215 – 5 Ways to Boost the Fun Factor for Community Volunteers

Episode #215 Transcript: 5 Ways to Boost the Fun Factor for Community Volunteers 

Tobi Johnson: Well, hello everybody. Welcome to the Volunteer Nation podcast. I’m your host, Tobi Johnson, and I want to talk about the fun factor: how to bring it back into volunteering. Sometimes I think volunteerism starts to feel a lot like paid work, and most volunteers really aren’t interested in finding another job in their busy lives. What they want to do is have fun, be social, make progress, make a commitment, and follow through on it — all of the things that volunteers want to do, but also in their social lives.

Volunteering is really about leisure time more than it is about work. Although we, as leaders of volunteers, sometimes think it’s all about the work, for volunteers, it’s all about the play as well. And nothing brought it home more to me than last Saturday. I was hosting our team of our Gardening Tips Live Master Gardeners team. We’re a team of volunteers who’ve been working together for a pretty long time, many years now, before the pandemic, I think, or at least during the pandemic we started. We get together and do a show on our Facebook group called Gardening Tips Live every Saturday, and now we do it every other Saturday.

That Facebook group has 36,000 people in it. I think any nonprofit would just love to host a Facebook group that’s that big. It is entirely run by volunteers, our team, our tiny team, actually, and we’ve been able to build it up to that many people. Partly, I think, it is because we just have a lot of fun in that group. We’re sharing pictures, we’re telling jokes, we’re inviting people. It’s just a really great community vibe.

When I invited my friends over, partly I invited them because I’m moving to the West Coast, and this is probably the last time we’re going to get to see each other in person, now, if ever. But I’m still going to be volunteering for the rest of the year on Gardening Tips Live because it’s a remote volunteering opportunity, and I can still contribute my time for the rest of the year. Then next year, I’ll transition to another volunteer role. But we had so much fun, and I started thinking through: why was it so much fun? Partly because I’m hanging out with my friends, right? But partly because there was a lot of love in the group. There are a few things that are so unique about our group.

One is that we are very different from one another. If you saw us together in the room, you’d say, “These people would never hang out socially.” And it’s true; probably we wouldn’t. Our lives probably wouldn’t even cross at all. But because of volunteering, we found a community together, and we built it over time.

The second thing is that community and that fun factor are partly about no one having to do it all. So when I suggested, “Why don’t we, rather than going out to dinner, it’s expensive, and then we all have to meet somewhere, and then we’re kind of constrained by time, why don’t we just meet on my back deck?” Most of our yard furniture is gone because we’ve moved a lot of our stuff already. So I said, “BYOC — bring your own chair.” So everybody brought their own chairs.

When we were planning this, we just planned it on a text thread, and folks were asking each other, “What can we do to make this easy? Let’s just push the easy button. Shall we do a pizza party?” And everybody agreed: yeah, pizza party would be great. It’s super easy. Then people started texting in: “Hey, I’ll bring a Greek salad.” I said, “I’ll bring a dessert.” Someone else said, “I’ll bring some wine.” So we all came together and decided what we were going to bring. Everybody was chipping in. We all decided together what the date was going to be.

We decided that it was going to be at my house, and we had such a good time hanging out. It was just fun to get together without an agenda. I did buy a couple of bouquets of flowers — vases of flowers — for the two leaders of our group because they do so much. They’re there in the community like every day. One of our leaders has had some health problems, so she’s been struggling, and the fact that she’s even volunteering still right now is amazing to me. Then another one of my team members gave me a card that was an appreciation card about some of the things I’ve done at Master Gardeners.

It was a very giving and generous type of event as well. You know, it took us, I don’t know, 15 minutes to clean up. We didn’t feel like it was a heavy lift for anybody, and we just had a good time. I was thinking to myself, “Are we having enough of a good time in our volunteer events and projects, et cetera?” So I thought I would go ahead and record an episode on five ways to boost the fun factor for community volunteers.

Maybe you’re thinking, like me, “I’m not being creative enough. Where can I be creative?” So hopefully I’ll give you some ideas today.

The other reason I’m thinking about this is because we are now ready to host our Volapalooza — I’m still getting used to the name of it because we just named it that. Our Volapalooza Festival, which will be happening from May 27th through June 9th. We have pulled out all stops. If you’ve been to any of my other challenge-type events or multiple-day events like Vision Week, we tend to have a good time in these events. This one is fashioned on a music festival vibe, so we created a music poster and all kinds of fun stuff.

