Episode #089 – Strategic Volunteer Recruitment Ideas for 2024
Tobi: 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. Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of the Volunteer Nation Podcast.
I’m your host, Tobi Johnson, and today we’re going to talk about some fresh volunteer recruitment ideas for 2024. And I’m going to kick it off with a conversation and a little bit of reading I did from a Washington Post article a few days ago entitled, “Nonprofits Need More Help Than Ever. Why aren’t Americans volunteering?”
It is such an interesting study in the world of volunteers and what volunteers are thinking right now. So, I’m going to pull out a few quotes from that. The comments from that article, it’s just really interesting, made me think about what we could do better around our volunteer recruitment. But before we do that, I want to mention that our Volunteer Management Progress Report survey is now open and up for business.
It will be up until Friday, January 5th, but don’t delay. We would love to have you participate. If you are a leader of volunteers, please go to volpro.net and once you get on our homepage, if you just click on research in the menu, it’ll take you to the page for the survey. It’ll give you information about it.
This year, our survey The theme is leadership and workforce and infrastructure and support is really needed to grow and maintain an active volunteer enterprise, but we don’t have a lot of information in our field about how volunteerism is set up inside organizations and where there are similarities and where there are differences.
So we’re going to be exploring that. We’re going to be exploring levels of volunteer capacity, levels of satisfaction and support for volunteer managers, key areas of volunteer strategy and the extent to which volunteer leaders are leveraged there, as well as a whole bunch of other stuff. It’s a, our ninth annual Volunteer Management Progress Report survey.
We’ve been doing this survey for nine years straight. We do not charge for the results; the report usually runs 20 or 30 pages long, and you’ll be able to download that in February or early February. If you take this survey, you also get invited to our Sneak Peek Early Results webinar, which is on February 1st.
So, once you finish the survey, don’t forget to hit submit, and then it will redirect you to the registration page. We only invite. our survey respondents and our distribution partners to that event to hear the early results. So. the only way to get into that event, and it’s free, is if you participate in the survey.
And we do need you. If you’re a leader of volunteers, we need your information, we need your insights, we need to hear your voice so that we can represent the field well and give you a report that has really robust data. One other thing I will mention is that if you’d like to be a distribution partner just email us at wecare@volpro.net and just let us know you want to be a distribution partner for this year’s survey and we will email you a press kit.
All you have to do is cut and paste and we have some graphics for you. Makes it super easy to just send it out to your network if you belong to a volunteer manager’s association, or if you belong to an organization that has a network of volunteer coordinators, or you just have a bunch of friends you’d like to send it to that lead volunteers just like you. I would love and enjoy and welcome your assistance with this.
So, if you’ve enjoyed anything we’ve done on the Volunteer Nation podcast, I really hope you’ll support us by adding your voice to this year’s Volunteer Management Progress Report survey. I cannot wait to share the results with you and use the data to advocate for this fabulous field of volunteerism that we’re part of.
So, without further ado, let’s get started talking about volunteer recruitment ideas for 2024. Now, part of what inspired me a little bit. First of all, volunteer recruitment is a perennial topic. It’s very important. It’s a challenge for folks. Many organizations are struggling to build back volunteers.
And a recent Washington Post article asked, why aren’t more Americans volunteering? And by the way, it’s not just Americans. There are plenty of other folks and other countries that are struggling to build back their volunteer course as well.
And the reasons in the article were stated, one was that volunteering is harder and one was that people have other priorities. Now that may be true and it, there are many reasons why we have lower volunteer numbers right now, but it’s not the same for every organization. But I’d like to. I’ll maybe ask you to think a little differently about this.
We often take a look and say, why aren’t volunteers volunteering? And maybe the real reason people aren’t volunteering is because they aren’t finding you. In fact, I went and looked at some Google Trends. I like to do this from time to time. I went on to Google and I’ll link to this in the show notes. I went on to Google Trends yesterday, and I just typed in volunteering opportunities near me, which is pretty common.
If you think someone’s hanging out thinking all of a sudden, you know what? I’m going to go volunteer. That’s probably what they’re going to type in their phone, in their phone on Google to try to find an opportunity.
So, when you look at these data from Google trends and you compare back in December, 2022, where we had the highest number of people going on Google and searching for volunteer opportunities near me. We don’t yet have the data for 2023, but I suspect that’s going to pop back up again because it’s that time of year. It’s the time of year when people are setting their New Year’s resolutions. People are thinking about how to live a better life. They want to give back to their community. So now is a really good time to think about volunteer opportunities and recruitment.
