Engaged supporters are key to your nonprofit’s success. For your organization to retain a strong base of support, you need a consistent strategy for communicating with donors and cultivating relationships throughout the year. However, managing all of these crucial relationships can be a challenge.

That’s where your nonprofit’s CRM, or constituent relationship management software, comes in. This platform houses all of your supporter data and comes equipped with other valuable features you can leverage to boost supporter engagement. But to access these benefits, you have to know how to use your CRM effectively. We’ll explore the following best practices that can help you leverage yours:

1. Analyze CRM Data to Learn About Your Supporters
2. Create Segments to Personalize Outreach
3. Leverage Automation Features
4. Build Out Your Technology Stack

Whether your nonprofit uses a highly customizable platform like Salesforce for Nonprofits or a more basic donor database, you can use these tips to maximize your CRM’s unique potential to engage supporters. Let’s dive in!

1. Analyze CRM Data to Learn About Your Supporters

By housing all your supporter data in one place, you can more easily see overarching trends and patterns in your donor base. Through analysis, you can then unlock key insights to help you determine the best engagement strategy for your audience.

Specifically, your CRM helps you learn about your supporters’:

• Giving habits and preferences. Knowing how individual donors prefer to give helps you tailor fundraising appeals, increasing the chance they’ll engage with your requests. For instance, a donor who gives $15 a month is far more likely to respond to a tailored increase request asking for $20 than a standardized message that asks for $50. Plus, you may discover wider giving trends—such as peak donation periods—that can inform the structure and timing of future fundraising campaigns. 
• Charitable interests. Each of your donors has their own reasons for supporting your nonprofit. By analyzing giving data and looking into supporters’ involvement history, you can find out which aspects of your mission each donors engage with most. For example, you might find that one supporter volunteers to help with local food pantries. To better engage this supporter, you would send them information about an upcoming food insecurity campaign.
• Preferred type of involvement. Learning which supporters prefer to attend events, volunteer, or participate in advocacy helps you determine the most relevant types of involvement to promote to them. Of course, supporters can get involved with multiple parts of your nonprofit—volunteers often make great donors. However, be conscious of how supporters first choose to interact with your nonprofit and send them materials that align with their expressed interests. 
• Employment information. Ask supporters to share the name of their employer and potentially even their job title. With this information, you can find donors whose employers participate in corporate philanthropy. Then, encourage these supporters to engage with your nonprofit through their employer’s CSR portal to earn extra support for your organization, like matching gifts. 
• Communication preferences. There is a wide range of ways to stay in touch with your donors, and chances are that many of them have a specific way they’d prefer for your nonprofit to reach out. Allow supporters to share whether they’d like you to contact them via email, text message, social media, direct mail, or some other platform. 

With this data, you can create tailored stewardship strategies that are designed to engage your most important supporters. As you learn more about each individual, make sure to record the information in your CRM to tailor your strategies even further in the future.

2. Create Segments to Personalize Outreach

Personalizing your communications with supporters is vital for maintaining a high donor retention rate. To convince supporters to stick around and continue engaging with your organization, show your donors that you’re paying attention to their specific contributions and value them as individuals.

Fortunately, your CRM doesn’t just store supporter data but also allows you to arrange it to divide donors into segments based on shared characteristics. Group your supporters based on an attribute that might impact how you would communicate with them, like: 

• Giving preferences. Consider how you would reach out to a donor who prefers to give by check over one who always makes online donations. 

• Involvement methods. Use the data you’ve collected on donor engagement and continue promoting ways to get involved that align with their interests. 

• Length of time as a donor. New donors need an introduction to your organization and an extra initial push to persuade them to stick around long-term. In contrast, long-term donors still require routine communication, but there’s no need to continually go over the basics with them. 

Use grouping strategies like these to enhance the personalization of your messages. For example, one of your involvement method segments might consist of all past volunteers. From there, you could narrow it down further into a group of those who volunteered at least 10 hours this year and those who volunteered over 20 hours together. To engage the volunteers in both of these segments, craft two different volunteer thank-you messages that recognize each individual’s contributions.

3. Leverage Automation Features

Your CRM likely comes equipped with a variety of automation features to make your staff’s lives easier. These tools save your staff time, cut down on manual data entry, and mitigate data loss—but you can also leverage them to engage supporters. Often, these features allow you to:

• Auto-fill donor profiles with information from your online giving page when a supporter donates.
• Automatically send donation receipts, thank-you emails, or reminder texts when supporters take specific actions.
• Fill in email templates with personal details from your donor profiles, such as supporter names and gift sizes.