I hope you’ll come to that. I’ll put a show link in the show notes. It’s volpro.net/festival, and you’re invited to come. But you know, we just gotta start having a little more fun, I think.

So, first thing in this, let’s move into what I want to talk about today, which is how to boost the fun factor. I want to ask you: when was the last time — just ask yourself — when was the last time your community volunteers left a shift laughing?

Even when it’s hard work, even when the work is stressful, even when the folks you are serving — in some cases, it’s difficult work — I’ve worked with a fair amount of direct service, and I know what difficult work looks like. But you can still have fun. You can still have fun even in difficult work.

So, when was the last time community volunteers left a shift laughing? When was the last time someone said, “That was really fun. Thank you so much. I had such a good time.”? When was the last time you heard people just roaring with laughter, deep belly laughs? When was the last time you saw play going on with volunteers?

Here’s the thing: when we are working with community volunteers, sometimes we get lost in the tasks. We lose sight of the people, the culture, and the joy that can come from volunteering. You know, it was 110% on display last weekend on my back deck; the joy of coming together. And we were talking about it as a team. We were actually reflecting on how it is. Our team does so well together. We will back each other up if somebody can’t join us that day. We are just super supportive of one another.

Part of it is we just don’t have egos, and we’ve done this all 100% volunteer. We don’t actually have a lot of support for what we do; we just do it ourselves. So it’s been really great. But what’s going to keep volunteers — the reason we come back to this volunteering experience over and over again — I’ve been a Master Gardener volunteer; this is my 11th year. And I’ve been working with Gardening Tips Live for, I think, five or six years as part of that team. The reason we keep coming back is because there’s joy to it. There’s satisfaction. It’s the secret ingredient to retention.

Yes, you can create all these different things and smooth out processes and all that. But really, when people feel joy, they want to have more joy — especially in today’s world. Today’s world feels really hard. I don’t know about you, but for me, it’s feeling pretty hard. And so I love those moments where I can share joy and commune with others. If we want to think about our retention, we should think about how we create joy. So we’re going to talk today about how to turn up the volume on joy and why it matters more than ever. So stay with me. We are going to get into it.

So maybe the secret is,  let’s get started here. Maybe the secret to retaining more community volunteers isn’t about working harder. Maybe it’s not about working harder, but making volunteering more enjoyable.

Because you know, people have endless demands on their time. Think about all the things that you have committed to your volunteers have committed to. They don’t have a lot of extra time. So anything in your life that buoys you up and that makes you feel light and happy, you’re going to do more of, because the other things may not feel that great. So it’s really good if volunteering feels draining, stressful, disconnected, or even forgettable — people probably aren’t going to come back.

So let’s talk about, I talk a lot about edutainment. I’m in the field of edutainment, and that may — some people don’t like that term. I think that when people are having fun when they’re learning, they actually learn more. So when we let go of the stress hormones in our bodies, we actually can start to feel and start to open up. We don’t have as much adrenaline, so our brains actually open up and are more spongy when it comes to the ability to take in data. So joy in our volunteering is good for our volunteers as well. It helps them live in the moment, be in the experience, but also learn more as they go. So it’s good stuff.

So let’s talk about what are some ways to do that.

You know, today’s volunteers really want connection. They want flexibility. They want belonging. They want positive experiences so they will stay. They will stay when they feel connected to others, when they feel emotionally connected to not only the mission but the people at your nonprofit.

One of the ways, when we laugh, it’s a way of making a connection happen. When you laugh with someone else, you are doing something in unison. If you think about the connection you feel when you’re singing with someone else, let’s say you were in a choir at one point, or let’s say you’re just singing with friends, doing karaoke — it’s a way of bonding. Similarly with laughter and joy and smiling, it’s a way people are saying, “I feel light enough to be around you. I’m not going to be on my guard, and I’m also experiencing this thing — whatever we’re experiencing — side by side.” So it’s a way of sort of clamping, bonding. So it’s really important.

You know, volunteer engagement is absolutely emotional before it’s operational. Let me say that again: volunteer engagement is emotional before it’s operational. So we’ve got to think about whether our volunteers are having positive experiences and feeling positive emotions, because when they do that, they’re more likely to stay, they can learn better, and they are more likely to be productive as well.

So let’s also talk for a minute, before we jump into the tips, about what drains the joy. What drains the joy? There are a few different things.