So, I ask again, maybe the real reason people aren’t volunteering isn’t because they don’t want to, because they’re obviously many people are typing into Google, looking for opportunities.
Maybe it’s when they type in, they don’t find you. They don’t find your organization. Or maybe when they do find you, they don’t like what they see. I’m going to give you some straight scoop right now, guys. I’m going to be a little bit candid about things. So maybe they don’t like what they see. Maybe it’s too inflexible.
Maybe it’s too much trouble to join. Maybe it looks boring. Maybe it’s confusing about how to join. Or maybe they reach out and no one gets back to them. Maybe they want to volunteer. They found you on the internet. They apply and no one gets back to them.
So, I think we need to take a pause when we’re talking about why people aren’t volunteering. I think we need to take an honest look at our own organizations and before we start blaming the community for the lack of support, maybe we should take a good, hard look at our own practices.
And I know that may sound a little harsh. But are we treating volunteers and people like day laborers that we just drive up to the corner of the big box store and ask them to jump into the back of our pickup for a day of work?
Or are we treating them like the valued community partners that they really are? And just as donors aren’t cash machines, nor are volunteers immediate free labor. It just doesn’t work that way. In both cases, supporters are valued people in the community that give their time, talent, and treasure. And all of those things are worth something.
And I would even hazard a guess and argue that time is our most precious resource. And so, when people are investing their time, which is their most precious resource into our organization to help us make a difference. We need to take that investment and commitment very seriously.
And so, I thought before I went into some of giving some of my tips, my volunteer recruitment ideas for 2024, I would think strategically by understanding some of the frustrations volunteers are feeling as they’re looking for opportunities because when I understand my audience and the people I’m trying to reach and convert, I do a better job with my strategy to attract them, right? This is the best of marketing. The best of marketing is not a magic wand. The best of marketing is not a tip or trick.
The best of marketing is understanding an audience and then designing a strategy that’s best suited to reach that audience. And so, I want to model that a little bit. So, we have this Washington Post article, I’ll link to it in the show notes so you can read it as well.
But look, the article asks, why aren’t Americans volunteering? 495 people posted an answer to that question. 495! Now, that is a lot of comments. And the majority of the comments, now, you know, in comment world, there’s a lot of people, there are cranks that post political commentary and getting arguments and whatnot. The majority of the posts were not that though.
The majority of the posts were from volunteers or people who had attempted to volunteer and, of those 495, I curated a few that I think bring home some of the things we need to think about as we are thinking about our volunteer recruitment ideas for 2024.
So here are a few and some of them to me are heartbreaking because I can’t stand it when there’s somebody in the community that really truly wants to give their time, wants to contribute, wants to make a difference, and are unable to do so.
I just think that’s the biggest shame. So, they’re being blocked from that opportunity. And sometimes it’s just by negligence, which is bad news bears for us, gang, in the world of volunteerism. Here’s some comments that I think are quite interesting. Here’s one – “Organizations don’t think about making good use of volunteers time and resources. The inefficiency was stunning at three different organizations. My time was free, so they felt free to waste it.”
Wow. Okay. That might be one reason why volunteers aren’t volunteering. You know, I interviewed Helen Tourle of the NCVO, which does the Time Well Spent study. And the reason they call it the Time Well Spent study, the study is extensive multi-year research, was that that people felt their time was wasted and that’s why they don’t volunteer.
So, we have to be super-efficient about the use of people’s precious resource that they’re giving us. So, interesting comment. And she said three different organizations. And by the way, a lot of these comments were so well phrased and thoughtful and really well considered. It wasn’t just people were just griping. They were honestly answering the question.
Here’s another one – “My husband and I were both health care professionals. When we retired, we tried to volunteer at three different organizations. They didn’t want us not going there again.”
Okay, we’ve got a systemic problem in volunteerism where it’s not just a one off once in a while one organization doesn’t get back to people, but that it’s systemic. And I myself have suffered from this. I remember trying to be a tutor. I applied. I waited months for an interview. I went in for an interview and then nobody contacted me. And it was just aggravating. Hey, I want to do this. You said you needed volunteers and I’m here to help, right? So that is very, you know, that’s giving our field a bad name.
So, part of it is that we’re not responsive enough, gang. We’re not responsive enough. And I want to talk about strategies to work against that. We’ll talk about our volunteer recruitment ideas a little bit later.
