Episode #067: How to Set Up a New Volunteer Coordinator for Success
Welcome to the Volunteer Nation Podcast, bringing you practical tips and big ideas on how to build, grow, and scale volunteer talent. I’m your host Tobi Johnson, and if you rely on volunteers to fuel your charity cause, membership, or movement, I made this podcast just for you.
Well, hey there everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Volunteer Nation Podcast. I’m your host Tobi Johnson, and today I want to talk about how to set up a new volunteer coordinator for success. If you are in the position of hiring for this very vital role for your organization, there’s some things you need to know to ensure that they are successful. I remember when I first started engaging volunteers, being a volunteer coordinator, it wasn’t even in my job title. I was hired to build a program from scratch to help homeless youth get connected with jobs.
And I built out a variety of educational and job preparation services. I built a team and we were ready to go. We had a program, I developed the model, I developed the key performance indicators. You name it, I built it. I set up the site. You name it, I did it. And once we got it all set up, I realized that these young people need mentors. They need people in the community that are different than me and my staff that can give them support and advice and help them as they navigate the work world, especially the young people who were in our transitional living facility.
And I realized we just couldn’t do it alone, that our tiny team was not going to be able to make it happen without the really great support of a group of mentors. And it made all the difference. But I can tell you that when I started that mentoring program and built that model, I really had no idea what I was doing. I had to do a lot of research and this was back when there wasn’t that much stuff on the internet, there wasn’t any training that I could see. And I just basically built a program based on my gut and my years of experience working in nonprofits. And the good news is it worked out great. And we were able to recruit mentors, we were able to match them with the young people and we were able to have this fantastic program. But in today’s world, being a volunteer manager is in some respects much more difficult.
We have volunteers who used to volunteer and then stopped volunteering during the pandemic and are busier than ever as we go back to work and have additional responsibilities and have a busier life. And so it’s hard to get the attention of those folks and engage them in volunteering. It’s also just a noisier world. There is so much competition for attention that it makes it really hard to get the word through, to break through with all the different social media, all the different emails. It’s just hard to break through with your message. And I will tell you that the job of the volunteer coordinator has gotten more complex as well. I don’t know of any other job in the nonprofit space that has such a wide span of area task responsibilities. If you think about it, a volunteer coordinator is responsible for recruitment and marketing and outreach, for training up volunteers, for processing human resources paperwork, for managing risk, for supervising and troubleshooting, for developing appreciation programs, for managing data and understanding the outcome metrics of their program, and for internally and externally building and maintaining really positive collaborative relationships.
That is a lot for one job. So when you’re thinking about hiring somebody and you find somebody who is the right fit, you do not want to lose them. It costs a lot to replace a nonprofit employee. It costs a lot to replace any employee. There’s a lot of time and effort and it costs money. You’re losing productivity. And by the same token, it’s really not good practice to have a revolving door of volunteer coordinators because those coordinators also develop relationships with your volunteers and your volunteers need a steady hand at the helm of that ship. So your volunteer services department, whether it’s a department of one or more, needs staff that are really, really consistent.
So that’s why I’m talking about how to set up a new volunteer coordinator for success today because I want to help you. If you’re in the market to hire or you need to replace or you’re working with a volunteer coordinator who’s struggling, then maybe you can do some remediation and help get them back up to speed. So let me give you my top tips. As a person who has worked with volunteers, as a person who’s done a lot of hiring in my day, I’ve built several programs from scratch and had to do all of the hiring for those programs, as well as programs I’ve taken over as a program director and then had to refill or had people transitioning off. So I’ve done a fair amount of hiring my day and I know volunteerism. So this is a good combo for me to give you tips around. So let’s get started. So let’s talk about my top tips for setting up a new volunteer coordinator for Success so you can keep them happy and productive.
Again, a revolving door for this role is not good for maintaining a solid volunteer community in support of your good cause. So we’ve got to do our best to get them set up. So let’s start with and I’ve talked about this just a minute ago, but recognize that the job is complex and multifaceted. This is not an entry level job, contrary to popular opinion, this is not an entry level job. This is not a job that you tap somebody on the shoulder and say, hey, why don’t you take up volunteer coordination for us? If people don’t have the skill set they need to have something or some past experience, either as a volunteer and often even if someone has been a volunteer, they don’t have the skill set. So we need to acknowledge that this job is complex, it’s multifaceted. It’s not really an entry level job. I mean, would you tap someone on the shoulder and say, hey, I’d like to you to lead all of the fundraising for our organization, for our nonprofit.