Unclear rules and wasted time. When people don’t know what they’re supposed to be doing or feel like their time’s being wasted, it’s not fun. Think about that party I hosted last weekend. Everybody knew their role. We were all texting back and forth in our thread, committing to what we were going to bring to the party. So we had enough to eat, plenty to drink, and all kinds of different things. People were saying, “Hey, I’m gluten-free,” so I made sure there was a gluten-free option. I know not everybody drinks alcohol, so we had lots of juice, seltzer water, and all kinds of other things. So everybody’s needs got met through our communication.

The other thing: no sense of connection drains the joy. When people don’t feel like they’re connected to others, they’re just sort of a widget working in a machine, and that just doesn’t feel good. And of course, we had plenty of connections. While we were sitting around having dinner, I would just kind of randomly throw out conversation starters — not really icebreakers per se, but I would just kind of say, “So what’s everybody doing? What are you all doing this summer? What events are you doing? Where are you going on vacation? What’s everybody up to this summer?” That kind of got the conversation going. Then we started talking about different kinds of food, and then what kind of movies, what are you streaming, what are you gaga for right now that you just can’t put down, what book are you reading? I just put a few things out there so we could have some conversation.

We actually don’t, when we get together as a group, talk a lot about our work together. We don’t say, “Can you believe our last guest? That was amazing.” No, we don’t talk about that. We don’t talk about the photos we showed. We just don’t talk about the work. We talk about each other. And we bond that way. You’ll find that volunteers who are finding joy and feel connected will talk more about each other and share experiences than they will about the work. Even though we’re complete geeks about gardening, now we might talk about plants and getting the right plants in, and I have a huge garden — I wish — you know, we were talking about some of the plants in my garden. But we’re not talking about the work; we’re talking about the joy of our hobby, right? It’s different.

So the third thing that really drains joy is a lack of recognition. People who feel invisible will stop showing up. People who don’t feel like they’re seen as humans. Now everybody in our group is seen. We have a wide variety of levels of introvert and extrovert in our group. Not everybody is the talkative one, so we also make a habit — I noticed people getting up and moving around and sitting by the more quiet people. You know, this is a group of about eight or ten people. We invited everybody to bring their plus one, so people could bring people if they wanted. Not everybody is a total extrovert, but everybody was seen and heard. So we had big group conversations, we had small conversations in dyads, and none of that was planned. It was just the vibe that we had going.

But we also, as I said, imbued into that event just a little bit of informal recognition. A couple of beautiful vases of flowers, a cake. The cake said “Thank you, KCMG, GTL”, now nobody would know what that is but our team, Knox County Master Gardener, Gardening Tips Live team, right? I just wanted to thank them, so I put that on the cake. So again, none of this is crazy hard to do, but it’s something we have to plan for. It’s not a mistake, right? It’s planned for. So when it’s working, it’s fantastic.

More on the topic of community building with volunteers, check out Volunteer Nation episode 27, where I talk about secrets to building a sense of community with volunteers. That’ll be helpful if you’re thinking more about community building in general.

All right, let’s talk also about the signs that your volunteer experience needs more energy and vigor. One is that your volunteers are quietly disappearing. They’re ghosting you; they’re not showing up. The other is that there’s low enthusiasm. People are just there to kind of check the box. They’re kind of dialing it in. They’re really not totally engaged. Maybe your orientations or other trainings or meetings feel overly stiff and formal, like nobody’s hanging out afterwards. They’re going straight home.

You know, if you have anything in person, I always know how fun the culture is by how early people show up; because I’ve been in volunteer groups where people show up like an hour early just to chit-chat and do a little bit of potluck, and how long they stay after. If people are hanging out around talking for a half an hour afterwards, then you know you’ve got a pretty positive culture going.

If you’re having a hard time getting volunteers to come back to things, then it’s probably not that fun.

And if you’re leaning on the same people to do things over and over again, then they’re just hard workers and they have a certain type of ethic or ethos in their life where they’re going to do it no matter how hard it hurts or how unpleasant it is. We have people like that. I do that sometimes. I’m a very hard worker. I’m going to do what I said I was going to do. I’m going to grit my teeth and grin and bear it, and I’m going to get it done. But you know what? If they’re not having fun, after a while they’re going to burn out, and they really need the help of other people. So that’s another sign that perhaps you need a little more joy.

The good news is that small shifts in energy and your own energy as well, you’ve got to think about your own energy and the energy that you are. Energy is a very powerful source. Whatever energy you can give your group; and if you feel depleted, you’ve got to start doing some self-care to get yourself back to a place of joy. That is not always easy. I know I’m probably preaching to the choir here, but I tell you this because I know from personal experience. When I’m depleted, I have very little energy to give to people. So I have to really back up and start doing more self-care. But small shifts in energy level and also in the design of the volunteer experience can make a difference.