Here’s another one I wanted to read – “The food bank in our area ruined volunteering by not training their full-time employees in volunteer engagement. The paid employees make it clear that the volunteers are in their way.”
Okay, this is a problem too. We don’t have a welcoming environment. We don’t have folks who have leadership skills. Gang, if we’re going to engage the community in our work, we need to up level our skills around it, right? We need to make sure that we’re really supporting people and championing our volunteers. That’s leadership 101 when it comes to engaging volunteers.
And I hear this from leaders of volunteers that co-workers are not supportive. And by the way, in this year’s Volunteer Management Progress Report, I asked a question in that survey. Where I ask you to rate the support you receive from leadership and to rate the report, the support you receive from your coworkers when it comes to volunteers.
So, make sure you weigh in on that survey so that I can report that out because we’re also going to create this year an executive summary for non-profit executives that speaks to this, so they can get the real deal. But hey, I can’t report it if I don’t get the data, so I hope you’ll participate.
But yes, we have an issue with non-profit staff treating volunteers like they don’t matter, and that’s a problem. Why would you go volunteer your time if your time is your number one precious resource? Why in the world would you go somewhere where you’re not wanted? Just doesn’t, nobody wants that, nobody would do that, so that may be an issue.
Here’s another one that I find really interesting that is a very insightful comment – “Eight years as a volunteer EMT while working a full time day job, I realized how critical it is to have gifted leadership to keep the organization together and humming along. It can fall apart so quickly.”
So insightful, right? So, he must, this, he or she or them, they must have had an experience with not-so-gifted leadership I’m thinking, or they’re just being appreciative of the gifted leadership they’ve had in their full eight years of volunteering.
So again, these comments are so insightful. People clearly and obviously care. And want to make sure that volunteering continues to happen.
Here’s another one on a more positive note – “I love the organization I volunteer for. They have an awesome volunteer coordinator who handles logistics and inquiries, defines roles and expectations, appreciation for whatever you can give, and ethical, involved, and effective leadership.”
Now, what a gift, right? What a gift. This volunteer clearly understands and appreciates the kind of management and coordination that’s happening at their organization, and they clearly really value their volunteer coordinator. So, it goes both ways, right?
Sometimes we think volunteers don’t really evaluate the people that are supervising or supporting them. And guess what? They do. They have thoughts about it.
Here’s one last comment I wanted to read. And again, there’s 495 of these. I spent about an hour reading through these. I just, you know, I was like, voice of the volunteer. It’s all here in one spot. People don’t have any, they’re unfettered.
This isn’t a survey by the organization. It’s completely anonymous. And I just felt like it was really clear. where our biggest issues are when it comes to volunteer engagement and why people might not be volunteering.
So the last quote I want to read is a little bit longer, but also very insightful – ‘Leadership of non-profit organizations, just like leadership for-profit businesses, need to take this moment after the pandemic to step back and reevaluate their positions for the current world. Most people do not have blocks of free time to accommodate four-plus hour shifts anymore. Lots of people want functioning websites and prompt emails replies when they’re signing up for volunteer positions.
Volunteers want defined roles and an understanding that they have committed the time they have available and shouldn’t be shamed when they can’t offer more than they signed up for. These are all barriers to volunteering that I’ve come across that could be removed if non-profits took the time to reorganize. After the pandemic, a lot of us realized the value of our free time. More employers and non-profits need to understand it too.”
So insightful. What a great quote. What a great comment to leave. It’s just, you know what? Hey gang, appreciate the new reality, right? This volunteer is asking us to understand the current context within which we’re working. And I think they sum it up really and concisely and really well spoken.
Again, if you want to read any other, any of these other quotes, they’re just really, really helpful. Just really help us understand what people are struggling with. Some of the other quotes were about some older volunteers who, because of inflation, because of the cost of things, have had to go back to work.
There are others where people are taking care of family members. There are other comments where people are working two or three jobs. So, there’s also lots of practical concerns that volunteers have about why they can contribute. I think we need to remember that people have pretty busy lives and that people are still trying to build back their resilience from our global traumatic event called the COVID-19 pandemic.
So let’s transition now to just some of my ideas for volunteer recruitment in 2024. Based on the comments that I read, again marketing strategy and I consider volunteer recruitment marketing, always starts with the audience. It starts with their perceptions, their feelings, their needs, their wants, their wishes, their desires, their hopes, their dreams.