You probably would not consider your development director or your development manager or your fundraiser or even your grant writer. You wouldn’t consider them an entry level employee. Same goes for volunteer engagement. It is a complex job. It is a front facing job. So it’s a job that is your organization. They are the front face of your organization. So you want to make sure you got the right person in the job.
So hire the right people. Now, the good news is, in episode 26 of The Volunteer Nation, I did a whole episode on hiring and what to include in your volunteer coordinator job description. You can check that out. I will post it in the Show Notes. So second thing, make sure your new volunteer coordinator has the resources they need. I cannot tell you how many volunteer coordinators I meet who have zero resources to work with. And when they have zero resources, it means their job takes twice and sometimes three or four times the time to get done. And so we need to give them resources that help them save time.
And so one of the things we want to do is make sure they have volunteer management software. Now, I don’t have a specific software that I recommend. It always depends on your volunteer program and your needs. But get some type of software that tracks your volunteers. And I would recommend one that a volunteer can manage their own data from their side that has a login for volunteers. So at least the volunteer manager is not spending 24/7 doing data entry. That’s just not efficient. Second thing is your volunteer coordinator needs email software.
So if you have an email software like ConvertKit. ConvertKit is a software that we use that I highly recommend. I’ll put a link in the Show Notes for that. We are an affiliate for ConvertKit. We like it so much and it’s really inexpensive. You could track communicate with a team of 300 volunteers for like $9 a month. It is ridiculously inexpensive. So have some type of email software. Your marketing communications people may have software as long as the volunteer coordinator can get trained and use it and be able to communicate specifically with their segment of volunteers.
You can go that route or you can just get them a separate software so they’re not having to compete with your communications folks. Third thing I think people need is online community or learning management software. So it could be as simple as a private Facebook group or a YouTube channel. But I really like community software. We particularly like circle. It’s a community software we use. You need some place for volunteers to gather online and for you to share training. Gone are the days where all volunteers are going to be available all the time to come down to your nonprofit and show up for in person training.
Always. We live in a hybrid workplace and I can’t tell you how many opportunities I’ve seen for volunteers that are training in the middle of the work week. And for most people who work 40, 50, 60 hours a week, they’re just not going to be able to take the day off to come to training. And so we need to start providing training online and we also need to start building community online so we can keep our volunteers connected. So that is another software. Again, not that expensive, it can be done. But those are three tools. Volunteer management software, email communication software, and community or learning management software.
These are resources that your new volunteer coordinator must have to be successful. Okay. Third thing, don’t leave all of the work of creating an exceptional volunteer experience to the volunteer manager. Just think about that. If you have 5100, 201,000 volunteers, it can’t just lie on the shoulders of that single person. You need to help them remove, as the executive or as the leader in your organization, hiring a volunteer coordinator. You want to remove the silos that are between departments around volunteers. Volunteerism is something that impacts your entire organization.
So your entire staff need to take responsibility for maintaining a positive volunteer experience. It needs to be volunteer. Support needs to be on everybody’s job description. Now that doesn’t mean everyone’s responsible for recruiting volunteers. It doesn’t mean that everybody’s responsible for training volunteers or even supervising volunteers. But everyone in your organization should be responsible for supporting, helping and appreciating volunteers. And all it takes is a smile and how are you doing today and can I help you with anything? It really is about customer service. But if it’s not in people’s job descriptions, they’re just not going to take it seriously because why should they? Why should they? Because they’re not responsible.
The only way to keep folks accountable to particular tasks that they’re responsible for is to have them on their job description and include them in their evaluations. So you want to make sure that this is codified. It’s not just a nice to have. It’s not something you wish people would do. It’s something that you’re requiring of your entire team. All right, fourth thing, help your team and this is sort of along the same lines, help your team understand how important volunteer engagement is by walking the talk. So you can support your new volunteer coordinator by letting them know that you are open to having volunteers working in your office. So you are walking the talk and showing your coworkers, your team that you support volunteerism to this level.
