Volunteer Programme Management: Recruitment Funnels, Shift Coverage, Retention & the Value of Volunteer Time

What you'll build

What you will be able to do

Each lab ends with a concrete result that you build yourself and the checker confirms, cell by cell.

• Turn a weekly shift plan into volunteer-hours, the number of people each programme needs (rounded up), a buffer for absences and the hours needed over the year.
• Measure conversion at every stage of the recruitment funnel by channel, find the channel that turns enquiries into active volunteers best and work out how many enquiries next half-year's target needs.
• Schedule each applicant's welcome talk, training and first possible shift in working days around the hub's closed days, then measure how old the open applications are and how many have waited too long.
• Label every shift with its weekday, flag it Covered, Short 1 or Gap, count the unfilled places without letting over-staffed shifts hide them, and measure how many Saturday shifts are fully covered.
• Summarise a raw hours log by volunteer and by programme and month with SUMIFS, then find the third-highest contributor of the year and rank everyone.
• Roll the number of active volunteers through four quarters, calculate the year's retention and turnover rates and compare how start cohorts hold on after twelve months.
• Put a fictional value on each programme's hours with a rate lookup by role, total it, express the hours as full-time equivalents and compare the value created with what the programme costs.
• Give every volunteer the recognition level their hours have earned with an approximate lookup, show how far each is from the next level, count the Silver-and-above group and chart the monthly volunteer-hours.