{"id":338,"date":"2026-05-17T16:25:09","date_gmt":"2026-05-17T16:25:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/supporttips.com\/media\/?p=338"},"modified":"2026-06-09T23:27:47","modified_gmt":"2026-06-09T23:27:47","slug":"podcast-26-47-money-in-volunteers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/supporttips.com\/media\/podcast-26-47-money-in-volunteers\/","title":{"rendered":"ST Media Podcast on Where is the Money in Volunteers?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-text-align-center\">Listen ST Podcast on Where is the Money in Volunteers ?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-audio\"><audio controls src=\"https:\/\/supporttips.com\/media\/file\/aud-st-podcast-26-47-money-in-volunteers.mp4\"><\/audio><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Transcript<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">(0:00 &#8211; 17:57)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Welcome to the deep dive. Today our mission is basically to completely dismantle how you view your weekend community service. Yeah, we are gonna ruin that warm fuzzy feeling just a little bit. We really are.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So we&#8217;re unpacking this fascinating May 2026 article from support tips. It&#8217;s titled &#8220;Where is the money in volunteers?&#8221; Right, and we&#8217;re doing this by totally stripping away those sentimental feelings usually associated with volunteering. We want to examine it through a strictly financial, macro economic lens.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Because, you know, when you show up to a local park cleanup, or maybe you spend a Saturday reading to kids at the community library, you likely view that action through a purely altruistic lens, right? It feels like a pure transaction of the heart, like a gift, exactly. You certainly don&#8217;t look at the person handing out the high-vis vests and think, &#8220;Ah, yes, I am acting as the fuel for a massive multi-billion dollar global economic engine.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Okay, let&#8217;s unpack this. Because to really grasp the scale of what this support tips article is arguing, it helps to think of volunteering like an iceberg. I like that analogy. Yeah, so that good deed, the satisfaction you feel at the end of the day \u2013 that&#8217;s just the tiny tip visible above the water. Yeah. But underneath, totally hidden from view, is this massive complex machinery of economic flow, resource allocation, and honestly hidden profit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And what&#8217;s fascinating here is that the key to understanding this iceberg is recognizing that the money in volunteering doesn&#8217;t go into the pocket of the volunteer. I mean, that contradicts the very definition of the word, right, obviously. Instead, it flows incredibly powerfully through organizations, through massive corporations, and through governments, which is wild to think about. It really is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So today we&#8217;re going to map that flow across three core areas: first, the direct economic value of the physical labor; second, what economists call the &#8220;philanthropic multiplier&#8221; \u2013 love that term, right; and finally, the highly lucrative world of monetizable social currency.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So if we&#8217;re gonna treat this sentiment as a literal financial asset, we have to start right at the bottom of the ledger. We need to quantify the raw material, the actual labor. It&#8217;s exactly that. What is the literal dollar value of a quote-unquote &#8220;free&#8221; hour of labor on the open market?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Well, according to 2025 data from the Independent Sector, the baseline value of that labor is frankly substantial, and it fluctuates depending on regional economies. Okay, give me some numbers. So in the United States, a single volunteer hour in Mississippi is valued at twenty-eight dollars and thirty-nine cents. Okay, almost thirty bucks. Yeah, but in Washington DC, that valuation jumps up to $36 and 14 cents an hour \u2013 over thirty-six dollars an hour. That is, I mean, that&#8217;s a serious rate. It really is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Wait, so how do they actually arrive at that number though? They aren&#8217;t just looking at the federal minimum wage and applying it across the board. No, no, it&#8217;s way more sophisticated than that. They look at the average hourly earnings of all production and non-supervisory workers on private nonfarm payrolls. Okay, and then \u2013 and this is the kicker \u2013 they add a specific percentage to account for fringe benefits. Oh, wow, so they&#8217;re pricing in the overhead. Exactly. They are trying to find the true market equivalent of what it would literally cost an organization to hire someone to do that exact work, complete with the overhead that usually comes with an actual, you know, W-2 employee.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So if a local food bank has, say, a team of ten people sorting donations for a four-hour shift on a Saturday morning, yeah, they haven&#8217;t just been given a nice favor. They have been handed well over a thousand dollars in direct market value. Spot-on. And that infusion of market value is structurally holding up the entire nonprofit sector as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The data shows that 75% of US nonprofits report that volunteers are critical to their baseline operations. 75%? Yeah, and even more critically, 23% of nonprofits are entirely dependent on them. Wait, let&#8217;s pause on that 23% figure. That means almost a quarter of the entire sector has basically zero paid staff for their core operations \u2013 zero. So if the volunteers just decide to stay home one day, those organizations don&#8217;t just struggle \u2013 they cease to exist. They shut down. They fundamentally lack the capital to replace that subsidized labor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Okay, wait. So we&#8217;re just calculating this like unpaid wages. Isn&#8217;t that a bit reductive for something that, you know, helps the community? Yes, and that is a huge point of contention. What&#8217;s fascinating here is that relying purely on this wage replacement calculation makes a lot of people really uncomfortable. I can see why \u2013 it feels a bit cold. It does.