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50 Reasons Why It Is Hard to Run a Nonprofit — Challenge 29: Cost of Volunteer Guidelines, Training, and Supervision
Here's the math that so many executive directors do in their heads: "We have 80 volunteers. A volunteer coordinator costs $50,000. That's $625 per volunteer per year — just for the coordinator. Before training. Before background checks. Before insurance. Before anything else."
And the conclusion that follows: "We can't afford that."
I understand the math. I've sat across the table from EDs who are stretching every dollar. But there's a second calculation most organizations never do — and it changes the answer completely.
The nonprofit sector has marketed volunteer programs as a low-cost service delivery strategy for decades. Volunteers are "free." They donate their time. The organization gets labor without payroll.
None of that is true.
Independent Sector values a volunteer hour at $36.14 (2025 data, released April 2026). That figure is based on Bureau of Labor Statistics average hourly earnings. An average volunteer contributing 52 hours per year generates roughly $1,879 in labor value.
That's real economic value. And like any asset, it requires investment to maintain.
Here's what happens when you don't invest: roughly one-third of volunteers don't come back the following year. The national retention rate hovers around 65%. Every volunteer who leaves takes their $1,879 in annual labor value with them — plus whatever you spent to recruit, screen, and onboard them.
The first-year dropout rate is even worse: approximately 35% of new volunteers leave within twelve months, often due to inadequate onboarding. They showed up ready to help. The organization wasn't ready for them.
The common objection to investing in volunteer management is that the organization can't afford it. But here's the thing: you're already paying for it. You're just paying in ways that don't show up on a budget line.
A PACE Funders Forum analysis of volunteer program costs found that the actual expenses are routinely underbudgeted because supervision time is distributed across departments and never captured in the volunteer program budget.
A hospital volunteer program officially budgets six staff positions for volunteer coordination. But it does not budget the time of approximately 100 hospital employees who supervise volunteers daily, give assignments, answer questions, and correct mistakes. That supervision time — invisible in the budget — may dwarf the coordinator's salary.
Your organization is doing the same thing. Every hour a program director spends orienting a volunteer, every time a staff member fixes a data entry error, every meeting where someone discusses "what to do about" a volunteer who isn't working out — that's volunteer management cost. You're just not calling it that.
So what would it cost to do this properly? Less than most EDs assume.
A volunteer coordinator: $47,000 to $85,000 per year depending on scope and market, with the nonprofit sector median at $47,000. For an 80-volunteer program, that's $588 per volunteer per year — to have someone whose actual job is making the program work.
Background checks: $30 to $50 per volunteer. For a 100-volunteer program, that's $3,000-$5,000 total. One negligent hiring lawsuit costs orders of magnitude more.
Volunteer accident insurance: $2.15 to $3.95 per volunteer per year. For a 100-volunteer organization, total coverage runs roughly $1,500 annually. As I wrote in Challenge 27, that's less than many nonprofits spend on their holiday party.
Training and onboarding: Variable, but the cost of NOT training is measurable. Organizations that fail to onboard volunteers properly lose 35% of them in the first year. Each lost volunteer represents $1,879 in labor value plus whatever you spent to recruit them.
Add it all up for a 100-volunteer program: roughly $55,000-$60,000 per year for a coordinator, screening, insurance, and basic training infrastructure. Those 100 volunteers, at 52 hours each and $36.14 per hour, generate approximately $187,900 in labor value.
That's a better than 3:1 return — and it doesn't count the mission value, the community goodwill, or the donor relationships that often grow out of volunteer engagement.
You would never put an untrained, unscreened, unsupervised employee in front of clients. No executive director would hire someone, skip the background check, hand them a client file, and say "figure it out."
But that is exactly what many nonprofits do with volunteers.
Volunteers often perform the same work as paid staff — sometimes higher-risk work, since volunteer roles frequently involve direct contact with vulnerable populations. Yet the infrastructure that supports them is a fraction of what supports employees doing comparable tasks.
The question isn't whether you can afford volunteer management. It's why you would hold volunteers to a lower standard than employees doing the same work.
Here is one finding that should change how you allocate your volunteer management budget: 79% of people who leave — whether jobs or volunteer roles — cite lack of appreciation as a primary factor.
Recognition programs cost almost nothing. A handwritten note. A mention at a board meeting. An annual appreciation event that doubles as a retention tool. These interventions are nearly free compared to every other investment on the list — and they address the single biggest driver of volunteer turnover.
Organizations that improve volunteer engagement can decrease turnover by up to 43%. Moving from 65% retention to 80% retention means keeping 15 additional volunteers per 100 — worth roughly $28,000 in labor value. For the cost of some thank-you cards and a pizza dinner.
Run one calculation. Take your total volunteer hours from last year. Multiply by $36.14. That's the labor value your volunteers contributed.
Now ask: what did you spend to recruit, screen, train, supervise, insure, and recognize them?
The math in this post suggests proper management — a coordinator, screening, insurance, training, and recognition — runs roughly 30% of the labor value generated. If your investment is a fraction of that, you're underinvesting. And the volunteers who didn't come back this year are telling you the same thing.
This is part of an ongoing series exploring the 50 challenges outlined in Managing Your Nonprofit for Resilience (Wiley, 2023). Subscribe to Nonprofit Good News Premium for implementation tools and deeper analysis.