How to Recruit Volunteers More Effectively

It is one thing to obtain volunteer help for a day; it is another thing entirely to acquire assistance or a group of non profit volunteers for several months period of time. It is even more difficult, perhaps, to find the right volunteers. The right volunteers in the case of most of the nonprofit organizations out there includes a person or group of people who have valuable talents and skills that are useful to your needs and who are, at the same time, willing to donate their time practicing them to help you out. This last type of volunteer is fairly hard to come by and even harder to retain.

So how do you maximize the effectiveness of your volunteer recruiting efforts? The answer is you must solicit volunteer help in more appropriate places. Targeting specific locations to collect new volunteers of the most relevant skill set and personality type necessary for your services or organization instead of drawing from a large general volunteer database or resume type of bank is key to recruiting volunteers most effectively.

Obtaining the help you need through these directed means will allow you to find more qualified volunteers that are less likely to give up their promised responsibility a couple days into the job. One of the major reasons volunteers do this is because their talents do not coincide with the volunteer position requirements and many of them become bored or feel under utilized. A good skills-to-job-needs match makes for a highly successful volunteer experience, according to the organization as well as the individual assistant.

Here are three great ways to go about targeting volunteers with skills and talents relevant to your organization's needs:

Host an open house for volunteer recruitment:

Open your doors to members of the community to reintroduce your organization and its services to the public while simultaneously serving as an informational help desk for interested volunteers. During the open house session, hold a brief lecture with various speeches from top members of your nonprofit to show individuals (and maybe donors as well) that your employees care about their mission even those all the way at the top. Be sure among those speeches to include one by the volunteer coordinator or liaison, after which you can hold a question and answer session to engage those interested in possibly applying to help out. Focus on the benefits and skills one can develop through volunteering anywhere, and specifically, at your service organization. Consider passing out pamphlets or informative literature about your group and what it is like to work there.

PSAs to recruit non profit volunteers:

Send out public service announcements or press release event announcements to all of the public media outlets in your area to get free publicity in local newspapers and possibly on television about your search for new volunteers. Detail in the announcement some of the major plans your organization would like to implement throughout the next quarter, season or however you measure your goals and objectives schedule. Don't expect to get many giant full page articles about your recruitment efforts, but it is likely that the majority of editors in your area will include at least a blurb about your volunteer search, if only just as filler. Keep in mind that with public service announcements, many journalists seek to transcribe the information into a news article with as much swiftness and accuracy as possible. This means that more often than not, they will simply copy what you have written on your press release verbatim. So make sure it says what you want it to before you send it out to the masses.

Public Access Television for volunteer recruiting:

Run a brief commercial announcement on your community's public access television network. It doesn't have to have special effects or catchy taglines below your organization logo like traditional commercial advertisements. Public Access TV is renowned for looking as cheap as it is. But don't get me wrong, it is not generally looked down upon by people, despite its lower standards in programming. Most people watching public access TV are looking for something unique and new to check out or are flipping through the stations and pausing in boredom or distractedness, and for the most part these viewers understand and support the featured individuals and companies' efforts to start here in making a name for themselves or their event. A simple photograph of the front of your organization's building or a picture of your team of employees smiling; either of these visuals, with your contact info plastered still on the bottom of the screen below it and an audio advertisement of your volunteer recruiting efforts to go along should definitely be sufficient.