Recruitment Ideas and Communicating with Volunteers | Track It Forward

Recruitment Ideas and Communicating with Volunteers

Written by Jordan Galerkin

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Recap for June 19th - June 26th

Thank you to everyone who contributed to the Facebook community this past week!

Recruitment Ideas for New Organizations

If your nonprofit or service organization is just starting out, it can be difficult to know where to begin in terms of growing your volunteer base. There’s a variety of ways to recruit volunteers, but not all may be the best for your organization. From social media to press releases, it may take some trial and error to find the method that works best for you. Luckily, our coordinator community has some great ideas!

Facebook post stating: Hello, I am fairly new to the volunteer coordinator role. I am looking for ways to recruit. I’ve mainly done social media with Facebook on my personal page and our company page. We are extremely small as we are just starting our Hospice. Right now we have 4 active volunteers, 3 doing direct patient volunteering and 1 executing our tuck-in call program. Looking for different ideas to help me grow my volunteer base

Comments from the group

  • “VolunteerMatch.org and check local options like a United Way, community center, nonprofit chamber of commerce, rotary clubs, etc.”

  • “I used educational institutions, community centres, diverse community groups of newcomers, immigrants, faith organizations etc. to promote our programs.”

  • “Partner with churches and colleges.”

  • Article: Creative Ways to Recruit Volunteers

Add your own thoughts here!

Communicating with Volunteers

There are so many ways to communicate and conduct outreach to your existing volunteer base, but how do you actually get responses? The answer is - it depends. If you have a communication system built into your volunteer management software, like Track it Forward offers, it can be easy to do a large email blast to notify volunteers of upcoming opportunities. Other options include social media, texting, and good old fashioned calling. See what our coordinator community has to say on the subject!

Facebook post stating: Hello, I am very new to my volunteer coordinator position and I'm needing advice on how to best communicate with all volunteers. Email, social media, posters, and mail, are not working. This position is part-time and calling a list of 300+ volunteers to fulfill every volunteer takes a ton of time, however, is this what I am going to need to do to be successful to fill all my volunteer slots? Any insight or suggestions are greatly appreciated! Thank you!

Comments from the group

  • “How do you have them sign up? Emails and newsletters work best for me. Making it easy for them to sign up for volunteer slots is important.”

  • “I would encourage a volunteer management database to advertise and recruit for needs…Beyond that my phone and email are a constant too.”

  • “I communicate via email, we have a private Facebook page and mass texting. Only do phone calls to those I do not hear back from after using the 3 methods of communication. It has worked great for us so far.”

See all of the comments here!