Defining Your Strategy to Recruit Volunteers Successfully 

When thinking about how to recruit volunteers successfully, it is vital to review your current efforts, honestly assess how they’re working, and define an appropriate volunteer recruitment strategy that works for your organization.  

Strategy is often confused with tactics, and in the midst of all of your daily busyness, it can sometimes be difficult to determine which one you’re relying one most, and which one should be used as your primary volunteer recruitment approach. 

So, let’s start with a definition of each one. 

Tactics are akin to your “to-do” list. These action steps have to be done, but they aren’t necessarily going to help you solve the underlying reasons why you don’t have an active and engaged team of volunteers on board.   

Strategy involves higher-level analytical thinking. It requires you to make an objective assessment of what’s going on and develop a response that makes sense in your specific environment.   

Tactics are most commonly used in day-to-day operations. And while a defined volunteer recruitment strategy is more rare in nonprofits,  it is more effective in the long-run. 

How Well Are Your Current Efforts to Recruit Volunteers Working?  

Before you start the work of defining the strategy and tactics to recruit volunteers to your cause, it’s important to first take a look at where your program is right now and accurately assess the weak spots in your current approach.   

Below are five common areas in which volunteer-driven organizations may be missing the mark.  

1. You haven’t spread the word past your inner circle.

Yes, your volunteer workforce may already include women, people with disabilities, youth, minority people of color, veterans, refugees and immigrants, and members of the LGBTQ communities. But don’t get ahead of yourself. 

Through careful surveying and analysis, determine the demographics of current volunteers, those of the communities you are serving, and recognize the gaps in diversity. 

This step will allow you to make a data-informed decision when choosing the specific communities you’ll actively seek to recruit. 

2. Your message isn’t compelling enough.

There is a surprising trend in volunteer recruitment messaging that entices potential volunteers to click on your ad: it’s the social construct of reciprocity. Reciprocity is one of those social norms we live by.  No matter where we come from, we feel obligated to return a favor, even if it is unsolicited and no response is expected. 

Researchers believe this behavior has evolved in order to keep the majority of human transactions “fair.”  It’s basically helped us cooperate and survive as a species.  And we are, even today, hard-wired to follow the rule of reciprocity.  It simply compels us to act. Learn more here. 

3. Your call to action (CTA) is too vague.

It is so important to give clear, specific instruction on next steps to take right away.  

If the audience for your call for volunteers is already familiar with your organization and has been involved in other ways, your CTA can appear in the first line or two of your message. For other audiences, it may be better placed at the conclusion of your emotional appeal.  

In your CTA, you are building a relationship with a prospective applicant. Start it off with a warm welcome. Invite them to “Click Here” and include “to be taken to a 3-minute online application”, or “Call 555-5555 between 8 – 5 and speak with Angie or Rob for more details”.  

This counters a good bit of apprehension and clarifies expectations, which builds trust.  

4. Your application process isn’t consumer friendly.

Volunteer applications shouldn’t be only about the vital information you are gathering. 

The volunteer application is also a great place to start showing your volunteers that your organization prioritizes the interests, safety, and wellbeing of everyone. So take a look or go through your own application process yourself.  

Are you asking for significant amounts of personal information before the applicant is even sure they want to volunteer? Are there any unnecessary “hoops” that you require applicants to jump through, simply because that’s the way you’ve always done it? If so, now is a great time to streamline the process and create steps that draw applicants in rather than turn them away.   

5. You don’t tailor your opportunities to accommodate volunteer motivations.

Volunteer motivations can be altruistic, meaning the volunteer has a desire to help others for the greater good, and/or instrumental, meaning they are volunteering to meet their own self-interests.   

We talk a lot about volunteer motivations in our work because there is a body of evidence that validates their importance in every stage of the volunteer lifecycle.   

When you continuously evaluate volunteer motivations, you’ll be sure to attract volunteers who will be committed to staying involved. 

10 Steps: Define Your Strategy to Recruit Volunteers More Effectively 

Defining your volunteer recruitment strategy takes intentionality and the input of your coworkers and volunteer team.  

Start by laying out your program’s specific needs, and then analyze the volunteer skills required to meet those needs. This will help you better recruit volunteers whose personal values align with your mission.   

