Your People Are Your Mission: A Nonprofit Leader's Guide to HR and Volunteers

So many nonprofits begin the same way: one person, one passion, one mission. Then you hire someone. Then another. Then a small team forms, and suddenly nobody is quite sure whether the dental plan covers braces, who approves time off, or what happens when a volunteer stops showing up.

If that feels familiar, you are not behind. You are growing. And growth means the people side of your work (both paid staff and unpaid volunteers) needs real systems, not just goodwill. Your organization's success depends on finding qualified, dedicated people and keeping them happy, engaged, and accountable. That is the heart of human resources for a nonprofit, and it deserves more attention than it usually gets.

Why HR Is Really About Your Mission

It is easy to think of HR as paperwork and policies. In reality, it is the people side of your entire mission: recruiting talent, compensating them fairly, creating strategies to retain them, and building employment policies that make your workplace safe and productive.

Here is a principle worth taping to your wall: a line manager is the most influential person in an employee's work life. HR does not replace your managers. It advises and equips them. So even if you never hire a dedicated HR person, someone (often the Executive Director in smaller orgs) is wearing that hat. Naming that clearly is the first step.

And aim higher than the legal minimum. Meeting the law is the floor, not the goal. What good looks like is fair and open recruitment, documented and accessible policies, every role tied to a clear job description, and a culture of trust and care.

The Building Block: A Job Description for Every Role

Before you recruit anyone, paid or volunteer, you need a job description. It is the essential building block for the whole relationship. A good one states the accountabilities, responsibilities, required skills and knowledge, and the kind of person who would thrive in the role.

This matters more than it sounds. When you know exactly what a role needs, you recruit people who are not just capable of doing the job but who also carry a passion and commitment to your mission. That combination is what keeps people rooted.

Onboarding: The First Step Toward Retention

Have you ever started a job and spent your first day unsure what you were even supposed to do? That usually means orientation and onboarding were missing.

New people arrive full of expectation, excitement, and questions. Onboarding is how you meet that energy. It is worth separating two ideas:

• Orientation is the introductory session. For a volunteer, it might last an hour or so depending on the role's complexity.
• Onboarding is the fuller process of integrating someone and making them productive. For higher-level staff, it might take days or even weeks.

Either way, onboarding sets the baseline for morale and productivity. It is quite literally the first step toward keeping the people you worked so hard to recruit.

Do not skip the practical training either. Volunteers may need to be trained from scratch on their task, whether that is asking for donations or something as small as how to dial out on the office phone. Naming the obvious saves everyone frustration.

Volunteers Are Not Free (and Not Low-Skill)

One of the most costly misunderstandings in nonprofit leadership is treating volunteers as free labor. They are not. Volunteers carry liability, need a budget for training, insurance, and recognition, and often do highly skilled professional work.

The idea that holds it all together is the values exchange: matching the needs of your program with the needs of the volunteer. Ignore the program's needs and you harm your work. Ignore the volunteer's needs and you lose the volunteer. Both sides matter, every time.

And a gentle myth to retire: volunteers are perfectly capable of keeping confidentiality. It is the personal integrity of a person, not a salary, that determines whether they can be trusted with sensitive information.

Compensation: The Honest Tension

Here is a tension every nonprofit leader feels. You want to pay your people well, but the budget rarely allows it, and you are accountable to donors who want their gifts fueling programs, not overhead.

The way through is to think in terms of total rewards: not just salary, but benefits, learning and development, career growth, working patterns, and the environment you create. Professional development is one of the easiest and most powerful ways to retain people, because it lets staff keep growing with the organization instead of growing out of it.

Where you can, connect each job description to a clear salary grade so pay stays fair and consistent across the team. Internal equity builds trust just as much as the number itself.

Putting It Together

You do not need a full HR department to start doing this well. You need clarity about who owns the people side, a job description for every role, a real onboarding process, a values exchange with your volunteers, and an honest total-rewards conversation about pay. These are the systems that let your mission outgrow any single person, including you.

If you are working toward your next milestone of supporters, remember that engaged, well-cared-for staff and volunteers are the engine behind that growth. Strong people systems are not a distraction from the mission. They are the mission, made durable.

Your challenge this week

Pick one role in your organization (staff or volunteer) that does not have a written job description, and draft one this week. List its main responsibilities, the skills it needs, and the kind of person who would thrive in it. Just one. It is the single building block everything else depends on.