Briefing and Debriefing

Briefings provide excellent opportunities for communication of execution details for the planned event.  This is not the time to start making the plan - communicating the how is what should be happening here.  Having your volunteer team understand the how and why of the event is important to their actions.  Answer their questions.  Better yet - ask some questions.  There may be some who aren't comfortable asking questions without an invitation to do so. Or, if they are new to your organization, may not know what questions to ask.  Anticipating this and preempting their issues could go a long way to ensuring you have experienced volunteers for your next event.
Follow-up the event with a debriefing as soon as possible.  More information is available while memories are still fresh and emotions raw (depending on their experience with the event).  For those who don't feel comfortable expressing complaints, allow them an anonymous submission avenue.  This is especially important if you are not planning to hold your debriefing session within the first week following the event.  If you provide enough methods to receive feed-back and have a system in place to follow-up, you'll probably get all the information you need to improve delivery for your next event. Use the information you receive to tweak your approach to either your event or your volunteers or both.  Retaining experienced volunteers while recruiting new ones is more preferable to starting from scratch with every event. Of course there are other reasons for losing volunteers as well, work, age and availability to name a few.  Whatever the reason, if we don't get a handle on the reasons we're losing our volunteers, we won't be able to reverse the trend.  If numbers of volunteers lost is significant, some services, events, community programs etc. could not be run and would be lost. Ensuring our volunteers are valued, their time is appreciated and their contribution recognized, is essential!