Our Volunteer “Report Card” (We got an A!)

By Andy Meeks

Volunteers make our world go around. Without their incredible dedication, enthusiasm and energy in all aspects of our work throughout the year, we wouldn’t exist as an organization.   Fortunately for us,  last season was another record-breaking year for volunteer engagement.  More than 4,400 individuals volunteered over 37,000 hours with us across all aspects of our organization between September 2012 and August 2013.

While we’re in constant contact with many of our key volunteers, it isn’t often that we’re able to take a wide-angle snapshot of the volunteer experience and hear about how we’re doing.  Last fall, Friends of Trees received a grant from REI to learn more about our volunteers, how they hear about us and get engaged, what they like and don’t like about our events, as well as other fun and useful information.  Every planting volunteer, key volunteer and website visitor received an invitation to participate.  And participate they did — when everything was tallied this spring, we received an even 500 full responses to this 25 question survey — more than 11% of all volunteers for the entire season!

We just completed a long round of data crunching and would like to share the Executive Summary for your review.  It’s like a report card, only more fun to read.  It is our honor and pleasure to work with so many amazing volunteers – and we thank you for taking the time to let us know how we’re doing.  We hope to plant with you sometime soon!

Andy is the Volunteer & Outreach Manager for Friends of Trees