So let’s take a pause from my top tips on how to boost the fun factor for community volunteers. When we get back, I’m going to give you those five top tips. So don’t go anywhere. I’ll be right back.

Tobi: Okay, we’re back with my top tips on how to boost the fun factor of community volunteerism.

I’m going to lay them out right now, and hopefully, this will give you some inspiration in thinking really critically about your fun factor, because it’s actually a management strategy. It’s a technique, right? Boosting the fun boosts the productivity. It boosts the retention, and it just also makes volunteering more enjoyable. I believe that volunteering should be enjoyable. After all, volunteers are doing it as a leisure activity in their lives, and so it should be fun. I mean, it’s just a no-brainer: volunteerism should be fun.

Now, again, we have crisis-type volunteering that sometimes is stressful as well, but there’s also camaraderie. Anybody who’s worked in any type of crisis services knows the type of sort of dark humor that comes up between folks when they’re dealing in the face of pretty high-stress and high-stakes tasks. So even in those environments, we can see that people have a way to find fun in their work.

So let’s get into these five tips.

First way to boost the fun factor for community volunteers is to invite volunteers to co-create the culture. Ask them, “Okay, what is feeling like a drain right now? What is really lowering and pulling on our energy, and what can we do that would be more fun? What traditions could we start?” And let volunteers lead in this way.

The second tip is to design for more social connections. Volunteer buddy systems, icebreakers, team introductions, and shared meals can create a sense of community with volunteers. So we want to give them time. The next time you’re doing a training, ask people to come 30 minutes ahead of time for social time, or ask about potlucks. Or in the training itself, set aside time for people to get to know one another, or in the meeting. It’s just really helpful to have purposeful social time rather than having social time by accident.

The third tip for boosting the fun factor for community volunteers is using themes and a festival-like energy or a party-like energy. We’re doing this with Volapalooza, from the design of the event, the creative graphic design. I actually designed a poster for Volapalooza, and it’s supposed to look like, and you could tell me if it does or doesn’t it’s supposed to look like sort of a ’60s, kind of psychedelic music poster. That’s what I was going for, to make it fun. The colors are bright. It’s really fun. I’m not going with any of our quote-unquote brand fonts, for example. I’m going with fun fonts. I’m making it really high energy and fun, and we’re going to carry this through the entire event. So it is branded. When you can create an event that is branded and special, volunteers can feel like they are doing something that’s different.

You know, costume challenges, seasonal celebrations, color teams, music playlists, theme days, or total events — lots of things you can do. I think we’re going to be doing some fun things during Volapalooza that are going to be fun things to engage people on social. So we’re going to think outside the box and past and beyond just the normal of what we do with our free events. So it’s going to be a lot of fun.

Tip number four for boosting the fun factor for community volunteers is designing for joyful and memorable moments. I will remember this party on my back deck for the rest of my life. I created, and we created, co-created, I should say, with my team, and I’m not the leader of the team, by the way. I do not lead this team. I am just a participant with the rest of the folks. But I will remember it forever because it’s the final time we’ll get to see each other. Some people may come out and visit me. I may come into town once in a while. But I’m going to live across the country, so it’s unlikely I’ll see some of these people ever again. And it’s making me a little bit sad to say that. But it is a memorable moment.

We started taking selfies, and I’m not a big selfie person, actually. I don’t take a lot of selfies, but I said, “You know what, guys? Let’s take some selfies,” because I knew we would want to remember the time together. Then we started sharing those in our text thread.

So, having selfie stations and celebration rituals. I like things like high-five tunnels. If you’re in person, there are so many things you can do in person that are fun. You can do dance parties. You can do dance parties remotely as well. If you’re all in a remote volunteer program, just do dance parties. Get everybody in front of the camera doing a dance. You can do group photos. You can do group photos with everybody’s tiles on LinkedIn. You can do these things.

You can also give surprise treats and giveaways; something that’s meaningful, though. I’m not really big on just buying stuff for stuff’s sake, but if it has a particular meaning to your group. Sometimes it’s a little talisman of some kind that people can take with them. You know, when my husband and I got married, we had a giveaway. My husband’s a geologist, and we had a giveaway that was just a little river rock — a small river rock in a little tied bag. Inside it was engraved “love rocks.” And to this day, I know some of my friends and family still have those love rocks. We call them love rocks, and that’s a talisman. That’s a memory that when someone holds that, they’ll remember that event. So there are certain things that can have meaning. I’m just not into buying a bunch of stuff just for stuff’s sake. That’s me, though.

