One of the hardest parts about managing volunteers is just getting the volunteers in the first place. Once you have them, you best be making sure you don't lose them! Sometimes life changes and it's completely out of your control, but most of the time it is actually completely in your control. I'm talking about burn out. It's easy to avoid and easy to do.

Appreciating volunteers is one of those things that has the highest level of impact, easiest to do, but gets commonly overlooked. It doesn't make sense that burn out is even allowed to happen, especially when volunteers are the strongest asset. If so, why not protect it? But alas, it happens, even to the best organizers. In an organization where everyone is over-worked and underpaid, it's easy to forget these type of things. But that's where time tracking comes in, to make sure that doesn't happen.

If you have volunteers track hours, you'll easily be able to get the insights on who is active and who is not. You can even set up milestone achievements, like at 100 hours, and give them a pin. If you don't have any milestone achievements, make them up, create a tradition, it's fun for everybody. However, there is something even better than all this, and that is the volunteer knowing that someone else is seeing what they're doing.

When a volunteer tracks hours and that progress is visible to everyone else, it makes a volunteer feel connected to the other volunteers and they know that at least someone else out there knows what they are doing. Post that leaderboard in a central place, send it out in a mailer, or at the very least let it be available for others to view online. This instant recognition through transparency alone could boost a volunteers moral.