Twelve people signed up. Two of them ever showed up.
For anyone who runs the people side of a nonprofit and has watched a good recruitment push turn into a quiet inbox.
You post a call for volunteers. It is a good call. A real need, a clear cause, and a form at the bottom.
Twelve people sign up in one week. That is a win, and it feels like one.
The week fills up with things that were already on fire. Four of the twelve get a reply, usually two weeks later, from someone’s personal inbox, written in five minutes between meetings. Two write back. One turns up to a meeting. The other eleven just disappear. Nobody ever sends the message that says they are gone.
By the time you run the next campaign, the old list has gone cold and nobody wants to touch it. The room decides that recruitment did not work.
Recruitment did work. Twelve people said yes. You lost them after the form, in the part of the process nobody was watching.
Willingness has a short shelf life. A volunteer is most willing on the day they sign up. That is the peak, not the starting point. A week of silence and the feeling cools. Two weeks, and the person has quietly decided you did not really need them after all. The yes was not delayed. It was withdrawn, and it happened on your side of the form.
Nobody knows what they said yes to. "We need volunteers" asks a stranger to invent their own job description. Most people cannot do that from a Facebook post. They do not know how many hours it is, how long it runs, or who they would speak to if they showed up. So they wait to be told, and nobody tells them, and waiting looks a lot like losing interest even when it is not.
The first meeting has nothing in it. A new volunteer turns up, sits through an hour of introductions and background, and goes home with no task and no date to come back for. Attention without work does not turn into commitment. It turns into "let me know when you need me", which is a polite way of leaving.
Before you read on, it is worth doing one thing. Pull up your last intake and count four numbers: how many people signed up, how many got a reply, how many came to something once, and how many are still around after three months. Most organisations have never put those four numbers next to each other. Once you do, the leak is usually obvious, and it is usually earlier in the process than anyone assumed.
Build the intake before the call
Start with the reply. Decide, before the next call goes out, how fast a real person will get back to someone who signs up. Three working days is realistic for most volunteer-run teams. Then write that promise into the call itself, not into an internal document nobody reads. "You will hear from a named person within three working days" does two things at once. It forces you to hit the number, and it tells the applicant this is a place that follows through.
Then fix who is answering. Name one person to own replies for that intake round, and a second person to cover the weeks the first one is away. This is not a structural change. It is one line in a shared document that says "Maria owns October intake, Jonas covers if she is away". A reply now has an owner with a name behind it.
Next, give the first meeting a task instead of an agenda. Handing someone a handbook to read is homework, not a task, and most people quietly never do it. A task is small, real, and has a date attached. "Call two members on this list before Thursday and ask how the autumn programme is going for them" is a task. It gives the new volunteer something to do with their willingness while it is still fresh.
To be clear, a good manual still matters. This is not an argument against writing things down. But a manual on its own is not onboarding, and treating it as the finished product is its own trap. A document can only hold so much before people stop absorbing it. Some volunteers learn from a page and some need to see it done once. That is a subject on its own, and I will come back to it in a future issue. For this one, the short version is simple. Write the manual, and still give the first task.
Last, stop recruiting for "help". Recruit for a role with a name. Compare "we need volunteers for outreach" with "Membership Support Volunteer, four hours a month, six month term, reports to Maria". The second version can be said yes to, because the person knows what they are agreeing to and can picture themselves doing it. The first version can only be vaguely intended, and vague intentions are what fill your list with people who signed up and never showed.
None of these four things need new software or a bigger budget. They need someone to decide them once, write them down, and then stick to the reply window the next time twelve people say yes.
The unglamorous fix that works
I designed the intern onboarding and coaching process for a pan-European volunteer movement of 38,000+ members across 31 countries, and led the build of a GDPR compliant applicant tracking setup underneath it.
Most of the change was structural and fairly unglamorous. Applications stopped living in private inboxes and got a status, an owner and a next step each. Supervisors went through a short training, so the first conversation with a new volunteer went the same way whether it was run by someone in their third week or their third year. None of it was clever. It was mostly the discipline of writing down who does what, and then checking that it happened.
Check the real reply time
How long does it take today for someone who signs up with you to hear from an actual person? Worth checking. Most people who ask themselves that question are estimating, and the real number tends to be worse than the guess.
Ermal Asllani
People Ops for Decentralised Organisations
Behind the Mission goes out every second week, on the people side of running a decentralised organisation.