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During this active stage of your volunteer coordination with your volunteer cohort, your focus will be on juggling the needs and motivations of your volunteers with the mission of the organization and the community you are serving. Though it is important to cater to your volunteers, accommodations you make for them should not overshadow your mission.

There has been some research done on what practices correlate with positive volunteer outcomes, and many sites and forums provide what they believe to be the best practices for them. Pressure can be high for organizations to follow these best practices (Hager & Brudney, 2015). However, we have also seen that there is never just one way to do something, and these areas will look different for every organization, or may not even be necessary.

Though the research is still limited, some management practices strongly correlate with volunteer retention and satisfaction. The following practices are part of a review conducted by Einolf (2018) of various research studies of practices which best predict volunteer satisfaction, as well as being recommended by other organizations. These practices are highly customizable to your organization and provide a good place to start.