Where have all the volunteers gone?

In this guest blog, Laura Elson of Laura Elson Consulting reflects on volunteering in an ever changing world. Laura is a Strategic Volunteer Engagement Consultant and Associate of Almond Tree Consulting.

Why our approach to attracting volunteers needs to modernise

In the 20+ years I've worked in volunteer engagement, recruitment has changed beyond recognition.

In my first roles in the early 2000s, we were swamped: far more willing applicants than vacancies, and much of my time went on signposting people elsewhere. One manager wouldn't reply to an interested volunteer until they'd emailed three times, taking it as proof they were serious. Building a pipeline took little tactical thought. People simply came to us.

Today the story is very different. Ask anyone in a volunteer-involving organisation and you'll hear the same gloomy refrain: people just don't want to volunteer anymore.

The headline data seems to agree. The government's Community Life Survey shows formal volunteering in steady decline for well over a decade: in 2013/14, 27% of us volunteered at least monthly; by 2024/25 it was 17%, around one in six. The pandemic sharpened the fall, but it's part of a much longer trend.

In my work as a Volunteer Engagement Consultant, I keep reflecting on two key recruitment issues, and I'm convinced we can fix both.

Volunteering has a marketing issue

The first is marketing, or rather the lack of it. When organisations do try to reach new people, there's rarely much strategy behind it. Who are we trying to attract? What skills do we need? Where do they spend their time, and what would make volunteering appealing to them? That's less a criticism than a hangover from an era when applications outstripped vacancies and we never had to compete for attention, in real or digital spaces.

And the world has changed around us. People are time-poor, their spare hours going on caring for family or recovering from ever-more-demanding jobs. Political rhetoric is quietly recasting volunteering itself as suspect: unpaid labour to be questioned rather than a contribution to be valued.

Volunteering has an audience issue

The second problem is more fundamental, and much more hopeful.

Volunteering in the UK has deep Victorian roots and the model has proved extremely durable. Volunteer management has professionalised hugely, yet roles we often struggle to fill, like Speaker, Regional Committee Member and Collections Volunteer existed in the 1890s, and at their core, these roles have changed very little. Then and now, women who do not work, or have finished working make up the majority of traditional volunteer roles in many organisations. Back then and today the best route to a new volunteer is word of mouth from someone already involved. It's a powerful lever but one that is likely to recruit more similar people.

But that cohort of the newly retired, particularly women, is now the least able to help. Delayed pension ages and therefore retirement, the cost-of-living and widening health inequalities leave the people we've counted on increasingly short of the time, resources or health to give.

Meanwhile, appetite among younger generations is rising. British Heart Foundation research found 94% of Gen Z would consider volunteering, against 74% of baby boomers, and 52% said the cost-of-living crisis made them more likely to, against just 21% of the over-55s. Reach Volunteering signed up over 13,000 new volunteers in one year, mainly people under 40 from Global Majority backgrounds wanting to lend their skills to small charities. As Reach puts it, volunteering is thriving. Just not where we've traditionally looked.

So why don't the figures show it? Because our traditional roles simply aren't designed for younger and working aged people. They want flexibility: 37% are likely to volunteer if hours flex, and a quarter would happily help from home. And where marketing exists, it rarely targets them.  

So the volunteers are out there, we need to change our approach to reach them and meet their needs.

We all like to say we couldn't do what we do, without volunteers.

So I often wonder what becomes of volunteer driven institutions like the RNLI, Girlguiding and the Samaritans if we don't plan for succession now, bringing younger cohorts through to secure their future.

Modernising how we attract volunteers doesn't take a big budget. It takes intent. In practice, that means:

• Market with purpose: define who you want, the skills you need and where those people already are, then go to them.

• Design roles around how people can give time now: flexible, remote-friendly, bite-sized and skills-based.

• Facilitate word of mouth, helping your existing volunteers, younger ones included, tell people in their networks, in person or on socials.

The volunteers, across several generations, are out there, and more of them are willing than the gloom suggests. Our job is to design roles they can say yes to, and to bring the opportunities to them.

At Almond Tree, this is exactly the kind of practical, values-led challenge we love. If your organisation is grappling with volunteer attraction, engagement or succession, do drop us a line. Whatever your need, we can usually find someone who can help your charity or non-profit to thrive.

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Want to find out more? Contact us at julian@almondtreeconsulting.co.uk to discuss your organisation's needs.