Marketing automation tools within your CRM can be especially useful for fostering supporter relationships. According to Redpath Consulting Group, these tools seamlessly pull data from your CRM into automatically tailored donor communications, handling personalization and other baseline stewardship strategies for you. Some tools even allow you to create complex automations that use branched logic to increase personalization.

For instance, you might create an automated email stream that sends supporters a feedback survey after they attend an event. After the initial email, the email stream might branch in two directions: supporters who fill out the survey receive a personalized thank-you email, while those who don’t fill out the survey receive a few reminder emails spaced out over a week.

4. Build Out Your Technology Stack

Finally, don’t limit yourself to the features that come with your base CRM. Many CRMs have add-ons available to expand your technology’s capabilities and meet any additional needs you may have.

For example, if you use Salesforce, you can browse hundreds of native and third-party apps for nonprofits and choose the ones that best fit your technology needs. Double the Donation’s list of the best Salesforce apps includes several types of apps that are designed to help you engage supporters, such as:

• Matching gift software. Integrating a matching gift tool with your CRM helps you find out which of your donors are eligible for a corporate match and automatically lets them know, greatly increasing your fundraising potential while adding another layer of supporter engagement. 

• Event management apps. If your nonprofit hosts a lot of fundraising events, you can simplify event planning and management by integrating virtual event tools with your CRM. These tools can help you create events that resonate with your audience and yield a better turnout.

• Nonprofit marketing tools. Need to refresh your donor communication strategies? Expand your marketing automation capabilities, manage complex promotional campaigns, or tap into a new marketing channel with these apps.

If you’re not sure where to start, a nonprofit technology consultant can help you find the best solutions and even implement them for you. Look for qualified experts with nonprofit experience who will evaluate your existing technology and work by your side to determine the best path forward. Be sure to let potential consultants know that your goal is to better engage supporters with your CRM’s help.

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As you try out these strategies, keep track of your results and don’t be afraid to pivot your approach when necessary. With your CRM as your organization’s technological foundation, you’ll be on your way to creating a stronger community of supporters who feel personally connected to your nonprofit.

Salesforce is one of the top CRM providers for businesses, associations, and nonprofits. As a nonprofit professional, you may be familiar with Salesforce’s nonprofit solution Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP), built on top of its core CRM as a comprehensive, user-friendly fundraising tool and CRM.

Thousands of organizations have found success with NPSP over the years, so much so that Salesforce decided to transition its nonprofit-specific technology to a more robust offering in Nonprofit Cloud. Nonprofit Cloud boasts more features, a new data model, and a stable infrastructure within Salesforce. However, Salesforce plans to continue supporting NPSP, leaving nonprofits to question if switching to Nonprofit Cloud is right for their organization.

In this guide, we’ll explore the basics of Nonprofit Cloud and why it might be best for your organization to implement this new tool. Let’s start by covering what Nonprofit Cloud is and what it means for nonprofits using NPSP.

What is Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud?

As Fíonta’s guide to the Salesforce nonprofit family explains, Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud is an expansion of the existing package of nonprofit technology. Nonprofit Cloud is meant to be a one-stop-shop for nonprofit organizations, offering technology to assist with case and program management. Fundraising features will be added as soon as Winter 2023.

Why Use or Switch to Nonprofit Cloud?

1. It is a core product on the Salesforce platform.

NPSP is essentially a set of apps installed on the Salesforce platform, often called a managed package. While nonprofits using NPSP were able to take advantage of new releases from Salesforce, managed packages are not considered core products and have more difficulty smoothly connecting with other Salesforce tools.

Salesforce’s core products are considered foundational to the platform, whereas managed packages function as extensions of the core product, often developed by a third party or Salesforce partner. While both can be effective tools for nonprofits, here are some considerations to keep in mind about core products like Nonprofit Cloud:

• It will receive investments from Salesforce. As a core product, Salesforce will invest more heavily in Nonprofit Cloud in the future. Nonprofits using Nonprofit Cloud can count on continued updates and use it alongside other Salesforce offerings outside of the NPSP data model.
• It is one of the Salesforce Industry Clouds. Salesforce offers collections of cloud-based tools designed specifically for different industries, such as the Financial Services Cloud. Nonprofits in industries that require precise reporting and compliance features, like healthcare organizations, can easily connect with data stored in Nonprofit Cloud to other relevant Industry Clouds.
• It is built on the Industry Data Model. The Industry Data Model is the model used by all of the Salesforce Industry Cloud Solutions. This means that going forward, Nonprofit Cloud users can seamlessly access and implement tools from other industry clouds. For example, your nonprofit might leverage tools from the Financial Services cloud for tasks like donor management, data analytics, wealth screening, and financial tracking.

