Volunteer Recruitment: A Guide to Get More Volunteers

Volunteer recruitment is a process that includes attracting, selecting, and engaging people willing to give their time, efforts, and skills for the betterment of a cause, community, or organization without being financially compensated. Nonprofit organizations rely on volunteers to support missions, including providing services to communities in need, fundraising, and organizing events.

What Is Volunteer Recruitment?

The process of actively seeking and attracting people willing to give time and services to support something is the core of volunteer recruitment. The process of volunteer recruitment relies on a combination of activities and strategies to identify, engage, and enlist potential volunteers.

Components of an overall plan for getting more volunteers include:

• Identify volunteer needs: The first step in recruiting volunteers is to identify specific tasks and roles that a volunteer is needed for. This involves an assessment of organizational goals, priorities, and existing capacity to determine where more support is required.
• Develop volunteer roles and descriptions: After volunteer needs are identified, an organization can create a clear, compelling set of volunteer roles and job descriptions that outline qualifications, responsibilities, time commitments, and expected outcomes for every position. More on crafting compelling descriptions is below. 
• Marketing and outreach: Getting more volunteers relies on marketing and outreach to raise awareness about opportunities and attract potential volunteers. This could include the promotion of needs and positions through websites, social media, newsletters, partnerships with other organizations, and community events.
• Engagement and communication: At this point in the recruitment process, an organization can actively engage with potential volunteers through different channels. Effective communication is critical to building relationships, addressing concerns, and motivating people to get involved.
• Screening and selection: Depending on the nature of roles, an organization might do screening processes like interviews, reference checks, or background checks to ensure volunteers are well-suited to positions.
• Training and onboarding: After a volunteer is recruited and selected, an organization can provide the needed training, support, and orientation to make sure volunteers have the skills, knowledge, and needed resources to perform roles effectively.
• Recognition and appreciation: Recognizing and appreciating volunteers for their contributions are needed to maintain their sense of motivation, satisfaction, and commitment over time. Acknowledgement of volunteer efforts can include appreciation events, letters, awards, and other forms of recognition.

A volunteer recruitment plan is ongoing and strategic. The process requires careful communication, planning, and building of relationships.

In this guide, we’ll focus on the actual activities to get more volunteers and how you can meet your goals.

Identify Your Needs

A crucial step to recruiting the right people to contribute to the mission and goals of your organization is to know what your needs are, very specifically. To identify volunteer needs, start by reviewing your organizational goals, including mission, values, and strategic objectives. Identify key priorities and the areas where you need additional volunteer support to achieve the goals you define.

Review current roles and responsibilities and determine where gaps are and if you could require additional support to meet organizational needs better.

Engage with key stakeholders as you’re identifying goals and needs. You can talk with staff, board members, community partners, and program beneficiaries to gather insight and perspective about where you could benefit from volunteer support.

Other things to keep in mind as you’re identifying your needs include:

• Perform a task analysis, breaking down different activities and tasks needed to accomplish organizational goals. Consider operational tasks and project-specific activities that could require help from volunteers.
• Evaluate the skills, expertise, and availability of staff. Identify the tasks that could be delegated to volunteers, freeing staff up for specialized or higher-level work.
• Consider time-sensitive projects that could benefit from volunteer support.
• Evaluate resource constraints that could be impacting your organization’s ability to meet goals and try to find places where volunteers could fill resource gaps, effectively leveraging their skills and talents.
• Prioritize volunteer roles and opportunities most closely aligned with your goals, mission, and capacity. Focus recruitment on filling priority roles before you expand to any other areas.

When you follow these steps, you can systematically identify volunteer needs, tailoring recruitment to attract people with the skills and expertise as well as the passion required to make meaningful contributions to the work of your organization.

Once you’ve got a clear view of who you hope to connect with and what your needs are, you can start to take actionable volunteer recruitment steps.

Create Clear Volunteer Role Descriptions

One of the first things to do after you get a clearer picture of the scope of your recruitment and volunteer needs is to begin crafting role descriptions. You’ll use these throughout most of the rest of the approaches highlighted in this guide.

Key things to keep in mind when writing role descriptions for getting more volunteers include:

• Start with a descriptive, clear, and engaging title accurately reflecting the role. Be specific in the title rather than generic.
• Provide a brief, concise overview highlighting the purpose, impact, and importance. Be sure to communicate critical outcomes and objectives volunteers clearly will achieve.
• Outline the specific responsibilities using bulleted or numbered lists.
• If there are any qualifications, skills, or experience required or preferred, include this.
• Highlight the benefits and opportunities that can come with the role, like personal growth, skills development, making a positive benefit in the community, or networking.
• Set expectations clearly regarding availability, time commitment, and scheduling flexibility. Be transparent about the duration you expect for the commitment and orientation or training requirements.
• The description should also include organizational information, including mission, values, and programs. You want potential volunteers to understand how the role you’re highlighting fits into the broader organizational objectives.
• Use engaging language, avoiding jargon, technical terms, or too much formality.
• Provide contact information and a call to action.

