Volunteer accident insurance – An inexpensive way to protect, and thank, your volunteers

You depend on your volunteers, to carry out the organization’s mission. They’re there for you. But if a volunteer is injured on his or her assignment (or traveling between home and the place of the assignment), are you there for them?

Volunteers know they have risks, including risk of injury. Would it help your recruitment effort if you were able to tell the prospective volunteer, “We do all  we can to make sure everyone is working safely, but if you do get hurt, we have an insurance policy to make sure you don’t have to pay for your medical treatment yourself.”

The Volunteers Insurance Service accident medical policy provides up to $50,000 for treatment of the volunteer’s injuries. If the volunteer has other insurance, ours is in excess of that, but it reimburses copayments and deductibles. If the volunteer has no other coverage, ours becomes primary. All you need to do is report the injury to us, and we take it from there.

What would it be worth, to offer a benefit like that? The cost is $4.40 per volunteer per year – less than the price of lunch. So if you have, for example, 50 volunteers, the total premium to cover them all would be just $220 a year. With our membership and administration fee of $140, the total cost to insure 50 volunteers is less than $400 a year. Not a lot, considering the benefit for them and the extra recruitment power for you.

Here is a link to our online application on the Website of The CIMA Companies, the administrator of our volunteer insurance program — https://www.cimaworld.com/form/vis-volunteers-insurance-service. Your exact cost is computed automatically for you on the application, so you have that information without even talking with anyone here. But if you do want to talk to a real person about the program before you make a decision, Jennifer Yarnell would love to hear from you. She is at 800.222.8920.

By the way, in addition to accident insurance, we also offer volunteer liability coverage in case volunteers accidentally injure someone or damage someone’s property, and excess auto liability coverage in case volunteers cause an accident while driving their personal vehicles as part of their assignments. All the information is at http://www.cimaworld.com/nonprofits/cima-volunteers-insurance.