Top Tips to Help You Recruit Volunteers to Your Association

Association Marketing, Growing Your Membership

How can my association recruit more volunteers? Considering many groups only have a few paid staff and rely heavily on volunteers and members to operate, recruiting is essential. It can also be a difficult process. To help out, we put together a short list of tips to assist your recruitment efforts. Use the following strategies to keep your volunteer pool growing. 

Ask. This is the simplest tip we can give. Many people enjoy volunteering, but you won’t know until you ask. Additionally, asking for volunteers with specific skills can be an efficient way to find the right people for the job.

Not now doesn’t mean never. Don’t take “no” or “not now” as a rejection. Maybe they’re tied up with another activity or can’t make it because of a schedule conflict. Continue your efforts — you will find the right people at the right time.

Offer variety. In our post, How to Recruit More Volunteers for Your Association, we highlight the importance of offering a variety of volunteer opportunities with different time commitments. Some members will be ready to take a dive into volunteering while others may have very limited time and may only want to volunteer from time to time. It is important to give your volunteers options.

Social media. This post from Verified Volunteers makes an awesome point — social media is a great place to promote your association. Use the platform to build excitement around your work and promote opportunities to potential volunteers.

Make it easy to sign up. Take a look at your sign up process from the eyes of a volunteer. Is it easy? You need to determine if this process is helping or hurting you in your recruitment efforts. If it isn’t easy for people to sign up, that may be a sign you need to change things up.

Keep track. We can’t stress the importance of this enough. Using a tool like AMO is a great way to keep track of who, where and when someone has volunteered. This knowledge gives you insight into who might be interested for different volunteer opportunities throughout the year.

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