And you know what puts everybody else on notice that they need to start leveraging the community as well. So by walking the talk, you’re really leading by example. And it’s so important when many nonprofit workers don’t really understand not only the importance of volunteerism, but how challenging it can be. And they tend to undervalue the importance of involving the community in your work and you know as a leader that you can’t do it without the community, as donors, as volunteers, as champions, as supporters, as advisors, you name it. You need the community to help you stay sustainable. All right, fifth way to help your new volunteer coordinator succeed be clear and realistic about expectations. I was talking to someone the other day who needed help with their volunteer recruitment strategy. They were a new volunteer coordinator.
They’ve been in the field for 30 plus years and they wanted to know from me, hey, is it realistic for my nonprofit to expect me to have 300 new volunteers in the next four weeks? And I said, well, depends if you’re recruiting in groups, maybe. But that seems a little bit far fetched. So we want to be realistic. If you have been dead in the water when it comes to volunteer recruitment, do not expect a new person to come in and suddenly wave their magic wand and volunteers will appear. Volunteer recruitment is really about having the right systems, messaging and clear understanding of the right people you want to attract. And so no one single human is that superhuman who can just by their very presence snap their fingers and volunteers appear. I wish we don’t have that yet. Boy, if I did though, I’d give it to all of you.
But we don’t. So it takes systems. And if you haven’t been successful up till now, if those systems aren’t in place, that new person is going to need to set those systems up. So you need to be realistic and prioritize the most important roles for recruitment and then phase the rest in there’s no magic wands here. It’s just diligent work, that’s all. Just diligent work. All right, 6th way to support your new volunteer coordinator is to equip them. If they’re going to get out and recruit and represent you in the community doing outreach and tabling and whatever, recruiting online, all that good stuff, they’re going to need to be able to represent you well within your brand sort of guidelines.
So make sure you give them a brand style guide, talking points, PowerPoint deck templates, whatever it is that your new volunteer coordinator needs around communications, don’t ask them to make it up. You want them to be a good representative, so have them get some in service training with your comms department so they understand the way that you like to talk about your organization, the way you like to represent your organization in graphic form, in copywriting, et cetera. And then also let them know what tools and channels that might be available to them when they want to get the word out about your opportunities. And so we want to make sure that they understand how to represent you well and have those guidelines in writing. So if you don’t have those things, it’s now time to ask your communications person or people to develop that because it’s going to be important. And then it’s going to also help your volunteer coordinator when they want to start building out, for example, a volunteer recruitment team, that they can also hand that style guide off to those folks as well so that you have consistent communications at all levels. All right, that’s six of my tips. I’ve got six more.
But let’s take a pause for a quick break from our discussion on how to prepare a new volunteer coordinator to be successful. Don’t go anywhere. I’ve got six more tips for you.
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Okay, we’re back with our discussion about how to set a new volunteer coordinator up for success. We want them to keep coming back. We want them to get as productive as possible, as quickly as possible, and we want them to stay around and develop deep relationships with not only volunteers, but also with their coworkers. We want your team to work in synergy, and so we’ve got to make sure this vital position is supported well. And we want to make sure they’re not left to just figure it out on their own. That’s not the way to work with a new volunteer coordinator. So let me talk about my 7th tip. Work with them to set up key performance metrics that make sense for volunteer programs that are both formative and summative.
And let me talk about what I mean by that. When I was building programs from scratch, I just had such a blessing of being able to work with our funder in one of the programs I built to be able to develop these in a collaborative way to say, okay, I’m developing this employment and training program here’s. The things that I would track, I recommend we track to show impact. And I was able to work with the funder to arrive at something we thought was mutually agreeable, which is not always the case that you get to do that. Often the funder tells you, especially if you work for the federal government or you have contracts with the federal government, you will be told what your outcome metrics are going to be. But in this case, if you can work with your volunteer coordinator, there may be required metrics that need to be tracked. Most often there aren’t when it comes to volunteers. So work with them to arrive at a set and not that many.
And what I mean by formative outcomes metrics are those that tell you early on whether or not you’re in good shape. So the number of volunteers, the average volunteer hours, volunteer satisfaction, those are formative outcomes metrics. Those are going to help you predict your future capacity. A lot of people treat those as summative, as those are the end all, be all. We’re trying to track volunteer hours, we’re trying to track numbers of volunteers. But that isn’t those are the resources that are going into helping you reach your program goals. So the summative outcomes metrics for volunteer programs are often the metrics for the programs where those volunteers work. So if it’s a mentoring program where volunteers are the mentors, then the summative or the end result, those metrics are learning gains, reading levels achieved, kids staying out of trouble, kids not missing school, those kinds of things.