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In fact, Volunteer Canada actively argues against using this metric as the sole measure of value. Really? What&#8217;s their argument? Their stance is that if funders and governments only look at what it would cost to hire a staff member, they are looking at a highly, highly incomplete picture. It totally ignores the broader social, communal, and frankly personal benefits generated by the actual act of volunteering itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">That pushback makes a lot of sense, actually. If I spend an hour mentoring a teenager, the value to society isn&#8217;t just the 30 bucks an organization didn&#8217;t have to pay a professional tutor. The value is a potentially changed life trajectory for that teenager, which has these massive economic ripples down the road in terms of, you know, education and workforce participation. Exactly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And to put a concrete number on that more holistic view, we can look at this really interesting 2025 study conducted by London Economics for the UK government. Okay, what did they find? They set out to capture the total economic impact of formal volunteering just in England, and they arrived at an astonishing 24.69 billion pounds. 24 billion pounds? Yeah, billion with a B. That is staggering.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And the breakdown of that number is where we really see the Canadian argument validated. Because out of that total, sixteen point four three billion was the replacement cost \u2013 so the unpaid wages we were just talking about, right. But the remaining eight point twenty six billion was categorized specifically as measurable well-being benefits gained by the volunteers themselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Wait, how do economists actually put a hard financial price tag on human happiness and well-being though? That sounds so subjective. It sounds subjective, but they calculate the downstream effects. Okay. Well, when people engage in volunteering, they generally report feeling more socially connected, more purposeful. Sure. And that psychological boost translates directly to physical health \u2013 lower rates of depression, reduced anxiety, even significantly better cardiovascular health.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Oh, I see where this is going. Yeah. Economists look at those health outcomes and they calculate the deferred medical costs. Wow. If a demographic is healthier simply because they volunteer, they require fewer interventions from the National Health Service. So they are literally calculating the financial relief on public health systems and calling it value. That is&#8230; wow. It proves the economic flow is really a two-way street. Society saves billions on labor and health care costs, and the volunteer receives real, quantifiable life satisfaction that literally keeps them physically healthier. It&#8217;s a beautifully efficient system. Honestly, it is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But saving money is just one side of the ledger. The real paradigm shift happens when we move from seeing volunteers as just a cost-saving measure to seeing them as a mechanism to generate hard cash. Exactly, and this brings us to the second part of the iceberg: the philanthropic multiplier. The multiplier? Yeah. The dynamic fundamentally shifts here because volunteers are not just unpaid workers anymore. They are a highly optimized gateway to capital.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Break that down for me. Let&#8217;s look at the 2025 Bank of America study of philanthropy. They found that affluent volunteers donate more than double the amount of non-volunteers. Wait, double? More than double. Here&#8217;s where it gets really interesting. Yeah, because if I look at this through the lens of like a corporate strategist, a well-run volunteer program isn&#8217;t just a staffing solution. No, it is a highly optimized donor acquisition funnel. It&#8217;s essentially a premium marketing channel. But the marketing literally consists of doing community service: you bring people in, you give them a meaningful hands-on experience, and you let them see the impact of the organization firsthand. Right. That psychological investment, that feeling of real ownership over the cause, translates directly into financial investment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It&#8217;s almost like the IKEA effect applied to philanthropy. Oh, that&#8217;s a great way to put it. Right, like when you build the furniture yourself, you value it more. When you pack the boxes at the food bank yourself, you value the charity more. And statistically, you open your wallet and give twice as much as someone who just got, you know, a direct mail flyer in their mailbox. Exactly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And the demographic driving this is expanding rapidly. Among affluent households, volunteer participation jumped from 30% in 2020 to 43% in 2024. That is a massive jump in just four years. It is. The scale is unbelievable. A City Global Perspectives report estimates that individual global giving \u2013 which aggregates both donated time and actual money \u2013 reaches 1.3 trillion dollars every single year. A 1.3 trillion dollar pipeline? I mean, that completely explains why corporate HR departments are suddenly so aggressively organizing these days of service for their employees, right? It isn&#8217;t just a nice photo op for the company newsletter anymore. It&#8217;s an organized corporate strategy to align with a massive pool of global capital.