Okay, fifth and final tip for how to boost the fun factor for community volunteers: make those events and that experience a lot more fun and less bureaucratic, less boring, less drudgery. We just can’t have that for volunteers. Why would anybody sign up for that? Lives are stressful right now. We need to have some more fun, right? And so do you, by the way. So do you.

And so the fifth thing is making it shareable. We talked about designing for memorable moments; now let’s talk about making it shareable. So if you’re doing selfie stations or creating selfie booths, think about how you’re going to share that out. Are you using social media? Are you having branded signs or areas that people can stand in front of? Are you social sharing and tagging people after the event is over, or even during the event if it’s an event-based situation? So think about how to make things shareable and interesting. Have volunteers interview each other. We’re probably going to share a couple of group photos on Gardening Tips Live in the Knox Area Gardening Tips Facebook group because I think somebody probably already has done it. We want to share things, let people see how much fun we’re having.

I think those are really great tips: inviting volunteers to co-create the culture is one; designing for more social connection is the second; using themes and festival energy is the third; designing for joyful and memorable moments is the fourth; and making those moments shareable so that we can continue to remember them is the fifth.

If you want to learn more about my tips on creating really awesome events, check out Volunteer Nation episode 115: “Your Quick Guide to Amazing Volunteer Events.” I add a little bit more. You’ll learn more about my philosophy and tips on creating events, and there are a few tips on making them memorable as well.

Just remember this: joy creates a sense of belonging. When we feel collective joy, we feel closer to one another because we’re not feeling as on guard. Shared positive experiences do create stronger teams. Now, I know in team building, people do team building, and people have to go through crisis, and because they get through the crisis together, they form a stronger team; they bond. Yeah, okay, but you know what? In volunteering, people aren’t there for that. That’s not what they signed up for. They signed up to have fun. So let’s make sure they’re having fun.

Memorable volunteer moments lead to stronger community culture, better retention, and more referrals. So if you don’t think this is worth your time, think about that again. Is it worth your time to create more joy and space for joy and to lead through joy in your volunteer program?

People will remember how volunteering made them feel for a lot longer than all of the logistical things they needed to know and the day-to-day tasks they took on.

When I think back about Master Gardener, I’m not going to think about the every episode or the presentations I made or the guests we had on the show or the running around my garden at the last minute getting photos so I can share them on the show. That’s not what I’m going to remember about my volunteering experience. What I’m going to remember is this group of people, their smiling faces, their care and love for one another. And I was grateful to be part of that group, and I’m still going to be part of that group until the end of the year. I’m getting a little bit — forgive me. Sorry. I’m just a little bit feeling it right now.

So just remember that this is how it should be. This is how community work together should feel. And if there are a lot of processes getting in the way of that, you have to ask: at what cost are we removing the joy from volunteering? Is it worth it? Is the return on investment really worth it? I don’t know.

So if you want to join us to have some joy, maybe you’re not feeling like you’ve got enough joy in your life right now, join us for Volapalooza. We are going to have fun. That is the number one objective of this event: to have more fun, because we believe that there needs to be more fun in the world. I know that just sounds really basic, but it’s true.

So if you want to join us, it’ll be May 27th through June 9th. Just go to volpro.net/festival. There are several events on that page, so make sure you register for each one because the reminders will come out separately. They’re in different Zoom links.

So it’s not a single stage — we’re going to have multiple stages. Come and be ready to have fun, to get some creativity, to learn from our wise guest advisors. I will also be sharing my best advice on how to build, grow, and scale volunteer talent in today’s world, because things are changing rapidly.

Just remember that creating joyful volunteer experiences isn’t about being less professional. It’s not about releasing our ability to safeguard the people we serve. It’s not anything about that. All those things can be true, and joy can be happening, right? Joy can be happening. It’s really about creating the genuine community connections that we all crave, that we all want to be part of. It takes a little time, takes a little creativity, but not really much — just some forethought and proactive planning.

So I hope this has been helpful. If you like this episode, I hope you’ll share it with a friend or colleague, or give us a rating and review. We like five-star reviews — it means more people will learn about us. And of course, join us for Volapalooza. The first event is on May 27th. Go to volpro.net/festival, and I look forward to seeing you there.

It’s going to be fun. Now that I’ve hosted this entire episode on creating fun, I better deliver, right? Okay. I promise. I’ll see you there.