Below is a simple process you can use to to do just that.  Ask your volunteers and staff to help you work through this process.  All that’s required is pens, post-its, a blank wall, and some thoughtful people. 

Step 1 — Brainstorm all of the tasks that need to be completed at the program.  Do not separate out paid and volunteer duties yet. 

Step 2 — Write one task per post-it, and try to be as exhaustive as possible.  Don’t yet decide who will be responsible for each task. Put them all up on the wall. 

Step 3 — Identify which tasks can only be done by paid staff.  Be open-minded — there are probably very few tasks that absolutely must be done by paid staff. 

Step 4 — Remove paid staff responsibilities from the larger group, and cluster them together. 

Step 5 — Then, cluster the remaining tasks into groups of similar duties that make sense together.  These are your teams. 

Step 6 — Name them, and type up a team description with a bullet list of tasks, transcribed from the post-its. 

Step 7 — Identify which paid staff will support which team.  Consider how you will use paid staff to fill in when there are volunteer vacancies or absences, or when there are a higher than normal service volumes. 

Step 8 — Create one-page volunteer position descriptions for the jobs that would be needed to perform each team’s tasks.  In them, describe the “must-have” and “need to have” skill sets needed for each job. 

Step 9 — Prioritize which positions need to be filled first.  You can’t recruit them all at once, so pick the ones that will have the most impact with the least training investment at the outset. 

Step 10 — Finally, recruit for those positions; be clear about what skills are necessary for each job. 

Overcoming Barriers to Volunteering 

When building out your volunteer recruitment strategy, you should also keep in mind any barriers to volunteering and remove or minimize them whenever possible.  

The barriers volunteers experience will vary from person to person, based on their own past experience and current set of life challenges.  They might also be precipitated by the volunteer’s own identity and sense of self.   

If they are insecure about their capabilities, for example, they may be unable to ultimately make a commitment without some reassurance from you and others. 

If you ask potential supporters what worries them, they likely can’t or won’t tell you — anxiety is a private matter for most, and not easily shared with strangers.   

Alternately, their concerns may be subconscious, nagging thoughts that they couldn’t put a name to if they tried.  So, as a volunteer recruiter, it’s up to you to predict the unexpressed concerns of your volunteer applicants and address them in your recruitment appeals. 

Volunteer recruitment involves more than just posting information about your job openings and waiting for responses.  It also involves some complex psychological processes, believe it or not, and you must be able to overcome objections to common barriers to volunteering.  

Prospective volunteers have worries that differ from long-term volunteers. No matter how friendly your organization or how powerful your mission, volunteers must overcome a few emotional barriers and worries before they will commit (or even answer your recruitment ad).   

Your recruitment materials must provide the critical information they need to calm their anxieties.  Review the list of common barriers below and view them through the lens of your own recruitment, onboarding, and training processes. 

Think about the language and photos you use to describe your volunteer opportunities.  Can you use them to answer some of the questions that arise?  What about testimonials from other volunteers and people you serve; can they help?  

Finally, although your volunteer postings are usually short, can you provide a link to the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ’s) on your website?  These are but a few things you can do to eliminate the internal psychological barriers that keep people from joining your team. 

Common Barriers to Volunteering 

• Will they accept my application? 
• Do I really have enough time? 
• Can I afford it (the transportation, childcare, time off work, etc.)? 
• What exactly will they be asking me to do? 
• Will I be comfortable doing it? 
• Will I fit in with others? 
• Will I be treated kindly? 
• Will I know what to do and how to do it? 
• Will I be safe? 
• Will I have a real impact? 

Recruit Volunteers – It Requires Strategy AND Tactics    

Recruiting volunteers effectively is going to take BOTH an overall strategy to provide the roadmap and the right tactics to direct the specific actions needed to get there. 

We’d love to help you get traction on this foundational step through the training found in our Volunteer Management Fundamentals Course. This self-paced course includes five online modules covering all the most important aspects of volunteer management, including how to build a volunteer recruitment strategy that works and how to grow and scale your program beyond your current limitations. 

Enrollment is open NOW, and we’d love to help you get started today. Click HERE to learn more.