“Free” coverage for your volunteers isn’t really free. Here’s a better way to protect them.

Most insurance companies automatically include volunteers as covered on their general liability policies, and they usually do so at no additional premium. The insurance company knows that you want to protect your volunteers. Frankly, they don’t care whether it’s your organization, an employee, a volunteer, or any combination of the three that they are defending and protecting. They care only that their financial responsibility is capped by the limit of insurance you have purchased.

Add to this the fact that nearly all insurance agents and brokers believe the question of insuring volunteers is a binary one: either you can include them on your organization’s liability policy and protect them, or you can specifically exclude them from coverage and leave them without protection.

There is a third option, and a much better option, for both your organization and your volunteers. You can — and you should — insure your volunteers separately.

The cost?

It’s $2.15 per volunteer per year. So if you have, for example, 50 volunteers, the total premium to cover them all would be a little over $100 a year. With our membership and administration fee of $140, the total cost to insure 50 volunteers is less than $250 a year. Not a lot, considering the impact including them under your organization’s policy could have on your insurance limits. That’s roughly $5 a volunteer a year. You can’t buy them a lunch or a tee shirt for less, and this lunch/tee-shirt equivalent expense completely protects your organization’s insurance limits.

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 volunteer liability insurance, we also offer accident coverage in case your volunteers are injured, and excess auto liability coverage for your volunteer drivers. All the information is at http://www.cimaworld.com/nonprofits/cima-volunteers-insurance.