Your volunteers have skills you don't know about. Here's why that matters.

There is a version of this story in almost every charity. A small team struggling to keep up with social media, paying for a freelancer or an agency, or just letting it go quiet for weeks at a time. Meanwhile, one of their regular volunteers manages Instagram accounts for three local businesses, creates Reels in her sleep, and has a graphic design degree she has never mentioned.

She has been volunteering on Saturday mornings for six months. Nobody asked what she does during the week.

This is not a rare coincidence

Volunteers come from everywhere. Retired professionals with decades of experience. Students studying marketing or communications. Parents who freelance in web design between school runs. People between jobs who have skills that would cost your charity thousands to buy in.

We are not talking about niche or unlikely scenarios. These are the kinds of skills that regularly walk through the door of every charity shop, food bank, community centre, and animal shelter in the country:

• Social media management - people who run accounts, create content, understand algorithms, and know what actually gets engagement. Not "I have a Facebook account" but genuine, professional-level capability.
• Graphic design - Canva, Adobe Suite, brand design, print layout. The poster you spent three evenings making in Word could have been done in twenty minutes.
• Photography and video - from smartphone content creation to professional-grade event photography. Every charity needs visual content. Almost none of them have anyone dedicated to it.
• Copywriting - newsletters, grant applications, press releases, website content. The difference between amateur and professional copy is the difference between being read and being ignored.
• IT and web skills - from fixing the Wi-Fi to redesigning your website. The volunteer who "knows a bit about computers" might actually be a software developer.
• Accounting and finance - Gift Aid, bookkeeping, management accounts, financial reporting for trustees. Skills that charities need desperately and can rarely afford.

Why nobody mentions it

Volunteers do not turn up and hand you a CV. They fill in a form that asks for their name, their availability, and whether they have a DBS check. The form does not ask what they do for a living. It does not ask what they studied. It does not ask about the side projects, the freelance work, the professional skills they carry around every day.

And volunteers do not volunteer their skills. That sounds like a contradiction but it is not. People sign up to help in a specific way - sorting clothes, serving food, walking dogs, manning a till. They do not assume the charity wants to know about their day job. Many actively keep it separate. They are there to switch off, to contribute in a simple, tangible way.

Which means charities end up in a situation where they are simultaneously desperate for skills they cannot afford AND surrounded by people who have those exact skills. The gap is not capability. It is information.

The wrong way to find out

The obvious move is to send out a survey. "Tell us about your skills and experience!" It feels proactive. It almost never works.

Surveys get low response rates because volunteers have already filled in forms and nothing changed. The people most likely to respond are the ones who already share everything. The quiet ones - often the most skilled - will ignore it because they do not think it is relevant to them, or because they tried once before and nothing came of it.

The other approach is to have the volunteer coordinator ask everyone. Which works until you remember that your coordinator is already stretched across fifty things, turns over every eighteen months, and takes all the knowledge with them when they leave.

Why conversations work better than forms

When someone asks you "Do you have any skills?" you freeze. It is like being asked "Tell me something interesting about yourself." You cannot think of anything. Your mind goes blank.

When someone asks you "What do you do during the week?" and then follows up with "Oh that is interesting, what tools do you use for that?" and then "Have you ever thought about doing something like that here?" - the conversation flows naturally. You end up sharing things you would never have written on a form.

That is what good volunteer coordinators do instinctively. They have a cup of tea, they chat, and they discover that their new Saturday volunteer is actually a Mailchimp expert who could transform their donor communications. But it relies entirely on that one coordinator remembering to have the conversation, and remembering the answers, and being around long enough to act on them.

What this looks like at scale

A small charity with twenty volunteers can probably manage this with relationships and memory. A charity with a hundred volunteers across multiple sites cannot. A national charity with thousands of volunteers - in shops, in warehouses, in community programmes, in corporate partnerships - has no chance.

At that scale you need a system. But not a database where someone types in "skills: social media" based on a self-assessment form. You need something that has the conversation itself, that follows up on interesting answers, that captures the detail (not just "photography" but "product photography, Lightroom, studio lighting, event coverage"), and that makes it searchable when someone in the organisation needs exactly that capability six months later.

Being careful with what you find

There is a line between discovering skills and exploiting them. Volunteers need to feel that sharing their professional skills is safe - that it will not result in their Saturday morning turning into unpaid consultancy.

The principle is simple: treat each use of a volunteer's wider skills like a favour. Genuinely useful. Genuinely appreciated. Never assumed. The volunteer who is happy to redesign your Christmas campaign poster because they enjoy it and it makes a real difference - brilliant. The one who gets asked to overhaul your entire brand identity because "you are a designer, right?" - that is how you lose people.

The best charities let volunteers choose what they are willing to share and what they consent to being asked about. Someone might be delighted to help with social media but does not want to be the unpaid IT department. Both are valid. A good system captures the willingness alongside the capability.

The retention angle nobody talks about

Volunteer retention is one of the biggest challenges in the sector. People start with enthusiasm, contribute for a few months, and quietly drift away. The reasons are complex, but one of the most common is feeling under-utilised.

A graphic designer who spends every shift folding clothes eventually wonders why they bother. Not because folding clothes is beneath them - they signed up for it, and it needs doing. But because they know they could contribute more, and nobody has noticed. The gap between what they can do and what they are asked to do becomes a source of quiet frustration.

When someone's wider skills are recognised - even just acknowledged - they feel seen. "We noticed you have a design background - would you ever be interested in helping with our seasonal campaigns?" That question, asked sensitively, can turn a drifting volunteer into a committed one.

What to do about it

Start with the assumption that your volunteers are more capable than you think. Not some of them. All of them. The retired headteacher. The student on a gap year. The parent fitting in a few hours between school runs. Every single one of them has skills, experience, and knowledge that your charity could use - if you knew about it.

Then find a way to ask that is not a form. A conversation - even a short one, even an AI-assisted one - will surface more in five minutes than a spreadsheet will capture in a year. And make it clear that sharing skills is optional, that being asked to help is always a request and never an obligation, and that saying no is completely fine.

The charities that get this right do not just find hidden skills. They build stronger relationships with their volunteers, improve retention, and unlock capacity they did not know they had. All from a conversation that most organisations never think to have.