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Corporations absolutely recognize that an employee who volunteers is generally more engaged, and an engaged workforce is simply more economically valuable. Makes total sense. They are deliberately tapping into that 1.3 trillion dollar pipeline by making community service a core part of their identity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But you know, the volunteer market has also evolved into a massive consumer product in its own right. What do you mean? Well, we aren&#8217;t just talking about people donating money after they serve. All right. We&#8217;re talking about what they spend simply for the opportunity to do the serving in the first place. Exactly \u2013 you&#8217;re referring to volunteer tourism or voluntourism? Yes. This is where individuals literally pay travel companies, airlines, and hospitality networks to go overseas and work for free. Which sounds crazy when you say it out loud. It does.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But get this: the global volunteer tourism market was valued at 1,400 billion US dollars in 2024. Wait, 1.4 trillion dollars just for volunteer tourism? For voluntourism. And it is projected to hit 2,050 billion dollars by 2031. That&#8217;s insane. People are paying premium prices for international flights, accommodations, and these program facilitation fees just for the privilege of performing manual labor or, you know, teaching in another country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It fundamentally proves the premise of that support tips article, doesn&#8217;t it? It really does. Volunteering has created an entire secondary economy. It&#8217;s serving as a direct, colossal revenue generator for the global travel and hospitality industries. The irony of that is just striking \u2013 the human desire to give away labor for free has literally birthed a trillion dollar industry of selling people the opportunity to do that. It&#8217;s wild.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But okay, if individual donations and volunteer tourism are driving those kinds of numbers, the corporate and governmental scale must be astronomical. Oh, it is. This takes us to the deepest part of the iceberg \u2013 right \u2013 monetizable social currency. Yes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And we look to the United Kingdom for probably the clearest example of how this operates at the very highest levels. The UK operates under something called the Public Services (Social Value) Act. Okay. This legislation basically requires public sector procurement teams to evaluate the social value a company brings to the table, not just the financial cost of their bid. So if a government entity is looking to hire, say, an IT firm or a logistics company to manage a supply chain, they aren&#8217;t just looking at the bottom line anymore. Exactly. They are legally mandated to consider the broader community impact of the company.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Right. And a critical update to that legislation in February 2025 gave this mandate immense teeth. What did they change? The rule now states that for central government procurements over five million pounds, a minimum 10% weighting must be given to social value.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So what does this all mean? Like, let&#8217;s break that down for a second. Are we saying a corporation could realistically win a multi-million pound government contract over a much cheaper competitor simply because their employees have a stronger, more documented volunteering track record? If we connect this to the bigger picture \u2013 absolutely. Yeah, this legislation radically alters the playing field. It turns a corporate volunteer program from a nice PR stunt into a legislated, quantifiable competitive advantage. That is a total game changer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It is. The hours your employees spent cleaning up a beach or offering pro bono coding for a local charity literally become a weighted metric in a government procurement algorithm. So the money isn&#8217;t in the volunteering itself at that point. The money is in the multi-million pound contract that you secured using the data generated by that volunteering. Exactly. Companies that fail to track and leverage their volunteer programs are essentially walking into a 5 million pound contract negotiation with a 10% penalty right out of the gate. They&#8217;re doomed. Yeah, they simply cannot compete against a firm that has basically weaponized its social value.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Okay, we&#8217;ve moved from calculating $36 an hour in unpaid wages to exploring a trillion dollar travel industry to seeing how volunteering data literally wins massive central government contracts. It&#8217;s a journey. It is. And it sounds like an infinite money glitch for any organization. So my question is: why doesn&#8217;t every single nonprofit or corporate CSR department succeed at this? If the value is so huge, why isn&#8217;t everyone doing it perfectly?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Because there is a major catch, and it&#8217;s perhaps the single most vital takeaway from the entire support tips article. Okay, lay it on me. Volunteers are never free. Never free. Okay, you have to explain that because we&#8217;ve spent this entire deep dive talking about the immense financial value of free labor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Well, they are free in the sense that they don&#8217;t receive a weekly paycheck. Right. But the infrastructure required to actually harness their value is incredibly expensive. Ah. To unlock that thirty-six dollars and fourteen cents per hour value in the US, or to secure a piece of that 24 billion pound impact in England, organizations must build the machinery to process it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It&#8217;s kind of like \u2013 it&#8217;s like someone giving you a free racehorse. Oh, that&#8217;s a perfect analogy. Sure. The horse itself didn&#8217;t cost you a dime to acquire, right. But to actually win a purse, I have to board it. I have to buy specialized feed, hire a jockey, pay for transport, retain a veterinarian. Exactly. The horse is quote-unquote &#8220;free,&#8221; but making the horse competitive and actually valuable costs an absolute fortune. Yes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Organizations must invest hard currency into paid volunteer coordinators. They have to purchase specialized CRM software to track all those hours \u2013 because data is everything, right. They have to pay for background checks, develop training materials, and take out extensive liability insurance. Because if you just let a hundred well-meaning people show up at your facility on a Saturday with no manager, no training, and no plan \u2013 they aren&#8217;t generating value. They&#8217;re generating chaos. Total chaos.