Volunteer management, Management & leadership
What you need to master volunteer management
Here's what every volunteer manager needs to support their team.
If you manage volunteers, you’ve almost certainly typed “how do I recruit more volunteers?” into a search bar at 11pm and hoped for the best. The trouble is, “the best” rarely comes from the fifth blog in your browser history.
Sometimes you need a proper, grown‑up handbook. One that’s been argued over, road‑tested and updated.
The internet is brilliant at giving you ideas and terrible at giving you confidence. Search for “volunteer agreements” or “youth volunteering” and you’ll get an unfiltered mix of untested guidance, overseas examples that don’t fit a UK context, and confident opinions based on a sample size of one. None of that helps when you’re trying to write a board paper, defend a decision, or build a strategy that will stand up to the real-life challenges you’re facing.
What most volunteer managers actually need is:
- something UK‑specific and grounded in current research
- something that reflects how volunteering really works
- something you can point to when a colleague says, “but we’ve always done it this way”
That’s the gap The Complete Volunteer Management Handbook fills. Now in its fourth edition, it’s been built up, tested and refined over 25 years.
A handbook built on evidence, not guesswork
This book is written by four of the most experienced thinkers and practitioners in volunteering – Rob Jackson, Mike Locke, Dr Eddy Hogg and Rick Lynch. Between them they bring international consulting, UK volunteer management practice and serious academic research to the same table.
It was first published (in earlier form) back in 1994 and thoroughly revised for the current fourth edition, published in 2019, so you’re not just getting opinions, you’re getting decades of learning about what actually works. It’s produced in association with the University of Kent, explicitly designed to bring together academic evidence and practitioner insight, not treat them as separate worlds.
Why a workbook beats another webinar
Most of us don’t need more content, we need content that’s organised so we can actually use it.
The Complete Volunteer Management Handbook is structured as a genuine workbook and reference guide: you can read it end‑to‑end as a route map, or dip into standalone chapters when a specific issue lands on your desk. Chapters cover the whole lifecycle, from planning and embedding volunteering in your strategy, through role design, recruitment, selection and support, to tackling tricky behaviour, managing at a distance and measuring impact.
Crucially, it doesn’t stop at “here’s a nice idea”: each chapter includes practical pointers, examples and tools you can lift straight into your own practice. That’s something a one‑hour online workshop rarely gives you. The webinar finishes, your notes go in a drawer (or more likely disappear into your downloads folder), and by Monday morning you’re back where you started.
With a comprehensive handbook on your desk, you have:
- a shared language for staff and volunteers
- ready‑made frameworks you can adapt, not invent from scratch
- something people can revisit, not just “attend”
Depth, convenience and value for your organisation
Because it is so comprehensive, this isn’t just a book “for the volunteer coordinator”. The content is relevant to anyone with responsibility for involving volunteers, whether that’s senior managers, service leads, or even trustees who want to understand what “good” actually looks like. That makes it ideal as a team resource rather than a lone read.
From a value point of view, it’s hard to beat. For less than the cost of sending one person on a half‑day online course, you get a permanent reference that your whole organisation can use – including new starters who haven’t even joined you yet. Learning doesn’t stop when the Zoom call ends, and this gives people somewhere to go back to when they’re writing a new role description, redesigning an induction, or negotiating that awkward staff–volunteer boundary.
And because it’s grounded in both research and real‑world case studies, you’re not gambling your volunteer strategy on the latest management fad. You’re building it on evidence about why people volunteer, how patterns are changing, and what genuinely keeps volunteers engaged over time.
If volunteers are mission‑critical, your handbook should be too
Volunteering is too important to your organisation to be managed on the basis of whatever came up on page one of the search results this week.
If you want something you can trust – to brief your CEO, reassure your board, support your team and, most importantly, do right by your volunteers, The Complete Volunteer Management Handbook is exactly that: a proper, grown‑up, research‑informed guide you’ll keep reaching for.
And unlike that browser tab about “ten quick wins for volunteer recruitment”, you won’t regret returning to it.