Overall, this means that it will be possible for nonprofits to use more of Salesforce’s offerings. However, migrating to the new data model can be time- and labor-intensive. For advice on how to navigate this change and prepare your data for the transition, consider working with an industry expert such as a Salesforce partner.

2. It offers access to more tools.

Because of its Industry Cloud status, Nonprofit Cloud can provide your nonprofit with more tools through the Common Features available for use in multiple Industry Clouds.

Some new offerings your nonprofit could take advantage of with Nonprofit Cloud include:

• OmniStudio. Using OmniStudio, your nonprofit can develop positive, guided user experiences. For example, you might use this feature to guide supporters through your organization’s volunteer onboarding process, improving your stewardship efforts. OmniStudio does not rely on custom code but instead offers drag-and-drop configuration capabilities so you can set up these guided experiences in just a few clicks. For NPSP users, this is somewhat similar to Flow or Apex.
• Actionable Relationship Center (ARC). This tool is similar to the NPSP’s Relationship Viewer, but it offers a more comprehensive and easy-to-visualize way to view donor relationships. If your nonprofit uses Experience Cloud, you can further customize it with ARC. For example, you might allow partner organizations to view ARC relationship graphs to understand how they’re connecting with your supporters.
• Identity Verification. This feature offers an easy way for your nonprofit to validate an individual’s identity before allowing them to access certain pages of your website or disclosing sensitive information. This is important for staff members, volunteers, and program participants who may access or be told sensitive data.

Remember that no matter which of these features your nonprofit may need to use, they will integrate seamlessly with the other features included in Nonprofit Cloud.

3. It supports long-term scalability.

Nonprofit Cloud is designed to accommodate your nonprofit’s growing and changing needs, helping you better manage projects, oversee staff and operations, and obtain sustainable funding.

Additionally, its data analysis and reporting tools, like Einstein Analytics, are built to support growing organizations with large volumes of data. For example, when creating your annual report, you follow best practices such as those outlined in Double the Donation’s guide to annual reports that advise you to use concrete data and statistics. Because you use Nonprofit Cloud, you quickly and easily organize your data and generate custom reports that reveal the exact statistics needed for the report.

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To weigh the pros and cons of switching to Nonprofit Cloud, consider working with a managed services partner who can provide their expertise, assist you in implementing new technology, and optimize the solutions and apps in your toolkit.

It’s no secret that highly involved supporters are essential for your nonprofit to further its mission. Retaining donors and building long-term relationships with them allows you to bring in the consistent funding you need to run your programs and operate your organization. Plus, your volunteers, event participants, and advocates play their own critical roles in your mission, so it’s also important to keep them engaged.

Data-driven supporter engagement strategies tend to be the most successful, and you likely have a lot of information stored in your donor database that you can reference. However, this data needs to be analyzed in order to provide actionable insights. The conclusions drawn from this process are collectively known as donor analytics.

In this guide, we’ll discuss four ways donor analytics can help your nonprofit boost supporter involvement, including:

1. Creating Targeted Appeals
2. Making Your Storytelling More Compelling
3. Sending Personalized Thank-You Messages
4. Improving Financial Management

To glean these insights, you first need to analyze the right information. Jitasa’s guide to donor analytics recommends looking at giving, engagement, demographic, and predictive donor data to better understand your supporters’ motivations and preferences for being involved with your nonprofit. Then, you can tailor your fundraising, marketing, and financial planning activities to those motivations and preferences. Let’s dive in!

1. Creating Targeted Appeals

Chances are your nonprofit runs a variety of different initiatives that you ask supporters to participate in. To maximize the number of supporters who respond to these appeals, use donor analytics to determine the best target audience for each opportunity. Then, tailor your communications to those audiences.

Some initiatives where targeted appeals can be particularly helpful include:

• Volunteer opportunities. In your database, make note of supporters’ interests that are relevant to certain areas of your mission. That way, you can promote your volunteer opportunities to those who are most likely to be interested in participating. For example, an animal shelter might keep track of which supporters prefer dogs or cats and advertise different volunteer positions accordingly.
• Matching gifts. By tracking donors’ employment information, you can identify those who work for a company with a matching gift program. Then, you can reach out to these donors individually to remind them to submit match requests to their employers each time they contribute, multiplying the impact of their gifts.
• Major gift solicitation. Analyzing supporters’ wealth and philanthropic markers allows you to identify potential major donors among your supporter base. A strong prospect needs to have both the financial capacity and the willingness to support your mission through a major gift. Supplement the information in your donor database with specialized prospect research tools to get a complete picture of each candidate before reaching out.

