How to Conquer Recruiting Volunteers Using Personas When you think about recruiting volunteers, you need to imagine your ideal volunteer. What kind of work are they doing in your organization? How do they interact with you, your co-workers, other volunteers, your clients? What skills do they have? What values? How do they communicate? Just pause [...]
How to Build Better Nonprofit Partnerships If the thought of building nonprofit partnerships in your community leaves you in a cold sweat, you’re not alone. For some of us, the idea of cold calling complete strangers -- however beneficial they may be to our efforts -- ties our stomachs in knots. I’m one of those [...]
Key Insights from 5 Years of Volunteer Management Research In January 2016, we launched our first global "state of the volunteer industry" report. Now the longest running volunteer management research p[project on the planet. Our chief aim was to gather and share information related to the infrastructure, practices, challenges, and needs of leaders of volunteers around [...]
What Every Volunteer Manager Needs to Know: A Lesson in Leadership As a volunteer manager, you are often stuck in middle management and all of the challenges that entail. Not always the best place to be. But let’s close our eyes for a moment for a little thought experiment (OK technically, you need your eyes open to [...]
10 Free, Last Minute Ways to Celebrate National Volunteer Week This year’s National Volunteer Week starts in two days! The theme is Celebrate Service. In the hustle and bustle of new-year strategic planning and onboarding new recruits, you may not have had time to think about National Volunteer Week. That’s why we’re here, two days [...]
What I Learned From 10 Wonderful Years in Nonprofit Consulting This month marks my tenth anniversary as a business owner in the field of nonprofit consulting and training. It’s hard to believe it’s been that long. A decade! To be clear … When I started my business, I really had no clue what I was [...]
How to Recruit Volunteers by Appealing to the Emotions Now, more than ever, our messages occupy a crowded landscape, and recruitment of volunteers is more difficult. Even if your volunteer/potential volunteer has opted into your communication, you’ll still be competing with all the other information they are interested in receiving via email, text, social, [...]
Proven Impact is the Key to Winning Volunteer Grants We often get questions about how to find and secure volunteer grants, funding for volunteer coordinators, and resources for volunteer programming. Often, staff members have high hopes that if they just find the right funder, they can go directly to the source and get funding for [...]
