Find out why people stopped

The one measurement almost nobody takes.

Because volunteers leave silently, an organisation can lose a substantial share of its people annually and have no account of why. The information is obtainable and it requires deliberately contacting people who have drifted away, which feels awkward and is the only way to get it.

The message that works is short and asks one question without any attempt to bring them back: we noticed you have not been in for a while, and we would find it useful to know what changed. A useful proportion of people answer, and the answers cluster.

The clusters are usually mundane and fixable: the shift time changed, a new coordinator did not know them, they did not feel useful, or something happened and nobody followed up. None of that would appear in any other data the organisation holds.

Tracking the drift rate at all is a step most programmes have not taken. Knowing how many people who started this year are still attending after six months is a basic figure and it is rarely calculated.

The other useful measurement is how long people stay, expressed as a distribution rather than an average. A programme where most people leave within three months and a few stay for years is a different programme from one where most stay eighteen months, and the mean conceals the difference entirely.