Because if you can’t speak to those. You can’t make a connection with your marketing. It’s just how it works. And so again, we’re not going to have a magic wand. I’m not going to give you a tip that says, yes, if you create this beautiful flyer, you will automatically have people lining up at your doors. That’s not how marketing work works.
Marketing is about making human connections. And so, let’s talk about some of these. Ideas these volunteer recruitment ideas based on these comments based on what real human beings are telling us about their experiences.
First off, I do believe that volunteer involving organizations and communities need to collaborate better They need to collaborate across their organization. You need to recognize that you’re stewards of volunteerism within an ecosystem. So, for the general public, they don’t see this non-profit versus that non-profit versus that non-profit. They just see volunteer opportunities where they’ve been disappointed if they have been disappointed.
And once you heard from some of these folks, they try one, two, three strikes, you’re out. And after that, they don’t go back to volunteer. So, there is a point in time where people give up on volunteerism because the organizations in their community have been non-responsive. And so, it’s really important if you’re working in a community with other volunteer involving organizations that you are stewards of that volunteer ecosystem, not just the roles for your organization itself.
And so, it’s important that you meet regularly, that you get to know the other organizations, that you cross refer volunteers, that perhaps you don’t have an opportunity that, that fits the schedule, the scheduling needs of that volunteer, and maybe you understand that somebody else down the road does.
It’s really important nowadays. It’s too easy to share if things aren’t going well. People are frustrated, all they need to do is post on social media, or send emails, or just talk it up with their friends. And so set standards of responsiveness that you and your group of volunteer-involving organizations in your community can agree to.
And if you have things posted on your website, if you’re not needing volunteers or you’re not able to get back to folks, then don’t include them on your website anymore. If they’re posted on VolunteerMatch or Galaxy or local volunteer center website. If you no longer need those roles, or you don’t have time to process applications right now, then take them down.
So, people aren’t going into a black hole and saying, wait a minute, I wanted to contribute my time. Because people have an emotional charge when they’re ready to volunteer. They’re inspired. They want to make a difference. They have a need to help in some way. And there is nothing worse than offering your help and having it turned down.
And you will feel a sense of rejection if you’re offering your help if people don’t get back to you. You feel a sense of rejection and volunteers that because you don’t have the time, energy, effort, whatever to get back to volunteer in a timely manner. And I would say one business day is timely in today’s world.
That person experiences rejection from your organization and it makes them a little grumpy. They’re like, Hey, I wanted to contribute. And now you’re saying, no, what’s wrong with me? Right? Collaborate across your community better. That’s my number one volunteer recruitment idea. So collaborate, collaborate.
Let’s talk about my number two of my volunteer recruitment ideas. Refresh your volunteer recruitment webpages. These must be refreshed. I have looked at many of these over the years. Particularly with our volunteer recruitment accelerator clients, I do a communications audit and I look at people’s websites and the number one thing I see is that the website focuses mostly on the rules and the processes to become a volunteer and not enough on why people should volunteer in the first place.
What is the transformation? What is the change? What is the good in the world that happens because of volunteering? So, I have a few questions for you that you might ask yourself, and if you’re driving, you can listen to this later and jot them down. If you have a piece of paper, now’s a good time to pull it out. I’ve got some questions for you to quickly assess your webpages.
So, first of all, as I just mentioned – are your current opportunities listed? And if they are not open right now, don’t list them, take them off. So, your website isn’t a thing or your web pages. It’s not a thing that you do once a year. These need to be updated and refreshed all the time.
And I would think about putting together a set of webpages. I call it a volunteer recruitment hub, where you have a main recruitment page that links from your homepage and then you have sub-pages to that page where you have different opportunities or different types of volunteering like corporate groups or service learning or court-ordered community service or family volunteering, whatever it is, or you’re linking to specific volunteer roles that have a role on each page. Okay, so it’s like a website within a website. So on these pages, first of all, are your current opportunities listed and have you taken down the ones that are not current?
Do you have baseline data on micro conversions? So, for example, do you know how many people have visited a certain web page and then how many people took action on that web page? So, you can see if you’re getting great conversion rates on that page or not.
You can use tools like Google Analytics, that’ll show you how many people have gone to your webpage. If you talk to your marketing people, they should have those, that data. You can use tools like Hotjar. It’s free heat mapping software where it will actually track where people look on the webpage and where their eyes go and where they spend the most time. So you can see how you can optimize your webpage.
