity can become useful when it is connected to the systems and workflows an organization uses to engage people.

Strategy 3: Create Meaningful Moments and Use Them

Once you have a richer understanding of your volunteers, the next question is what you do with it. One opportunity is to identify moments when the connection between a volunteer and your organization is particularly strong and use those moments to deepen the relationship.

For example, at Golden we can identify moments when volunteers are reflecting on an experience. They may upload photos or share a story about something meaningful that happened during their service. Instead of waiting days or weeks and sending them a generic drip campaign, you can recognize that moment and connect it to a relevant call to action while the experience is still fresh. A volunteer might be invited to support the specific work they just experienced through a donation.

There can also be meaningful moments when a volunteer can't fulfill a commitment. If someone has to cancel a soup kitchen shift, for example, that moment can become an opportunity to invite them to contribute financially instead. Recognition can create another kind of meaningful moment: when someone completes their 10th volunteer shift or 100th hour, you can create social media assets that allow them to celebrate their achievement and share it with their network. A donation request might accompany that recognition, or it might not. The point is to recognize the moment and strengthen the person's connection to the organization.

Think in Moments, Not Just Transactions

One concept I find especially useful comes from The Power of Moments. The idea is that certain points in an experience become disproportionately meaningful: moments of elevation, insight, pride, and connection. Organizations can be intentional about creating those moments or helping people recognize them when they happen.

If you can manufacture meaningful moments and help people appreciate them, you create experiences that can have a lasting effect on their relationship with your organization. That applies not only to volunteer engagement but also to community-building, fundraising, and the broader supporter experience.

Strategy 4: Understand and Acknowledge Your Advocates

The fourth strategy is to recognize the people who are driving engagement behind the scenes. It's easy to measure first-order contributions: How many hours did someone volunteer? How much money did they personally donate? But there is another layer of impact that technology can help organizations see.

Consider the volunteer who shares an opportunity with friends and coworkers and recruits additional volunteers. That person may be contributing far more to your organization's reach than their own volunteer hours suggest. These people are multipliers because they're using their existing relationships and networks to bring others into your organization.

At Golden, this is reflected in the concept of deep influence. When a volunteer shares a link to an opportunity, the link can be unique to that person and tracked to show how many people sign up through it. That allows an organization to identify its super fans and recognize them for the impact they're having—not just for completing their own 10th shift or 100th hour, but for recruiting 20 new volunteers or bringing new people into the organization.

That recognition can change the narrative around what it means to be impactful. A volunteer's contribution isn't limited by their personal availability or their personal wallet. When they become an advocate who brings others into the organization, their potential impact expands significantly.

From Volunteer Management to Relationship Building

The broader vision is to create more durable relationships between individuals and organizations. That starts with understanding the people who enter your ecosystem: why they're volunteering, what skills and abilities they bring, and what kinds of opportunities will be most meaningful to them.

The organization then needs tools to make sense of that information and identify how to engage each person effectively. Service shouldn't simply be a stopgap that fills an immediate need. It can be a meaningful experience that becomes part of a much longer relationship between an individual and an organization.

A Bit About Golden

Golden provides tools for organizations to manage their volunteer ecosystems, communicate with participants, understand their intentions, and reduce the administrative burden associated with volunteering. That includes things such as background checks, waivers, certificates of completion, and tracking volunteer hours.

Golden also has a mobile app that allows people to find local service opportunities and sign up in real time. The platform uses a participant-centered model in which individuals can maintain a portable record of their service across organizations. That makes it possible to recognize people for their service and credentials across their broader volunteering history rather than keeping that history isolated within a single organization.

Audience Q&A

What is the biggest barrier to turning volunteers into super fans?

One of the biggest organizational limitations is a lack of internal connectivity. Organizations often don't think about the potential for volunteers to become something beyond exceptional volunteers. Imagine knowing that someone who signed up for a Saturday soup kitchen shift is also interested in board service. That information would fundamentally change how you engage that person.

The challenge is making that visibility possible at scale. Understanding someone's skills, abilities, goals, and interests can reveal pathways that aren't obvious from their initial volunteer activity. Technology can help organizations capture and connect that information so teams can see the broader potential in their volunteers.

How did Golden help Surfider Foundation move from a “clipboard” model to a more connected volunteer system?

Surfider Foundation has dozens of volunteer-led chapters, where local volunteers historically managed activities such as beach cleanups using paper sign-in sheets and waivers. That information often never made its way back to the national organization, which meant thousands of highly engaged volunteers were effectively invisible in the organization's CRM and there was little opportunity for follow-up or continued engagement.

Golden enabled Surfider's chapters to use its volunteer tools and send that information back to the national organization. The result was tens of thousands of volunteer records entering the CRM rather than disappearing into a local paper process. The organization could then gain visibility into people who had already demonstrated a high level of commitment by giving their time and energy.

How much information should nonprofits ask volunteers to provide?

The honest answer is that it depends on the organization's constituents. The broader principle is to build trust and avoid trying to collect everything immediately. Asking for too much information upfront can make people question your intentions or create friction in the relationship.

Be transparent about why you're asking for information and how it will be used. If you need someone's geographic information to route them to an appropriate opportunity, explain that. You can also find ways to encourage people to proactively provide information—for example, through recognition programs, badges, rewards, or other mechanisms that make the information useful to the volunteer as well as the organization.

How can organizations identify and nurture their super volunteers?

A useful model is to understand what makes someone a super fan in the first place. It might be the person who consistently volunteers, but it could also be someone who advocates for the organization, recruits others, or shares its work on social media. Organizations can look at different forms of engagement and identify the trajectory that makes sense for their particular mission.

The example of Team Rubicon illustrates this idea. As the organization matured, it moved from a loosely organized volunteer model toward a structured system that trained volunteers and prepared them to become part of a professional disaster-response workforce. The organization collected leads, nurtured them through training, and developed volunteers over time rather than waiting for an emergency to find out who was ready to respond.

How can gamification encourage volunteer engagement?

Golden has experimented with several approaches, including an in-platform currency called “carrots” that volunteers could accrue through service and redeem for opportunities such as entries into experiences. Another approach is profile badges and credentials that recognize skills, accomplishments, and participation.

The underlying idea is to take information the organization is already collecting and turn it into moments of recognition for volunteers. Even small, time-bound recognition programs can be effective. One example from a nonprofit swim team used a month-long swimming challenge and merit badges to recognize milestones, resulting in a significant increase in participation.

Closing

Turning volunteers into super fans starts with a change in perspective. Volunteering isn't simply a transaction in which someone gives an organization a few hours. It can be the beginning of a relationship in which the organization learns what motivates that person, creates meaningful experiences, recognizes their contributions, and gives them opportunities to deepen their engagement.

The goal isn't to force volunteers into becoming donors. It's to understand the broader ways people can contribute and create the conditions for deeper engagement to happen organically. When organizations recognize the people who show up, advocate, recruit others, and connect deeply with the mission, they can turn individual acts of service into lasting relationships and a much broader network of support.

This transcript has been lightly edited using AI for clarity and readability, with timestamps, filler language, audience participation, and transcript artifacts removed while preserving the speaker's examples, terminology, and key points.