Whatever your program outcomes metrics are, those should be owned by the volunteers as well, because there are the resources that are fueling that program. So make sure you work with your volunteer coordinator so they’re not guessing about what they’re responsible for and that you can have conversation with them when things are going well. When things aren’t going well. And outcomes metrics aren’t to find fault. What they are is to learn. They’re a learning tool to help us understand can we predict future success. And if we’re predicting future success isn’t going to look good, what interventions can we make now to assure future success? So they’re really a tool, not a compliance issue like some people treat them. All right, the 8th thing I want to mention to prepare a new volunteer coordinator is be clear about who does what.
This is something that’s really interesting. There’s a lot of gray area, believe it or not, in volunteer coordination. For example, who’s responsible for posting social media posts about volunteer opportunities? Is it the marketing communications folks? Is it the volunteer manager? Another gray area. Who’s responsible for supervising volunteers or even recruiting volunteers for fundraising events? Is it your development staff or is it your volunteer coordinator? It depends on the organization. But you need to be clear. So those are just a couple of different areas. Who’s responsible for processing volunteer background checks? Is it the volunteer coordinator? Is it your human resources department? And I would recommend and encourage you to really think about where it might make sense for people other than the volunteer coordinator to do some of these tasks.
If it makes sense if they’re already doing something similar. Take the load off so that the volunteer coordinator can spend the time that they have building relationships, recruiting new volunteers, getting out in the community, that’s what they should really be doing. And so if there’s ways to take the load off, because again, it’s often a very large span of tasks that if you can spread it out a little bit, then you can get the volunteer out in the community and out working with volunteers and getting your strategy in place, rather than doing clerical work. When your volunteer coordinator is doing mostly clerical work all day long, you’re not getting what you need to get out of that position. Okay, let’s talk about helping them get the word out. This is my 9th tip for supporting your new volunteer coordinator help them get the word out. Do not expect one single human being to get the word out about all things volunteerism. We want to include volunteer appeals in any community presentations, your regular marketing editorial calendar, so your social media newsletters, et cetera.
There should be a place for discussion and content around volunteerism. It needs to be part of your identity. So that means it needs to appear often, not only when you are recruiting success stories about volunteers, quotes from clients, you name it. Shoutouts to corporate groups that are helping you, all those types of things. It needs to be part of your identity as an organization. We are a volunteer driven organization. People will not see that unless in your communications. Volunteers are featured frequently in your annual report, for example, those kinds of things in media and press releases, you name it.
You need to make sure that it’s part of the entire editorial cycle. And I was talking to a group recently and they said, well, our job is to make sure we sell tickets. That’s the marketing communications department’s job. And I said, okay, that’s great. Selling tickets is a great thing, and I see that’s a priority for you. But what if you had more volunteers? Wouldn’t they help you do some word of mouth? That would also help you sell tickets. So featuring volunteers is not an either or, focusing on other program priorities. It’s not an either or.
Volunteers can help you and can amplify those messages for you as well. So there’s no reason to not have them as a regular part of your editorial calendar. All right, 10th way to support your new volunteer coordinator meet with volunteers along with the volunteer coordinator to get to know them and learn more about what motivates them, as well as gathering ideas from the front line. And so you want to set up a regular cadence for meeting with the volunteer coordinator along with a couple of volunteers that they hand select to meet with you. If you’re in a leadership role, whether you’re a program director, executive director, et cetera, you need to stay in touch with your community and your volunteers are the best ear to the ground you could ever have. They can give you intel on your reputation, on where to improve programming, you name it. They are a fantastic sort of interface between you and the community. And so why not tap that? They also are often the people who are experts in delivering some of your services or the experts at interfacing with your patrons or customers because they’re on the front lines.
So why not ask them about how to make improvements as well as just making sure that their experience is going well. So it’s a casual conversation, maybe set it up once a quarter and just sit down and meet with folks. Doesn’t have to be formal, can be a coffee chat, but you’re going to learn a ton. So support your volunteer coordinator in that and let them know that you are listening, right? It doesn’t have to be every month, doesn’t have to be every week, but once a quarter just have a little sit down. All right. 11th way to support your new volunteer coordinator is to include them in your strategic planning process and any leadership level meetings related to human resources, new program development, community engagement initiatives, or fundraising campaigns. Let me repeat those again. So include your volunteer coordinator in any meetings related to human resources, new program development, community engagement initiatives, and fundraising campaigns.
