Volunteers are an inseparable part of your organization, thus volunteer recruitment is critical. Volunteers are the ones who relentlessly support your organization’s mission and donate their valuable time and efforts to you. Whether someone’s driven by helping society and making the world a better place or they’re passionate about the cause you’re working for.
Whatever their reason might be to work with you, you must appreciate their toil to keep them retained with you for years. When you appreciate your volunteers, you’re not only making them seen and valued, but you’re also making their passion for your cause even stronger. And this, in turn, would help you keep them with you for a long time.
Because, let’s be honest, recruiting new volunteers every time isn’t easy. So, it’s much better to strive to retain your old volunteers and consider recruiting as your organization grows and expands. Moreover, you can also recruit when you need some new talent and skills to help your organization grow.
So, before you go out to hire some new volunteers for your organization, make sure to have a recruitment and volunteer engagement strategy to help you along the way. Recruiting may seem easy, but it’s actually not. And without using some smart ways of recruiting, you may put off people from joining your organization. Therefore, in this article, just to help you recruit the right way, we’re going to share some strategies to effectively recruit volunteers. Let’s dive in and make people join your cause!
Strategies for Effective Volunteer Recruitment
Clarify Your Mission
The reason volunteers join any organization is to support the cause they’re passionate about. So your cause should be reflected very well in your recruitment email or advertisements. This cause will encourage people to join if they’re passionate about it, or if some people aren’t, they might feel called to work for it if you present it well. Making your organization’s mission and goals clear is one of the best way to recruit volunteers. You can also take this opportunity to tell a little more about your organization and the work you do. By sharing the story of how you started, you can motivate others to support you and perhaps even root for you and donate something, even if they don’t end up joining.
Tailored Messaging
Everyone’s inboxes are filled with emails that they don’t even want to open. So, you must personalize your message and present it interestingly. It all starts with a well-written subject line, and then once you move on to the body, start with a warm personalization. Once they’ve opened and started to read your email, you have to convince them to join your organization. To do so, you can tailor your recruitment email to your target audience. Write something related to their interests, values, and skills so that they feel it’s something they would love to be a part of.
Offer Varied Opportunities
So, as you write your recruitment email or advertisement, make sure to clearly highlight the types of opportunities or community service ideas you offer to your volunteers. Even though volunteers obviously don’t expect to earn anything monetary from this work, it doesn’t mean they don’t want to grow in life. By offering exciting opportunities for growing and working, you can encourage them to join you over other organizations. So, provide a range of roles and projects to work on, along with different preferences and schedules you think would enhance your recruitment email.
Leveraging Existing Volunteer Networks
Your current volunteers can also be a great source for getting leads to recruit new volunteers. You can ask them if they have some references for you. Besides that, offering your current volunteers great opportunities to grow, expand, and take ownership of the work can also intrinsically encourage them to tell more people about you. As your volunteers spread the word about you through positive word-of-mouth, it can help you earn a positive reputation for your organization, which can also help you get a bunch of leads without even going out to look for them.
Harnessing the Power of Social Media
Social media is a great way to connect with people and make your little space and audience online. You as an organization, can share various social media posts related to your work, your volunteers’ accomplishments, and the communities you help. This will help you garner followers who are passionate about your cause. And once you need to recruit more volunteers for your organization, you can go out and post about it on your social media pages. And if some of your followers would love to work for you, they may join you from there.
Final Thoughts
So, there you have it, some strategies to effectively recruit volunteers. Even though retaining your old volunteers is important, to grow and expand your organization, you may need some more helping hands. So, we hope these above-shared tips help you recruit more supportive hands for you.