You can use software like PICKFU. I just used this software to ask and compare two different book titles for my book, which will be coming out next year. I put up two titles and I had people vote on it. They voted and then they told me why they picked the title they picked.
And I’m like, okay, well, I guess we’re going with what the masses say they want. So you can also use PickFu to have people review your website and tell you what they think about your website. You can also just ask your volunteers, right? But it’s nice to get complete strangers to look at things. You can see if things are confusing or not. I will put links to those software in the show notes in case you want to try them out. They’re cool.
Okay. The other thing you want to ask, is it easy to get to your volunteer hub? from the homepage of your website, your nonprofit website? I would say that for some of you, this is a no brainer. It’s always happened. You are completely volunteer-driven. And so, it’s always been that way. But for others of you, especially if you’re, for example, a museum or an arts and culture organization, sometimes the volunteer opportunities get buried multiple clicks away. Everyone who comes to your homepage needs to know that volunteering happens at your organization.
I also, I’m not a huge fan of having volunteer opportunities buried in a drop-down menu. If that’s the only place and only way to get to your volunteering hub pages. I’m a fan of a button, and I’m a fan of a button that’s there all the time. There’s no drop down and it’s a different colored button and it is on your web, your homepage.
Now maybe your web designer says, and your marketing people say, no, we can’t do that all the time. Then at least advocate to have it. Have that button be put on that homepage when you are doing heavy duty volunteer recruitment, when your big campaigns are going on ’cause it’s important, people will see it and then it’ll be in the back of their mind.
Maybe they’re not going to volunteer now, but now they know that you have volunteer opportunities. So I like to be clear about that. I don’t like to use vague terms like “get involved.” I like to use “volunteer now.” It’s super clear, or “learn about our volunteer opportunities,” super simple and direct.
Alright, another thing, another question to ask about your website. And I believe that your website is your most important asset when it comes to volunteering. Aside from people-to-people, word of mouth marketing, even then they’re going to send people to your website.
So, your website is where all roads lead. If you’re going to post on social media, it’s going to link to your website. If you’re posting on a different website, it’s going to link to your website. If people are telling you about their volunteer opportunities, they’re still going to visit your website. So it is, if you’re going to focus on one thing to improve, it is absolutely the thing to improve is your website. It’s your number one asset.
So, ask yourself this – Do you make it easy for people to browse and choose volunteer opportunities based on their availability? Now, again, I read through all those comments on that Washington Post article and people were talking about the inflexibility and the inability for people to fit their schedules with your opportunities.
So, if that’s the case, if that’s what the audience wants, if that’s what your prospective volunteer is looking for, Then why not organize in some way the information in a way that makes it easy for them to find what meets their schedule? If scheduling is the biggest pain point, then why not organize the information that way?
For example, one-day opportunities, two-hour opportunities, and break it down that way and let people, or maybe even do a little quiz. Where people, you can use something, you can use a quiz. There are all kinds of quiz software out there. You could put a quiz on your website and some of the questions you ask are how many, how many hours a week do you have to spend? Do you want to spend just a one-time volunteering, or do you want to do ongoing?
Really help people organize how they can find the right, maybe you organize around weekends, weekdays, week, weeknights for the nine-to-fivers. Nothing during the week is going to work for them if, unless they get time off, paid time off to volunteer. So, do you make it easy for people to browse based on their priorities?
Another thing, are there gorgeous photos of happy, smiling people on your website? Are there pictures of real volunteers doing their thing? Are they looking at a camera? Do they look happy and relaxed? Does it look like it’s a resilient place to work? Does the culture look inclusive?
All these kinds of things that you want to ask yourself when you look at your webpage. I talked about this earlier, but does your copy, the writing on your website, focus more on transformation or more on requirements? When you focus on requirements, people are just like, meh, not interested.
If you focus on transformation and say, yes, and in order to help us make this transformation, we have a few steps you need to take to get involved. Here they are on the simplest terms, then that’s the way to go.
Is there social proof that others have benefited from volunteerism? Proof from the volunteers, quotes from volunteers and people they’ve served or people who’ve benefited from their work? Do you have that proof on your website? Can people hear the voice of the volunteer and see who’s talking?
And then do visitors have a clear picture of what to do next? So, is the, is there a clear call to action? So, is it simplified to only three to five steps long? Now, you may have a lot of things going on behind the scenes that help people join your organization.
