One thing I see again and again across my volunteering and fundraising work is that it's so often the same people giving both their time and their money. Yet in many charities, volunteering and fundraising sit in separate teams, with separate data and separate plans.
£2 million a year from volunteers
While interviewing organisations for a volunteer strategy project, I spoke to one charity that had worked hard to break down the silos between its volunteering and fundraising teams. As a result, it was raising over £2 million a year in direct debits from its volunteer community.
Many of the organisations I work with are cautious about asking volunteers for donations, or haven't looked at whether their volunteers are already giving. I understand the caution. Nobody wants volunteers to feel their time isn't enough. But if people love a cause, they're often open to supporting it in lots of ways, and it's respectful to give them the choice.
Community fundraising: where it often starts
Community fundraising is one area where the overlap is clearest. It simply couldn't happen without volunteers.
For many people, meeting a volunteer at an event or in their community is their first human contact with a charity. Those short, flexible, one-off roles are often the way in to a deeper, lifelong commitment, of time, money, or both.
I've worked alongside lots of brilliant community fundraising teams, and in my experience, fundraisers make naturally brilliant volunteer managers. They're great at building relationships, thanking people well and helping supporters feel part of something.
Despite all that, the evidence suggests organisations are finding it harder to recruit community fundraising volunteers than they did a few years ago. That makes working together even more important.
Where to start
Joining up doesn't need a restructure. A few small first steps can help:
check, with the right consent in place, how many of your volunteers also donate, and how many donors also volunteer
map a supporter journey together, from first contact onwards, and look at where the two teams' messages overlap or clash
mystery shop each other's sign-up routes (when I do this, around half of my volunteering enquiries never get a reply)
plan one campaign or moment together, such as Volunteers' Week
ask supporters how they'd like to be involved, rather than deciding for them
Thinking of supporters as whole people
Supporters don't see themselves as "volunteers" or "donors". They see themselves as people who care about a cause. When our teams work together, we can give them a more joined-up experience, and in my experience, that's when they stay with us for the long term.
I'd love to hear from organisations that have brought these teams closer together. What made it work?