Before you start reaching out to potential volunteers, you need to have a clear idea of who they are, what they care about, and what motivates them to get involved. You can use various methods to research your target audience, such as surveys, interviews, focus groups, or social media analysis. Based on your findings, you can tailor your messages, channels, and strategies to appeal to their values, interests, and needs.
Help your volunteers feel valued and important by helping them see the bigger picture. You might have a volunteer knocking on doors, or doing data entry. Explain to them how their piece of the puzzle fits with the others and helps the entire team draw closer to a win!
People are more likely to join a grassroots movement if they feel connected to its vision, mission, and goals. You need to craft a compelling story that explains why your cause matters, what challenges it faces, and how volunteers can make a difference. Your story should also showcase the impact of your existing volunteers, highlight the benefits of joining your community, and invite people to take action.
One of the biggest barriers to volunteer recruitment and retention is the perception that it's too hard, time-consuming, or boring. You can overcome this by making it easy and fun for people to get involved. For example, you can create a simple and user-friendly sign-up process, offer flexible and diverse opportunities, provide clear and regular communication, and recognize and reward your volunteers. You can also organize social events, games, contests, or challenges to foster a sense of camaraderie and enjoyment among your volunteers.
Another key factor for volunteer recruitment and retention is the level of training and empowerment they receive. You want your volunteers to feel confident and capable of carrying out their tasks, as well as having a voice and influence in your campaign. You can achieve this by providing them with adequate training, resources, and support, as well as delegating them with meaningful roles and responsibilities. You can also encourage them to share their ideas, feedback, and stories, and involve them in decision-making and planning.
Finally, the most important practice for volunteer recruitment and retention is to build relationships and trust with your volunteers. You need to show them that you care about them as individuals, not just as numbers or tools. You can do this by getting to know them personally, expressing gratitude and appreciation, listening and responding to their concerns, and being honest and transparent. You can also create opportunities for your volunteers to connect with each other, as well as with the people they serve or advocate for.
East Coast Operations @ Timeleft | Connecting strangers, building community 🤝
While everyone may be united through a shared mission, each individual in your organization is going to have unique motivations that inspire them to show up, work hard, and adapt over time. Rather than assuming you know or understand what draws someone into the fold, have a conversation with them and/or integrate an onboarding survey where you can better understand their unique needs as a volunteer. Maybe they want to make friends, but they have been strictly working on solo projects. Maybe they want to strengthen their ties to the local community, but they have been limited to remote tasks. While these intentions may change, both parties succeed when you do the initial legwork to meet someone where they are.
You need buy-in for your goals and tactics. To achieve this you need full engagement and this means having real dialog. For grass-root organizations can be challenging to achieve. The informality, part-time nature, and limited organizing time drives a desire to avoid dialog. A mistake - if you lose buy-in you loose volunteers. Email is an ubiquitous tool that can serve this purpose. However, email comes with some risks such as SPAM, phishing, and other attack vectors. This is especially true when using personal email addresses. Tools that addresses these issues are "anonymizing email reflectors" that keep members' email addresses private and bar external attacks. I use is EMail Parrot (emparrot.com) which is web based and cheap.
Very good basic stuff. The obvious elemental part in 2023 is missing. I.e., how computers & cell phones Wes into this. Great start though!
It's important to understand that retaining volunteers may also be out of your control. People may need to prioritize other opportunities, and that doesn't mean that your opportunity wasn't worthy. For example, I have stepped away from opportunities because of time constraints, life changes, and career focus shifts. The places that I left were wonderful. While I non longer partner with them, I still support them in my other roles by sharing their mission, reposting their social media, and engaging in their events. Investing time and care in volunteers is really about investing in people. It only strengthens your organization.