LinkedIn has a dedicated Volunteer Experience section you can add to your profile in just a few clicks. It sits separately from your paid work history, giving you a clean way to showcase community involvement, pro bono projects, and nonprofit roles without mixing them into your professional timeline. Here’s how to set it up and write entries that actually strengthen your profile.
Adding the Section on Desktop
Click the “Me” icon at the top of your LinkedIn homepage, then click “View Profile.” In your introduction section (the area near the top with your name and headline), click “Add profile section.” From the dropdown, select “Additional,” then choose “Volunteer experience.” A pop-up window will appear with fields for the organization name, your role, the cause area, and a description. Fill in what applies and click “Save.”
Once the section exists on your profile, you can add more entries by scrolling down to the Volunteer Experience section and clicking the plus icon. You can also reorder entries or edit them anytime by clicking the pencil icon next to each one.
Adding the Section on Mobile
Tap your profile picture in the top left of the LinkedIn app, then tap your photo again to open your full profile. Tap “Add section” near the top, select “Additional,” and then “Volunteer experience.” Fill in the organization, role, cause, and description fields, then tap “Save.” The process mirrors desktop almost exactly, just with a slightly different layout.
What Each Field Should Include
LinkedIn gives you several fields for each volunteer entry. Here’s how to use them effectively:
- Organization: The name of the nonprofit, school, community group, or platform you volunteered through. If you volunteered through an intermediary (like a skills-based volunteering platform), you can list both the platform and the nonprofit, such as “Taproot and [Nonprofit Name].”
- Role: Your functional title during the engagement. Be specific. “Volunteer” alone is vague. “Marketing Consultant (Pro Bono)” or “Event Coordinator” tells a recruiter what you actually did.
- Cause: LinkedIn provides a dropdown of cause categories like education, poverty alleviation, environment, animal welfare, and others. Pick the one closest to the organization’s mission.
- Dates: Include start and end dates. If you’re still active, check the box indicating it’s a current role.
- Description: This is the most important field and where most people underinvest. More on this below.
Writing Descriptions That Show Impact
The description field is your chance to translate volunteer work into professional language. Treat each entry the way you’d treat a job listing on your resume: lead with what you accomplished, not just what you were assigned.
Quantify wherever possible. If you helped with a fundraising campaign, include how much was raised or how many new donors came on board. If you managed other volunteers, note the team size. If you redesigned a nonprofit’s website, mention the traffic increase or the number of pages you built. Numbers ground your work in real outcomes and make it easier for someone scanning your profile to understand the scope of what you did.
Highlight transferable skills that connect to your professional goals. Volunteering often involves navigating unfamiliar projects with limited resources, collaborating with new teams, and solving problems on the fly. If you led a group of volunteers, pitched a strategy to a nonprofit’s board, or built a project timeline from scratch, those are leadership and organizational skills worth spelling out. Don’t assume the reader will infer them from your title alone.
Keep descriptions to three or four lines. Use short, active sentences. A strong entry might read: “Led a team of five pro bono consultants in developing a donor acquisition strategy for a regional food bank. Identified three new corporate partnership opportunities, contributing to a 20% increase in annual donations. Presented final recommendations to the organization’s board of directors.”
When to Use the Experience Section Instead
The dedicated Volunteer Experience section works well when you have a solid professional history and want to show community involvement alongside it. But if you’re early in your career, changing fields, or have gaps in your paid work history, consider listing significant volunteer roles in your main Experience section instead.
This makes sense when the volunteer work involved the same skills you’d use in a paid role. A marketing professional who spent six months running social media for a nonprofit, or a web developer who built a charity’s entire online presence, has done real professional work. Listing it under Experience ensures it shows up more prominently on your profile. Just note clearly in the description that the role was volunteer or pro bono so there’s no confusion.
LinkedIn’s recruiter search tools filter candidates by company type, including nonprofit organizations, and by seniority levels derived from job titles. Roles listed in your main Experience section are more likely to surface in these searches than entries in the Volunteer section. If you want maximum visibility for a substantial volunteer engagement, the Experience section gives it more weight.
Choosing the Right Keywords
LinkedIn is a search engine. Recruiters find candidates by typing in skills, job titles, and industry terms. Your volunteer descriptions should include the same keywords you’d want to rank for in a job search. If you did “grant writing,” use that phrase rather than “helped with funding applications.” If you managed “social media strategy,” say that instead of “helped with online posts.”
Look at job listings in your target field and notice the recurring terms. Work those naturally into your volunteer descriptions where they genuinely apply. This helps your profile appear in recruiter searches even when the experience came from unpaid work.
Making Volunteer Work Visible on Your Profile
Once you’ve added entries, you can rearrange where the Volunteer Experience section appears relative to other profile sections. Drag it higher if volunteering is a central part of your professional identity, or leave it lower if it’s supplementary to a long work history.
You can also strengthen volunteer entries by asking colleagues from those projects for LinkedIn recommendations. A recommendation from a nonprofit executive director or a fellow volunteer project lead adds credibility and makes the experience feel as substantial as paid work. Request recommendations through the “Ask for a recommendation” option on your profile, and specify which volunteer role you’d like them to reference.
Finally, list relevant skills you developed during volunteer work in your Skills section, and ask people you volunteered with to endorse them. This creates a consistent thread across your profile: the volunteer entry shows where you used the skill, the Skills section confirms you have it, and endorsements from real collaborators back it up.