Every association leader has heard some version of the same complaint: “We can’t get people to volunteer,” or “The same ten people keep raising their hands while everyone else stays quiet.” Jim Piechowski has spent more than 25 years untangling that problem across borders, first on the association side leading international growth, and now as Vice President of Strategic Partnerships at Holmes Corporation. He recently teamed up with Pietro Macchiarella, Senior Director of Data and Insights at YPO (Young Presidents’ Organization), for a UST Education webinar on exactly this challenge. Pietro’s own organization makes an unlikely but convincing case study: YPO’s membership is made up entirely of CEOs, over 36,000 of them across 140 countries, and even with schedules like that, more than 10,000 volunteer every year. Jim and Pietro know each other through ASAE’s International Associations Advisory Council, where Pietro is past chair and Jim is current chair.
Their session, “The Strength of Associations: Volunteering Around the World,” walked through why a volunteer model that works at home can fall flat elsewhere, and what to do about it. By the end, they’d distilled the conversation into a six-part framework they call DESIGN, a practical way to stop treating low participation as a recruitment problem and start treating it as a design problem, one that gives association leaders a repeatable set of questions to ask before, during, and after a volunteer program launches. The six words: Discover, Establish, Shape, Invest, Give, and Notice. Here’s what each piece means, in Jim and Pietro’s own words.
Discover the context
Before recruiting anyone, Jim’s advice is to understand who you’re actually trying to reach. He pointed to his time at the Institute of Management Accountants, where the membership base shifted dramatically. “Very quickly, 75 percent of our membership had become members from China after almost 100 years of membership being mostly based in the U.S.,” he said. That shift meant rethinking volunteering from the ground up, since board membership in China doesn’t work the way it does elsewhere. IMA responded by building alumni groups of people who’d passed the CMA certification exam, who supported each other the way a local chapter would in the U.S.
Pietro added a broader pattern he’s observed across regions, offered as general impressions rather than hard rules: engagement in North America often centers on leadership and professional development, in Europe on representation and consensus, in the Asia-Pacific region on relationship and trust, and in Latin America on community and shared mission. The point isn’t to treat these as fixed categories, but to recognize that the same email asking for volunteers can land completely differently depending on who’s reading it.
Establish Trust
Trust is often the real bottleneck, not interest. Jim’s clearest example of this was a chapter that never took off. When IMA opened an office in Singapore, “we actually had a really hard time getting people active in that market to join the chapter,” he said. The team looked for local champions who could model participation for others, and never quite found the right combination. “It doesn’t mean that people in Singapore do not volunteer or were not active. It’s just that we didn’t have the right combination of things to make it happen.”
Pietro’s experience pointed to the flip side, how much a single trusted person can do. Running a focus group in Belgium years ago, he heard members describe a kind of snowball effect: “I asked, how do you choose whether to attend an event or not? And they said, ‘We look at this member. If he’s attending, we know it’s good, so we’re also attending.’” One credible volunteer, he said, can make a market explode simply because others trust his judgment.
Shape Volunteer Pathways
Both speakers pushed back on the idea that volunteering has to mean board service. Jim shared an example from his work with the International Coaching Federation, where the goal was volunteer-driven content creation. The result was the ICF Coachbock, the official ICF Coaching Body of Competencies and Knowledge, written by more than 100 volunteers from 30 countries, divided across three authors per chapter. It gave contributors visibility with fellow coaches and a way to build their own professional brand, not just a line on a resume.
Pietro connected this back to YPO’s own numbers. With a membership of busy CEOs, not everyone has time for a multi-year committee term, but plenty will take on a single event, write an article, or mentor another member. “There is such a huge menu of choices that even the busiest volunteers will be able to contribute and feel engaged,” he said, adding that YPO’s member renewal rate sits close to 95 percent, something he credits in part to that sense of ownership. As Pietro put it, associations are increasingly operating in a Netflix world where everything is on demand, and a single linear ladder toward board service doesn’t fit everyone.
Invest in the Experience
Recruiting someone is only the beginning. Jim described building detailed volunteer job descriptions at IMA, spelling out expected hours, the kind of people a volunteer would work with, and what the role could lead to. Pietro described the harder-to-implement half of this idea simply: “make sure that volunteering is not a chore, but rather something that they actually enjoy and grow from.” That means real support and continuity, so volunteers build on what came before them instead of starting from scratch every term.
Give Meaningful Recognition
Recognition isn’t one-size-fits-all either. Jim was candid that public applause isn’t for everyone. “I do not need to be called up to the front of the stage,” he said, describing his own preference for quieter forms of thanks, a note from a chair or CEO, a certificate, a badge tied to a status level. Other volunteers want the stage and the plaque. The job, as he put it, is offering recognition “in a lot of different ways that are meaningful to the people that you’re trying to reward,” rather than assuming one form fits the whole membership.
Notice and Adapt
The framework closes on listening and adjusting, something both speakers returned to when talking about what surprised them. Jim admitted that recruiting high-profile council members with impressive titles didn’t guarantee engaged volunteers. “Just because they have that title doesn’t mean that they have the time or experience or interest in sharing that with other people,” he said, noting that people doing the day-to-day work often bring more value than the names on the letterhead. Pietro pointed to COVID as a case where the external environment quietly degraded the volunteer experience, since board terms that fell entirely during lockdowns meant no in-person connection at all. The council’s response was to let those volunteers repeat their term afterward, rather than let a hard year define the whole experience.
Both also flagged surveys and structured off-boarding conversations as simple, repeatable ways to learn what worked and what didn’t, closing the loop before the next volunteer cycle starts.
The Takeaway
Asked directly during the session how associations can help international members rise into board roles, Pietro pointed to intentional design again: informal guidelines ensuring regional representation, or pairing rising international volunteers with an existing board member. Jim added that the International Associations Advisory Council had built a formal mentor program for exactly this purpose, matching promising volunteers with someone who could help them navigate the path forward.
The underlying idea across all six letters is the same: volunteer engagement isn’t something associations recruit for. It’s something they design, deliberately, for the specific people and cultures they’re trying to reach.
This article only scratches the surface. The full webinar also digs into Erin Meyer’s Culture Map, a tool for understanding how national culture shapes communication, trust, and decision-making, and applies it directly to volunteer engagement, along with live audience polling and a Q&A on getting international members onto the board. Watch the full webinar recording, free for CPE and CAE credit.