To figure out the best way for each supporter to be involved, leverage demographic data like their age, location, employer, and interests, as well as the predictive analytics drawn from wealth and philanthropic data. Analyzing information on supporters’ past giving and engagement can then help you decide how much money or time is reasonable to ask for in your appeal.

2. Making Your Storytelling More Compelling

Many nonprofits use storytelling to inspire supporters to get involved with their mission because stories engage supporters’ emotions more than facts alone. To make your stories even more compelling, leverage donor analytics to discover:

• What types of stories would catch your supporters’ attention. Supporters often like to see themselves in stories, so feature donors as main characters who share demographic characteristics and engagement histories with your target audience. Alternatively, if you want your story’s protagonist to be one of your organization’s beneficiaries, ensure the story aligns with your audience’s interests.
• Which marketing channels to use for storytelling. Donor engagement analytics also encompass the marketing content your supporters prefer to engage with. Determine which channels are receiving the most interactions and concentrate on telling compelling stories in those materials.

To see these tips in practice, let’s say an educational nonprofit is preparing to send out its year-end fundraising appeals, and the campaign’s primary target audience is Millennial donors. By analyzing demographic and engagement data, they determine that many supporters in that generation are interested in improving elementary education, and their preferred communication channels are email and social media.

With this in mind, the organization could convince this audience to donate by sharing stories about an elementary school’s students who achieved academic success through its free after-school tutoring program in their Instagram posts and email newsletter.

3. Sending Personalized Thank-You Messages

In addition to appeals, donor analytics can influence your follow-up communications after supporters engage with your organization. In particular, the insights you glean will help you send personalized thank-you messages that help donors feel valued.

To effectively leverage analytics for donor recognition, try these tips:

• Address each supporter by their preferred name. Along with other demographic data, make notes in your database about whether each supporter likes to be addressed by their title and last name, their first name, or a nickname in the greeting of a thank-you note.
• Mention the donor’s individual contributions. Review the donor’s giving and engagement history to thank them for the exact amount they gave, the number of hours they volunteered, or the ways they participated in your event or advocacy campaign.
• Provide an opportunity to give feedback. If a supporter fills out a survey or answers a satisfaction question, it shows that they care about their involvement with your organization. Not only can you use their responses to improve their experience, but you should also track which supporters give feedback as part of your engagement analytics.

According to eCardWidget, leveraging analytics to personally thank donors is important for retaining them. Supporters who feel valued are more likely to stay involved with your organization over time, saving you money on donor acquisition and ensuring consistent support.

4. Improving Financial Management

Although they may not be the first aspects that come to mind, your nonprofit financial management activities are essential to your supporter engagement strategy. Being transparent with donors about how you manage their contributions builds trust in your organization, which encourages them to stay involved.

Here are a few ways that donor analytics can apply to your nonprofit’s financial management:

• Budgeting. Analyzing supporters’ giving patterns helps you predict when you’re most likely to receive a large number of individual donations so you can allocate your funding accordingly. For instance, nonprofit giving often peaks at the end of the calendar year, so you might wait to launch a new program until after the new year to ensure you’ll have enough funding to do so.
• Revenue generation. Diversifying your funding allows you to bring in more sustainable revenue. Review your donors’ engagement histories and interests to determine what new revenue streams would appeal to your supporter base. For instance, you might decide to create a membership program to increase long-term involvement or add a new annual fundraising event to your calendar.
• Financial reporting. By tracking supporter contributions accurately, you can ensure you report your revenue and expenses correctly on your end-of-year financial statements. Plus, you’ll know which supporters you’ve sent donation acknowledgements to for tax deduction purposes.

While many nonprofits view fundraising and financial management as separate processes, they actually work together to further your mission. Therefore, make sure you don’t overlook financial management activities as you work on involving supporters more deeply in your organization’s efforts.

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When deciding whether to get involved with your nonprofit, supporters take a variety of considerations into account. Some of these include their personal interest in your mission and available opportunities, the experience of contributing their money or time, the potential impact of their involvement, and their trust in your organization. So, an engagement strategy that also considers these desires and is backed by donor analytics is most likely to succeed in boosting involvement at your nonprofit.