Your most significant goal in crafting these descriptions is that they effectively convey the opportunities, expectations, and requirements that come with the position to attract qualified and motivated volunteers.

Use Referrals and Engage Your Alumni Network

Use both current volunteers and your volunteer alums to recruit new volunteers. You can do this in a variety of ways, including reaching out to former volunteers and engaging them in ongoing communication. Alums will frequently feel a solid connection to your organization, making them powerful potential advocates for your cause.

Other ways you can use current and past volunteers for recruitment include:

• Showcase success stories and testimonials from your current and former volunteers. Highlight stories of impact, meaningful experiences, and personal growth that are likely to serve as inspiration for others.
• Create alumni communities online or in person. This helps your alumni stay connected, support one another, and share experiences. Then, when there are opportunities for volunteers, they’re also platforms for recruitment.
• Provide referral incentives for current and past volunteers who refer new people to the organization. You can go about this in different ways, with examples including recognition, exclusive opportunities, and special perks.
• Host alum events to give volunteer alums a chance to reconnect with each other and learn about new opportunities. If you host events, your alumni bring friends, coworkers, or other people who could also be interested in getting involved with your organization.
• Provide your volunteer alumni with resources like recruitment tools, informational materials, and talking points to help them effectively promote opportunities to their networks. You want to make it as easy as possible for them to engage others.

It’s essential to keep up with your past volunteers, offer ongoing support and appreciation to them, and work on keeping them connected and engaged. Leveraging your volunteer alums and current volunteers can expand your base, strengthen your connections within the community, and enhance your organization’s overall impact.

Rely on Social Media

Social media platforms are powerful volunteer recruitment tools. There are so many ways you can reach new audiences that will include potential volunteers, with some ideas including:

• Create compelling content that’s engaging and visually appealing, highlighting the efforts of your volunteers, your organizational mission and impact, and volunteer opportunities. On most social media platforms, visuals are key to getting engagement, so think about videos and images along with things like testimonials and personal stories.
• Host live events on platforms like Facebook and Instagram where you can talk about the work of your organization, engage with members, and answer questions. You can also provide insight into your currently available opportunities.
• Use Instagram’s interactive features to get people interested and involved. For example, you can use stories, quizzes, question boxes, and polls to generate interest and engage your audience.
• LinkedIn can be a compelling platform if you’re looking to get more volunteers. LinkedIn facilitates connections with professionals who might have an interest in sharing their expertise or skills. Share updates about available opportunities, industry-related news, and organizational achievements.
• Develop targeted campaigns on social media with personalized messaging and clear calls to action.
• Encourage user-generated content, where your current volunteers, supporters, and members of the community create and share their content. Repost that user-generated content on your channels, amplifying their voices and giving others the motivation to get involved. TikTok is an excellent channel for user-generated content. 

When you’re using social media to recruit volunteers, ensure you’re regularly monitoring your channels, quickly responding to inquiries, and showing gratitude to your volunteers and everyone who engages with you online.

Host Recruitment Events

When you host recruitment events, you can provide information about your organization and hopefully inspire others to get involved.

To host a successful volunteer recruitment event, set clear objectives. Determine early on what you hope to achieve. This could be filling specific roles, attracting a particular number of new volunteers, or raising awareness.

Choose a venue that’s accessible and convenient, and plan engaging activities like volunteer testimonials, fair booths, or informational sessions.

You can use a range of channels to promote the event, including social media, email, community calendars, press releases, speaking with local media, and word-of-mouth referrals.

If you do host an event, it’s important to have informational materials, including volunteer role descriptions, brochures, and sign-up sheets. Make sure you’re getting contact information from as many people as you can if you have an event so you can add them to your database.

After the end of the event, you can follow up with attendees, thanking them for coming and reiterating the volunteer opportunities you have available.

Create Landing Pages

Your website and any associated landing pages are going to be a big part of making sure that information is readily available for anyone who has an interest in your organization.

If you haven’t already done so, create dedicated pages on your site for volunteer opportunities, information about your organization, your mission and impact, and contact information.

Develop engaging landing pages that are specifically tailored to volunteer recruitment with imagery, clear messaging, defined descriptions of available roles, and persuasive calls to action.

When you include available opportunities on your site, provide detailed descriptions of the role, responsibilities, time commitment, qualifications, and impact. Make it as easy as possible for people when coming to your site to search and filter opportunities based on their availability and interests.

