What is a cash-generating reason for cultivating volunteers?

I worked with a nonprofit that had a limited budget for hiring full-time staff.  But anecdotally, the organization's leadership was aware some community members were       excited about the possibility of volunteering to serve their clients.

We reviewed and revised our volunteer training manual, along with our forms, agreements, and—most important for tracking purposes—our timesheets and       processes for collecting the data.

Then, we wrote job descriptions for each position and determined supervision roles.

Next, with a focus at community events, online sign-ups, and web-based enrollment, we generated additional candidates and tracked the new volunteers in the CRM.

With the auditor's support, we appropriately assigned the hourly rate and determined the value of all this volunteer labor.

In our first year, we grew the value of volunteer contributions from 30K to over 120K. Our management team was stunned.  By year 2 we were up to 365k.

From that point, as we were developing program budgets for grant requests, we were able to demonstrate the true size of the program, by showing the value of the volunteer time.  As a result, we netted much larger grants from certain funders. That was the cash-generating reason for endeavoring in the whole process.