Your volunteers spend time pursuing your mission because they want to make a difference. They offer their skills, knowledge, and free time all because they want to see your organization succeed. They do so selflessly, but that doesn’t mean they don’t want your nonprofit to show volunteer appreciation.

Volunteers hold up the foundation of civil society by contributing in invaluable ways. Their hard work equates to an estimated $31.80 per hour, according to a recent Independent Sector volunteer report. In other words, keeping volunteers happy can have an incredible impact on your cause.

As a volunteer manager, it’s up to you to come up with memorable volunteer appreciation ideas that inspire people to stick around. It takes a little creativity to make your volunteer program stand out, though. If you’re running low on creative gifts, you’ve come to the right place. We’ll share everything you need to know about the art of volunteer appreciation and more than 20 standout ideas. Here’s what you’ll explore throughout this guide:

• The Volunteer Appreciation Fundamentals
• Our Favorite Volunteer Appreciation Ideas
• Volunteer Appreciation Event Ideas
• Inexpensive Volunteer Appreciation Gift Ideas
• Other Volunteer Appreciation Ideas For Nonprofits

By the end of this guide, you’ll have everything you need to communicate that you genuinely value your volunteers’ hard work. If you can’t wait to get started, let’s dive in!

The Volunteer Appreciation Fundamentals

What does it mean to recognize volunteers, and why should you do it? We’ll answer all of your burning questions below. That way, you can choose the right volunteer appreciation gifts that will resonate with supporters.

What Is Volunteer Appreciation?

Volunteer appreciation is the act of expressing gratitude and acknowledging the individuals who freely give their time, skills, and efforts to a charitable cause. Acknowledgment can be in the form of:

• A physical gift
• A thank-you letter
• A phone call
• An event
• An experience

It’s up to your nonprofit to determine which methods will communicate gratitude. A nonprofit that proactively thanks volunteers fosters a positive environment in which volunteers want to work. Doing so means you’re striving to foster a sense of belonging and continued engagement by highlighting volunteers’ vital roles in the success of the mission.

Why Does Volunteer Recognition Matter?

For those who are new to the volunteer manager role, expressing gratitude through grand gestures might seem silly. You might be wondering, “Can’t I just send a mass email to all my volunteers saying thanks?” You certainly can, but it’ll be a whole lot more meaningful if you put thought behind your approach to volunteer appreciation!

Going above and beyond with your volunteer appreciation gifts means you can experience these benefits:

• Motivation and Retention: Just like your fundraising team implements donor retention strategies, you need to retain volunteers. Fun volunteer appreciation ideas will motivate your volunteers to stick around and do their best work since they’ll see you appreciate it.
• Stronger Relationships: When you show that you value someone’s hard work, you’ll grow that individual’s loyalty to your organization.
• Positive Impact on Organizational Culture: Make your nonprofit a happy place for people to come together and make a difference. You’ll develop an inclusive and appreciative environment where people want to contribute.
• Volunteer Recruitment: By fostering a culture of gratitude, the word will get around to prospective volunteers. They’ll see just how much your value those who contribute to your cause, inspiring them to get on board, too.

Choosing creative and memorable volunteer appreciation gifts means you can transform your nonprofit’s volunteer program. In turn, you’ll multiply your impact and make more substantial strides toward your mission.

How Can You Make Your Volunteer Appreciation Efforts Memorable?

You don’t have to throw a full-blown volunteer appreciation event every month to say thanks in a memorable way. Although, those events can be a blast! Giving recognition can be as simple as sending a personalized letter or ringing them up on the phone.

To make any volunteer appreciation idea stand out, try out these strategies:

• Be creative. Come up with memorable volunteer appreciation ideas. Any nonprofit can send a mass thank-you email. Leveraging strategies like personalized eCards can take traditional methods up a notch.
• Be prompt. If you wait too long to reach out, that communicates that you don’t genuinely value their contributions. By the time they hear from you, they may forget they even volunteered for your nonprofit.
• Personalize the gift when possible. As explained in our donor recognition guide, you should tailor communications to each individual. Always be as specific as possible about the positive change their work has made. For example, if they worked one-on-one with at-risk youth, mention those kids or have them sign their names to the gift.

Bearing these best practices in mind, you can transform any volunteer appreciation gift into a memorable token of gratitude.

How Do You Recognize and Reward Volunteers?

It all depends on each volunteer and your nonprofit. There are plenty of great volunteer appreciation ideas out there, whether you want to send a tangible gift, ring them up to say thanks, or provide a memorable experience.

