You know your volunteer program is not working, but it can fail at different points, and finding volunteers is a different fix from keeping them.
This finds which part is failing and hands you an ordered plan, so you build the piece you actually need. It is a sorting instrument, not a fix. It will not design roles, recruit, train, or help you keep anyone. It is not a judgment of your volunteers, who are giving you their time for free. It is a short, honest read that ends with a written plan, and it takes about an hour. The honesty it asks for is about whether you are giving volunteers something genuinely worth their time.
A volunteer who may pose a risk to the people you serve is not a diagnostic, it is a safety matter for the right professional, acted on now, especially where a vulnerable person may be involved. Handle that first, then come back to this.
You cannot diagnose a volunteer program from good intentions. You diagnose it from where volunteers actually drift away or stand idle. Snapshot the program you have, how many volunteers, what they do, how you find them, what preparation they get, how you keep in touch. Then name where it breaks: you cannot find them, they do not stick, they have nothing real to do, or you cannot coordinate them.
Open the Volunteer Program Snapshot →Now place your trouble at the failing part, because the part decides the guide. Answer each the way the program really works.
A leader who cares about the mission assumes volunteers feel it too, and often they do not. One honest question corrects for that. Ask it of yourself and, separately, of a current volunteer, and compare. Where the volunteer's answer is worse than yours, trust the volunteer's.
Open the Volunteer Reality Check →Turn the finding into a plan that names your first guide, what follows, and a start date. Where more than one is true, the order is roles, then recruitment, then training, then engagement, because you cannot recruit for or keep volunteers in roles you have not designed.
Open the Volunteer Priority Plan →Two moments here call for someone outside these pages. If there is an active safety or legal concern about a volunteer, a volunteer who may pose a risk to the people you serve, that is not a diagnostic, it is a safety matter for the right professional now. And if the diagnostic surfaced that you are leaning on volunteers to carry work that genuinely needs paid staff, that is not a volunteer problem a better program will fix, it is a staffing and money reality, and it goes to the staffing and HR work and the money side of it.
You can say, in one plain sentence, whether your volunteer problem is roles, recruitment, training, or engagement. You have a written plan naming a first guide and a date. And you looked at the program from a volunteer's side, not only your own.
Once the acute problem is handled and volunteers are steadier, it is worth stepping back to look at the whole organization. There is a short whole-organization check-up waiting when you are ready. That is not a pitch. It is the next honest thing to look at. The whole-organization check-up →