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And chaos alienates people. If volunteers have a bad experience because an organization was totally unprepared for them, you instantly sever that lucrative philanthropic multiplier we talked about earlier. Oh, right. They aren&#8217;t gonna donate double if their volunteer day was disorganized and frustrating. Exactly. They&#8217;ll just leave and never come back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Organizations that view volunteering merely as free labor are destined to fail because they refuse to fund the actual management of it. You literally have to spend money to make money \u2013 even in charity. Especially in charity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The smart organizations \u2013 the ones who actually capture the hidden money we&#8217;ve been talking about \u2013 they treat volunteering as an investment portfolio. I love that framing. You spend a relatively small amount on professional management to unlock a massive economic asset, secure a lifelong donor pipeline, and potentially generate the social currency needed to win major government contracts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Wow. Let&#8217;s pull all of this together for you listening. We started with the simple, pure act of lending a hand. But the reality is that the volunteer economy is this highly complex, multi-billion dollar ecosystem. It really is. We are talking about billions in saved wages and deferred health care costs, supercharged donor pipelines, a global tourism industry projecting two trillion dollars by 2031, and high stakes government procurement contracts decided by a 10% social value weighting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It completely reframes the narrative, doesn&#8217;t it? From pure altruism to structural macroeconomics. It absolutely does.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So the next time you volunteer, or the next time your employer organizes a mandatory volunteer day out in the community, remember that you aren&#8217;t just doing a good deed. No, you&#8217;re not. You are actively participating in a highly lucrative, quantifiable economic engine. Your time has a literal tracked market value. And as that value becomes more and more integrated into corporate balance sheets and government algorithms, the implications really only grow larger.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Which brings up a crazy thought. It makes you wonder: if a volunteer hour has a rigid market value, deferred health benefits calculated in the billions, and the power to dictate central government contracts \u2013 how long until we see volunteer hours traded, banked, or even taxed like literal currency? Whoa, there&#8217;s a terrifying thought, right? Something to really think about next time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Source<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-wp-embed is-provider-support-tips wp-block-embed-support-tips\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<blockquote class=\"wp-embedded-content\" data-secret=\"SVTw0hlQgf\"><a href=\"https:\/\/supporttips.com\/news\/where-is-the-money-in-volunteers\/\">Where is the Money in Volunteers?<\/a><\/blockquote><iframe loading=\"lazy\" class=\"wp-embedded-content\" sandbox=\"allow-scripts\" security=\"restricted\" style=\"position: absolute; visibility: hidden;\" title=\"\u201cWhere is the Money in Volunteers?\u201d \u2014 Support Tips\" src=\"https:\/\/supporttips.com\/news\/where-is-the-money-in-volunteers\/embed\/#?secret=SZPY0T0BjP#?secret=SVTw0hlQgf\" data-secret=\"SVTw0hlQgf\" width=\"600\" height=\"338\" frameborder=\"0\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\"><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Listen ST Podcast on Where is the Money in Volunteers ? Transcript (0:00 &#8211; 17:57) Welcome to the deep dive. Today our mission is basically to completely dismantle how you view your weekend community service. Yeah, we are gonna ruin that warm fuzzy feeling just a little bit. We really are. So we&#8217;re unpacking this [&#8230;]\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-338","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-podcast"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/supporttips.com\/media\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/338","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/supporttips.com\/media\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/supporttips.com\/media\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/supporttips.com\/media\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/supporttips.com\/media\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=338"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/supporttips.com\/media\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/338\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":479,"href":"https:\/\/supporttips.com\/media\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/338\/revisions\/479"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/supporttips.com\/media\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=338"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/supporttips.com\/media\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=338"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/supporttips.com\/media\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=338"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}