We recommend checking your nonprofit CRM for individuals’ preferences any time you want to say thanks. Kindful’s nonprofit CRM guide explains that you can segment supporters using specific filters and group them based on shared characteristics. That way, you can easily determine whether they want public or private recognition based on their past interactions with your team.

Our Favorite Volunteer Appreciation Ideas

With all that great background knowledge in mind, let’s move forward with some creative ideas we think you (and your volunteers) will love!

Thank-You eCards

If you’ve ever received a thank-you card, you know just how special greeting cards can be to the recipient. Now, you can use that same strategy to thank your volunteers. Even better, you can do so digitally with thank-you eCards for charities!

Personalized eCards are an interactive, inexpensive, and environmentally-friendly way to say thanks to your volunteers. You can have your team, beneficiaries, or other volunteers send them, making them perfect for peer-to-peer recognition.

For some real-world inspiration, check out this volunteer appreciation eCard campaign from Youth For Understanding:

They designed a collection of eCards like this one, enabling youth impacted by their program to reconnect with former volunteers, mentors, and staff members.

To replicate this volunteer appreciation gift, all you need is a platform to power your efforts. We recommend eCardWidget, a leader in the digital greeting card space. Their user-friendly platform equips you with everything you need to:

• Design custom eCards whether you want to use a template or start from scratch. Easily incorporate your nonprofit’s branding by uploading your logo, choosing from an array of fonts, and incorporating your brand’s color scheme.
• Upload eCards to your site using the convenient plugin, or share your eCard collection from eCardWidget using a link.
• Send eCards through a variety of outlets like email, social media, and text. That way, you can adhere to volunteers’ communication preferences.

Trusted by more than 4,000 organizations, eCardWidget is the ultimate resource for your volunteer appreciation needs! Not to mention, nonprofit eCards have tons of great other uses, whether you want to sell them or use them to invite people to events.

Thank-You Letters

Looking for a classic volunteer appreciation idea? Look no further than a thank-you letter.

Writing a letter to say thanks is one of our all-time favorite strategies. It offers plenty of personalization opportunities, and it shows that you spent time drafting it, making it meaningful to the recipient.

Our guide to crafting volunteer thank-you letters shares a few key elements you should always include:

• A salutation: Address the volunteer by name for a personal touch.
• Why you’re reaching out: Let volunteers know you want to thank them for all of their help right off the bat.
• Specific details regarding their impact: Be specific about what they contributed and how it impacted your beneficiaries.
• Upcoming opportunities: Encourage them to join you at one of your next volunteer events.
• Contact information: Let them know you’re happy to answer any questions about upcoming opportunities by providing contact information for a specific team member.
• A closing: Close the letter genuinely by saying you hope to see them again soon or that you wish them a happy holiday season if it’s around that time of year.

Whether you send it via direct mail or email, make sure to include those details in your letters. That way, your gratitude will shine through!

Volunteer Appreciation Event Ideas

Get some face-to-face time with your volunteers and go all out by throwing a full-blown volunteer appreciation event. Your supporters will love coming together, whether you’re meeting for dinner, a family movie night, or a casual happy hour.

As a bonus, you can use your eCard platform to create online invitations. Volunteers will be thrilled to receive a custom invitation in their inbox. Just be sure to include RSVP details and explain the purpose of the event (to say thanks, of course!).

Volunteer Appreciation Dinner

Host a special dinner to honor and celebrate your volunteers. You can either make reservations at a local spot or host it at a different venue and line up catering.

Either way, you’ll want to provide a delicious meal, fun entertainment, and speeches recognizing volunteers’ contributions.

Volunteer Recognition Award Ceremony

Organize an awards ceremony where you recognize your nonprofit’s outstanding volunteers. You can create award titles like:

• Volunteer of the Year
• Rising Star Volunteer
• Best Volunteer Ambassador
• Exemplary Dedication Award
• Most Infectious Volunteer Spirit

Then, present personalized certificates, trophies, or plaques inscribed with their names. Supporters, staff, and beneficiaries can vote on the different awards, making them a meaningful token of volunteer appreciation.

Family Picnic

Plan a fun outdoor picnic where volunteers can bring their families for a day filled with food, games, and activities. Choose a warm day and gather at a local park.

Perfect for relaxing, this volunteer appreciation event will provide a casual way to interact with one another and your organization.

Volunteer Appreciation Breakfast

Start the day off right with a breakfast event where you honor volunteers. Meet up before a volunteer event, or choose a weekend morning for everyone to gather.

Then, offer a range of breakfast options and deliver heartfelt speeches to say thanks.