Embed sign-up forms directly on your site and landing pages so that it’s quick and easy for visitors to show an interest in volunteering. Your sign-up forms should gather visitors’ names and contact details, availability, areas of interest, and skills.

Once you’ve created landing pages and sign-up forms, set up automated confirmation emails scheduled to be sent to volunteers right after they submit a sign-up form. Use personalized messaging to thank them for their interest, let them know you received their submission, and provide details about the next steps in the volunteer recruitment process.

Create a series of automated follow-up messages to nurture and engage volunteers throughout the process. Send targeted texts or emails with information about upcoming orientation, training sessions, or events.

When you create landing pages and automated email campaigns, you want to monitor your site performance and landing pages. Track visitor traffic, engagement metrics, and conversion rates. This will help you identify where you might be able to improve your content and optimize your design and messaging to ensure you’re getting more volunteers.

Keep your site and landing pages updated with the latest opportunities, events, and news.

Work with Community Organizations

Partnering with community organizations can be a powerful strategy to recruit more volunteers.

• Start by researching and identifying organizations with similar missions or that serve overlapping populations with your own. 
• Look for organizations with services and programs that are complementary to yours.
• Consider a range of organizations, including nonprofits, faith-based groups, civic organizations, schools, government agencies, and businesses.
• Reach out to potential partners, introduce your organization, and talk about shared goals and interests, as well as explore opportunities to collaborate.
• Partner with community organizations to co-host recruitment events, pool your resources, share networks, and leverage each other’s expertise.

Other ways you can recruit more volunteers for your organizations by working with others in the community include:

• Promote volunteer opportunities through their communication channels, like websites, social media, and newsletters. You can provide partner organizations with promotional materials, sign-up forms, and volunteer listings.
• Another way to collaborate with community organizations is to offer volunteer training sessions, skill-building programs, or workshops.
• Think about partnering with local businesses to engage their employees in volunteerism.
• You can tap into school and university networks to recruit student volunteers, service-learning participants, and interns. Collaborate on service projects, academic programs, or volunteer initiatives that provide experiential learning opportunities for students.
• Establish a system for cross-referring volunteers between your organization and your community partners. You can share your volunteer database contact information, and you can refer volunteers to partner organizations based on their availability, skills, and interests.

Partnering with other community organizations lets you tap into existing networks and leverage shared resources. You can amplify your reach, building a robust and sustainable volunteer base.

Create Email Marketing Campaigns

Email marketing is a great tool to help with getting more volunteers. Start by building an email list of people who have expressed interest in volunteering with your organization. There are a lot of ways to start collecting email addresses, including:

• Your website and landing page sign-up forms.
• Volunteer recruitment events.
• Social media channels.

As you begin to build your list, segment it based on factors like:

• Interests
• Skills
• Availability
• Previous experience

Segmenting your email list is vital because it’s how you’re going to tailor your messaging and target communication to particular groups of volunteers most likely to be responsive to the opportunity you’re sharing.

Other things to remember with email marketing to find volunteers include:

• Create compelling subject lines with clear and concise language that will encourage recipients to open your emails. You want to choose keywords that are related to volunteer opportunities, like “Find Your Way to Make an Impact.”
• Personalize emails by addressing each recipient by name and tailoring your content to their preferences and interests. You can use merge tags for dynamic insertion of personalized information, like upcoming events or role recommendations, based on the recipient’s profile.
• Be clear with your calls to action. You need to prompt recipients to take a clear, well-defined action. This doesn’t necessarily mean jumping right into volunteering—it could be attending an information session or reaching out to your organization for more information. Make sure your language is action-oriented, and the buttons or links that contain your CTAs are prominent and attention-grabbing.
• When you’re sharing specifically available volunteer opportunities in your emails, provide detailed descriptions, benefits, and impact statements for all of them.
• Include testimonials, quotes, and success stories from your current volunteers. You want to focus on highlighting the impact and benefits of getting involved.
• Create automated follow-up emails so that you’re nurturing and engaging potential volunteers gradually. You can create a series of emails with additional details, reminders of upcoming events, and invitations to orientation sessions.

As is true with your landing pages and website, don’t forget about the importance of email marketing analytics. You want to look at key metrics like your click-through, conversion, and open rates. Analyze the data to see trends and further optimize your email campaigns for more effective recruitment over time.

Use VolunteerHub to Take Your Volunteer Recruitment to the Next Level

If you’d like a platform that can help you put all the above into action efficiently and streamline your entire recruitment process, we encourage you to learn more about VolunteerHub. Our software platform has the tools and features for impactful recruitment, including a centralized volunteer database, simplified scheduling with automated registration and volunteer sign-up features, and automated communication functionality.

You can also use our platform to create landing pages that are opportunity-specific. Request a demo to learn how VolunteerHub can help you find the dedicated, talented volunteers you need.