There may be many steps in your process, but can you boil them down to a simplified three to five? People don’t need to know all of the details about your administrative processes. You need to create something that’s very simple.
If you think about it nowadays, how many times are people, when you go online to do something, if a form doesn’t work, how much time do you spend on it? Not a lot. We all expect things to work. And so, this needs to work too.
And then the other thing I want to say, is it easy to quickly get in touch without creating a login? So many of our websites I’ve reviewed, in order to apply or even learn more, you have to create a login. And gang, you’re missing out. So many people are turning around and walking away because they haven’t yet decided if they’re going to join you.
So why should they create a login? Think of all the times you’ve been to a website where you’re like, I’m not creating a login. I don’t even know if I want to, you know, are these people going to email me every day? What? I don’t want them to have my email. So, you need to first educate people and help them understand.
So, we’ll talk after the break about, how you can do this to capture that immediate interest of people because you don’t want them navigating to your webpage and then walking away.
So, we’re going to take a quick break from my top volunteer recruitment ideas for 2024, but don’t go anywhere because I’ve got two more to share with you. So, I’ll talk to you in a minute.
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Okay. We’re back with my top volunteer recruitment ideas for 2024. Based on the focus group of comments I read from the volunteer, why America isn’t volunteering, the Washington post article. I read a few quotes.
Early on from that article and I started giving some tips before the break. We talked about improving your website and all the questions you might ask to make changes. We talked about collaborating across your community and becoming a collective group of stewards of volunteerism, so volunteerism doesn’t get a bad name in your community.
The other thing I want to talk about is really becoming more responsive by forming a fast-response team. Now I’ve talked about volunteer welcome teams who can help you with training and can call people and remind them and that kind of thing. You can do volunteer recruitment teams who are out in the community spreading the word getting people signed up, but I also think there’s room for a fast-response team, and this team is your customer service support in a way.
So it’s the team that helps you meet the standard of getting back to prospective volunteers within one business day. And so, you can put together a team of volunteers and perhaps they’re monitoring the forms, especially when you’re doing a very busy recruitment campaign. So, if people are completing applications, maybe they call them back that day, telling you you’re going to, you’re going to outperform pretty much everybody else in your community if you do that, because people wait so long to hear from nonprofits about their volunteer applications.
Having live humans getting back with people, super helpful. You can also use technology as a fast response team. So, you can set up info sessions, webinar-based info sessions every week and have on your website an RSVP so that people can feel that satisfaction of, okay, I landed on this webpage, I’ve read about it, I’m interested, I want to learn more. Oh, I can go here and I can join and I can RSVP for this info session. Excellent.
And if you can offer more than one, so that people can choose a time that works for them, that’s great. Now, this is not an orientation. You’re not training people. You’re talking about your need. You’re talking about what your organization’s all about and you’re talking about what volunteers do and you answer questions and introduce people to one another.
It’s not orientation. It’s not here’s how you volunteer here. And these info sessions should be short, maybe 30 minutes long, nothing longer. You can do it longer, but most people aren’t going to log in at the end of a long, busy, exhausting work day for an hour, 90-minute webinar. It’s just not going to happen. Say, hey, we do these short 30-minute calls. You can learn more. We can answer all your questions and we can help you figure out if there’s a role here for you.
The other thing you can do is to include a Calendly or some type of booking link directly on your volunteer recruitment page and ask people to book a call, a quick, short 15-minute call. And if people are able to do that within a week, if there’s call slots available within the next week, they are happy to book calls and maybe have a 15-minute conversation.
Now on the booking form, and even when people are RSVP-ing for an online info session, in either of those cases, you can include questions. Zoom allows you to include additional questions in your Zoom registration pages. So does Calendly. You can ask questions. So, you can ask questions to get a little bit more info about the volunteer.
And then you can send, you can set up automated emails that go out to that person. Hey, thanks for booking a call. By the way, between now and the call, here’s a quick fact sheet to learn more. And so, you can continue to communicate with folks before, between the time they book and the time that you, that you’re able to chat with them either on the info session or on a booked call.
Now, a super-fast response is to have a team of volunteers, a phone bank of people, or one person anyway, that just say, pick up the phone or text us at this number. And we’d be happy to talk with you about volunteering. Right? Now that’s fast. Right? It’s right there on the website. We are here this time to this time, this many days a week. Get in touch right away. We’d be happy to chat with you about what we have to offer. That’s fast response.