Volunteers will enjoy filling up on their favorite breakfast foods like pancakes, bacon, eggs, and muffins thanks to your nonprofit. After all, breakfast is the most important meal of the day!

Volunteer Appreciation Lunch

If breakfast or dinner isn’t your jam, why not try a luncheon?

Put together a catered luncheon event where you treat volunteers to a delicious meal, engaging conversations, and uplifting speeches. Be sure to work in time to say thanks and highlight the impact of their contributions.

Volunteer Appreciation Day

If a meal isn’t enough, dedicate an entire day to recognizing volunteers’ outstanding accomplishments.

Bring everyone together for various activities, workshops, and team-building exercises. This is a great camaraderie-building and volunteer appreciation event in one!

Happy Hour

Some volunteers might love the chance to chat with your nonprofit’s team or network with others outside of volunteer opportunities.

Organize a casual after-work happy hour event at a local venue or at your organization’s office. Everyone can enjoy free drinks, snacks, and socializing.

Not only is this a wonderful volunteer appreciation event idea, but it also serves as an opportunity for networking and building camaraderie among volunteers.

Movie Night

Arrange a special movie night exclusively for your volunteers. Create a cozy atmosphere and stream an uplifting and inspiring movie.

You have a few options when choosing a venue for this volunteer appreciation event:

• Rent a room at your local movie theater.
• Create a cozy setup in your organization’s office.
• Set up a screen at a local park or other public venue.
• Stream it online for volunteers to enjoy in the comfort of their homes.

Be sure to offer refreshments like popcorn and candy for your volunteers to snack on during the film. If you’re going virtual, you can always drop off movie snacks at volunteers’ houses. Bonus points if the movie relates to your cause!

Volunteer Gala

Plan a grand gala to celebrate volunteers’ dedication and impact on your cause. Make the night extra special by:

• Featuring live performances
• Offering a catered formal dinner
• Lining up live performances
• Setting up a dance floor

The end result will be an elegant and memorable evening. Even if you don’t host a separate event exclusively for volunteers, you can provide free entry to your annual fundraising gala and dedicate part of the night to expressing gratitude.

Inexpensive Volunteer Appreciation Gift Ideas

Not every nonprofit has enough room in the budget to throw volunteer appreciation events, and that’s okay! Thankfully, there are plenty of cost-effective ideas that are perfect for nonprofits working on a budget.

Remember, the absolute most important aspect of volunteer appreciation is ingenuity. Even simple gestures and heartfelt messages can leave a positive impression and make volunteers feel valued and appreciated.

Volunteer Spotlights

Showcase your standout volunteers in your nonprofit newsletter or on your nonprofit’s social media. To do this, create a ‘Volunteer of the Month’ spotlight in which you feature someone who made an incredible impact over the past few weeks.

In your spotlight, include details like:

• Their accomplishments and the impact they’ve made
• A quote from them or from beneficiaries they impacted
• A picture of them, either smiling or hard at work

Other volunteers will see this and have the chance to offer their congratulations. Plus, it may make them step up their commitment, striving to be Volunteer of the Month next time around.

Birthday and Holiday Cards

Digital greeting cards aren’t just for saying thank you. Send eCards on special occasions to show volunteers you’re thinking of them. Send holiday eCards, birthday eCards, and other themed cards to celebrate important days.

This will keep your cause top of mind and show recipients that your nonprofit’s team cares about them on a personal level.

Bonus! Explore our digital cards guide to learn different eCard uses that’ll create powerful engagement opportunities and push your mission forward.

Personalized Photo Frames

Custom photo frames can be a heartfelt volunteer appreciation gift. Personalize each frame with the volunteer’s name, your nonprofit’s name, or a special message. Doing so adds a personal touch that makes the gift more meaningful.

Volunteers can use their frames to showcase special memories from serving your nonprofit, whether it’s a group photo or a snapshot of them in action.

Each time they look at the frame, they’ll be reminded of the time they spent with your nonprofit. Perfect for displaying at home or in their offices, photo frames are tangible, lasting tokens of volunteer appreciation that honor their contributions and dedication.

Thank-You Videos

For a touching yet inexpensive volunteer appreciation gift idea, create personalized videos expressing gratitude for each volunteer.

Tectonic Video’s guide to the best nonprofit videos explains that story videos help demonstrate the impact of your mission, taking viewers on an emotional journey through your nonprofit. We recommend specifically creating testimonial videos in which your staff or beneficiaries speak directly to volunteers about the difference they’ve made.

