Has this ever happened to you? You need to make an announcement. You craft the message carefully so it’s clear and friendly. Then you send it out – and are blindsided by the result. The words are the same, but how people interpreted the words was completely unexpected. Communicating with diverse volunteers is hard, because we often forget that everything we say or write is filtered through a different set of lenses than our own.
People bring their whole life to the moment they take in your message. Their cultural background. Their previous experience with your organisation or others. What their mother tongue is. Their mental and physical health at that particular moment. Whether they trust you yet. Whether they’ve had their morning coffee! Let’s face it, small things mess with us!
All of that is already in the room before the first word lands.
Remember the last time you planned a volunteer training session? You carefully planned the content. You may have thought about the session length and the time of day. But did you think about whether the formatting of your slides is accessible to someone who lives with colour blindness? Did you consider that an introverted volunteer might feel more comfortable attending online where they could keep their camera off? What about the different connotations that particular words carry for different people?
These are not abstract concerns. They are the difference between a session that feels welcoming and one that tells certain people they do not quite fit.
Here’s an example. Say you lead volunteers at a food bank. You have several people on your team; among them a retired teacher who has been volunteering with you for a decade, a newcomer to the country who joined three months ago, and a youth completing community service hours. You send everyone the same message: “Please note that our client intake procedure will be updated effective next month. Everyone needs to attend the briefing. See you there!”
- The retired teacher reads it and thinks, “Fair enough, I wonder what’s changed.”
- The newcomer reads it and feels a knot in their stomach, uncertain whether “needs to” means their position is at risk if they can’t make the meeting.
- The youth will need to cut classes to make it on that day and is afraid to say so, thinking they’ll lose their hours.
One message. Three entirely different experiences. At least three! And you had no idea, because everyone showed up and nobody said anything. This is the practical reality of leading a team made up of human beings with different histories, needs, and ways of making sense of the world.
There is also a bigger picture that needs attention.
The 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer reports that about 70 percent of people globally now hesitate to trust those who think or live differently from themselves. Trust is becoming a scarce commodity. If you are sending information to people who are different from you, it becomes very easy for confirmation bias to step in if an email or a speech comes across to them in a judgmental or offensive way, regardless of your intentions. That can be scary.
Fortunately, there is a way of communicating with diverse volunteers respectfully.
It rarely needs a complete overhaul of how you communicate. It usually just takes input from a second set of eyes. Before you send anything significant to your team, have someone with a significantly different background and world view review it and ask them for three things:
- Ask them to repeat the message back in their own words. That tells you whether something that seems clear and straightforward to you is just as obvious to those looking at it with a different lens.
- Ask them if they feel that anything in the message sounds confusing, demanding, condescending or judgmental.
- Ask if it sounds friendly and authentic – like it came from a real person who actually cares.
Those three requests will catch most problems before they happen.
Also, as the Edelman Trust Barometer implies, when you send out communications to people who are different than you, or to a large group of people who may be different from you and each other, you need to pay far closer attention to highlighting areas of similarity. If we trust those who are like us more than we do those who are different, the more we can lean on our similarities, the more likely it is that anything in a message that might feel a bit off will be forgiven.
Volunteers, especially new ones who don’t already know you, make decisions about whether they are understood and respected every time they interact with you. Communicating with diverse volunteers takes a willingness to accept that what seems clear and respectful to you might not seem that way to someone else.
Volunteers who feel genuinely seen and understood are the ones who become committed to the organisation. The ones who feel like they are receiving memos designed for someone else will just disappear.