Now why? Because in most of these areas, volunteer coordinators will be supplying some of the human resources they will be providing and supplying some of the talent for these. In the case of human resources, many of the HR policies you’re developing have an impact on volunteers. So it’s vital that their voice be heard and that they bring up anything that they think you might be missing around fundraising. Of course you’re going to get volunteers involved in fundraising. Whether it’s a capital campaign or a fun run, you name it, volunteers are going to be involved. Community engagement initiatives, there’s nothing like having that being driven by community outreaching into community. It’s a great way to go. And then any new program development, your volunteer coordinator can help advise on where are possible ways to leverage volunteers.
You want to know that, you want to think about that. And you can include, when you think ahead, you can include a little bit of grant funding on supporting that volunteer coordinator and some of the resources that they have so that you are able to leverage that volunteer talent. Grants directly for volunteer services are not that common. But if volunteer services are supporting a program that you’re running or starting up and you bake that into the grant funding and you talk about and speak to the match, the community match of volunteer time as matched in kind resource, that can go a long way. So think about that and involving the volunteer coordinator in those new program development conversations can help you think through all of those things. And, you know, like I said, this is not an entry level job. If you’re hiring a Volunteer Coordinator or Volunteer Manager or Volunteer Director, they need to be able to advise you on this stuff, right? All right. And then the final tip I’ll give you on supporting your new Volunteer Coordinator is to provide them with access to support that can give them proven frameworks that can save time versus trainings that offer opinions in the guise of expertise.
So what I mean by that is today’s volunteer coordination, volunteer engagement is getting more and more complex. It really is. I talked about that earlier at the top of the hour, it is getting more difficult. It also is a competitive marketplace to attract volunteer talent. Top volunteer talent can have its pick of where to go and support. And so we want to make sure that our new Volunteer Coordinators are up to speed as quickly as possible and that they are equipped with the right frameworks that are proven that work. And the good news is we have such a framework and such a program. It’s called the Volunteer Management Fundamentals course.
And it takes participants through our five phase Volunteer Strategy Success Path, which is a bespoke phase by phase, step by step model that I have developed over years and years working in the field. And we go from envision to build, to grow, to sustain, and to scale around our volunteer program. And they can learn this in our five modules very quickly. And the good news is there are lots of downloadable templates and tools and things that can get people off the ground really quickly. So our doors are always open for the volunteer management fundamentals course. And so you can get your new Volunteer Coordinator started on day one, just learning our frameworks and implementing them. Everything we develop in our training is really geared at taking action. It’s geared at implementation.
We have tools and templates. It’s not just passive learning. It’s actually program development. It’s supported and facilitated program development. So if you need your new Volunteer Coordinator to get up to speed quickly, even if they have some years under their belt, this can be a big asset. We’ve had veteran Volunteer Coordinators and brand new Volunteer Coordinators go through this program, and we get raves from both. So I know there’s always something new for people to learn. So check that out.
If you want to give your new Volunteer Coordinator a healthy jump start on their job, you can go to volpro. Net v o lpro net begin. So it’s volpro. Net begin, and I will post that in the show notes as well. So that’s my show for this week. I hope this episode has really helped you hone in on some specific steps you can take to help your Volunteer Coordinator get up to speed quickly. Because you know what? You don’t have time to waste. I don’t.
Know about you, but I don’t know any nonprofit that has time to waste. And you’ve got to get that community quickly engaged and deeply engaged in your cause. And that’s going to help you with bringing in new voices. It’s going to help you with sustainability. It’s even going to help you with fundraising, because gang volunteers are donors, and donors are volunteers. So thanks for joining me. If you enjoyed this episode of The Volunteer Nation, would you share it with a friend who might need a little inspiration? And also, don’t forget to rate and review. It helps us reach more people and help change more lives.
Take care, everybody. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Volunteer Nation Podcast. If you enjoyed it, please be sure to subscribe rate and review so we can reach people like you who want to improve the impact of their good cause. For more tips and notes from the show, check us out at Tobijohnson.com. We’ll see you next week for another installment of Volunteer Nation.