After all, nothing conveys impact quite like visual storytelling. Don’t just tell them about their impact; show them!

Digital Recognition Certificates

If you don’t have time to host an awards ceremony, create customized certificates to recognize your volunteers’ efforts instead. Include details like the number of hours they’ve contributed or the projects they’ve worked on.

You can use online templates or design your own to recognize individuals’ contributions and highlight specific achievements. By sending them virtually, you’ll save on printing and postage costs, too! Sending them digitally transforms recognition certificates into an incredibly inexpensive volunteer appreciation gift idea.

Other Volunteer Appreciation Ideas For Nonprofits

Still not sure you’ve found the perfect volunteer appreciation idea? Don’t worry; we’ve got plenty of other ideas!

Here are a handful of other creative gifts that can go a long way in communicating gratitude.

Branded Merchandise

Give your dedicated supporters a tangible token of volunteer appreciation by giving them free merchandise. Whether you have leftovers from a recent fundraiser or create a special line of merchandise, volunteers might love:

• Apparel like t-shirts and hats
• Tote bags
• Everyday items like mugs and keychains

When the merchandise incorporates elements of your nonprofit brand, this also works as free marketing. They’ll wear your apparel or use your mugs, keychains, or whatever else out in public. Strangers may strike up a conversation with them to learn more, transforming this into a super smart nonprofit marketing idea.

Skills Development Opportunities

People often volunteer to grow their professional skills or put their existing ones into practice. Those same volunteers might enjoy skills development opportunities such as:

• Virtual Workshops or Webinars: Organize exclusive virtual workshops or webinars on topics that interest your volunteers. It could be a skill-building session, a guest speaker series, or a panel discussion related to your organization’s mission. This provides them with continued learning opportunities and shows that their contributions are valued.
• A Volunteer Mentorship Program: Pair experienced volunteers with new or less-experienced volunteers. By offering a peer mentorship program, you’ll recognize the expertise of long-term volunteers while fostering a sense of community and support.

Either way, encouraging volunteers to expand their skills provides invaluable learning opportunities.

Volunteer Wall of Fame

Create a dedicated wall or bulletin board in your organization’s facilities where you showcase volunteers’ photos and stories.

This will serve as a visual recognition of their contributions while also livening up your workspace.

Gift Cards

Send volunteers digital gift cards to their favorite stores, popular coffee shops, and other local businesses. Then, they can treat themselves to something they enjoy, making it a fantastic way to express volunteer appreciation.

Chances are, there are some local businesses that would jump at the opportunity to exercise corporate social responsibility, so you wouldn’t have to pay for these out of pocket. These businesses might be willing to give you free gift cards or at least offer them at discounted rates.

Bonus! Use our free sponsorship letter templates to create personalized outreach that will help kickstart relationships with businesses.

Volunteer Time Capsule

Show off your lasting commitment to expressing volunteer appreciation with a time capsule. Fill the time capsule with meaningful items, photos, and messages from volunteers.

Then, seal it and open it during a future event or milestone celebration. This is a great way to remind everyone of the collective impact achieved thanks to their support over the years.

Volunteer Appreciation Cookbook

This gift idea takes a collective effort that’s worth the output!

Collect volunteers’ favorite recipes. Then, compile them into a volunteer appreciation cookbook. You can either share the cookbook digitally or print copies to distribute.

Volunteers will have a lifetime of recipes thanks to your team!

The Lasting Impact of Effective Volunteer Appreciation

Your volunteers are the heart and soul of your organization. If we had to guess, you want them to stick around for years to come. Make sure their selfless work doesn’t go unnoticed.

Spending time choosing the right volunteer appreciation gifts means you can effectively communicate how much you value your volunteers.

Remember, it doesn’t matter if you throw a lavish gala or send digital certificates. So long as you make it unique and memorable, they’ll recognize the effort you put in. In turn, their loyalty will grow, and they’ll be ecstatic to spend time pursuing your mission.

While you continue pondering your plans, check out some of these additional resources we pulled together:

• 20 Volunteer Appreciation Ideas To Foster Relationships. Need more volunteer appreciation gift ideas? Spark your creativity with this extensive list that shares plenty of other great gifts.
• Donation eCard Examples that Share the Joy of Giving. Digital greeting cards aren’t just for saying thanks. See examples of how real nonprofits have used eCards as a fundraising strategy.
• How to Thank Donors: Best Practices + 15 Effective Ideas. Thanking volunteers is a lot like thanking your donors. Check out these donor appreciation ideas, several of which can be used for volunteers too.