Remember, we live in a world where people expect to get information when they want information. People aren’t going to wait two, three weeks a month to get information by then they’ve moved on. And so, we really do need to think about how fast our response is to potential volunteers.
My fourth or number four of my volunteer recruitment ideas is to offer people short challenges to give them a taste of what volunteering is about. So, this sort of gives volunteers, prospective volunteers, a team environment so you can form teams, make it fun, and ask people to come for like, a two-hour challenge or to be part of a weekend challenge doing something, a project based volunteer opportunity.
This is like days of service, but not all day. You can have people just come down and form a buddy system and just have them come down and volunteer for a couple hours with a current volunteer. Now, just because people start out small doesn’t mean they’re going to end up small. If they really enjoy their opportunity with you and they meet people and make friends, then they’re more likely to come back. It doesn’t feel so overwhelming anymore.
And maybe they volunteer short-term now and later on when they have more time, they volunteer more. The goal is to get people into your universe and give them a taste of what volunteering is all about and how much fun and satisfying it can be. But you’ve got what we’re hearing over and over again from, especially from the comments that I read in this response to the Washington Post article.
But also we’re just hearing it, in general, that people need more flexibility in their volunteering. And so, we’ve got to be super creative to find ways that they can come in and help and just get them started small and see where that can grow, where that involvement can grow. And then the final and fifth of my, one of my volunteer recruitment ideas is to, and this sort of goes along with your website, is to get a Google Grant.
And if your organization already has a Google Grant, then you need to start doing paid advertising on Google. If this is where everyone is looking for. Information and you are able to get free pay-per-click advertising on Google, which is the number one browser and search engine. Then why would you not do this? This is a no brainer.
Now, some organizations already have Google grants, so you need to check with your marketing and communications folks. Some don’t, and therefore you need to go to Google, and I will put a link in here for Google grants. And you want to apply for one cause you can get up to $10,000 in pay per click advertising per month.
I would die to have that kind of money for my business! I don’t do Google pay-per-click advertising cause it’s too expensive for my company. So, we used to do it long years ago and just don’t have the money now, but you can get it for free. And what that Google Grant gives you, let’s say you live in a certain community and your volunteer opportunities near me, maybe the keyword you want to rank for is volunteer opportunities.
I live in Knoxville, Tennessee, volunteer opportunities, Knoxville, Tennessee, or Knoxville. If I can put a, an advertisement on the webpage, the search results where people go when they type that into Google. Guess what? I’m going to get more clicks than everybody else because my advertisement is going to be at the top of the page.
And this is a no brainer if you want to make more people aware of what you’ve got going on. And the thing that’s so lovely about Google Grants is if you’re posting ads for search results and keywords, what we call keywords, of things like volunteer opportunities, Knoxville, then people who are typing that in Google have high search intent, we call it.
In other words, they’re ready to go. You don’t have to convince them that volunteerism is something that is worthwhile because they’ve already realized it and they’re now actively looking or you might use keywords like volunteering, volunteer dog walkers. If you do, if you run work in animal welfare, if you do volunteer food bank.
Hey, it’s pretty basic, but you got to know what people are typing in Google. So, you got to do a little bit of research, but if you set up, if you get Google Grant money, Google has a tool in there where you, when you create ads and you can search for keywords and figure out which ones get the most traffic. So, they help you with intel.
But this is a no brainer, gang, if you want more people to your website and you want more people that you don’t already know to know about what you do and to know that your volunteer opportunities are available, a Google Grant is the way to go.
So, check it out. If you don’t have one go get one and let’s start getting more people to your web pages. So first get your web pages up to date then get your Google Grant. Sound good?
All right. So those are my key recruit recruitment volunteer recruitment ideas for 2024. They’re based on what I’m seeing in the market, what volunteers are telling us about why they’re not volunteering, and what makes them happy when they volunteer.
So, whatever we know about our audience, that’s how we have to adjust our strategy. And so, as you think about marketing and doing volunteer recruitment in 2024, you want to think strategically. People are more picky, more choosy, and they should be because you know what? Our time is even more valuable than ever. Our time is our most precious resource. And when people invest their time in our organizations, we need to make sure it is. Absolutely worth it. Absolutely worth it. So think about that.
Wish you the best. Have a fantastic holiday or holiday season, I should say. And we’ll be here next week. Same time, same place on the Volunteer Nation. 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.
