Recruiting volunteers
Make no mistake, recruiting volunteers is hard!
This is particularly so when recruiting people for the club's committee. A consistent and concerted year round effort is required to bring people on board as volunteers.
Volunteers can be recruited from inside or outside the organisation but the most successful strategies generally concentrate on recruiting from inside the organisation i.e. recruiting from within the current membership.
Recruitment of volunteers does not just happen; someone must be allocated the task. The recommended practice is to appoint a person as a Volunteer Coordinator who takes on the specific role of recruiting volunteers. If no such Volunteer Coordinator position exists the task is often carried out by anyone on the management committee of the organisation (if it is a non-profit organisation).
Whoever is assigned the task; a volunteer can only be recruited if:
(a) Someone steps forward and volunteers (less typical)
(b) Someone is specifically approached and asked to volunteer (more typical)
Activities that might cause someone to step forward as a volunteer are:
- Appealing to the membership for volunteers by using a newsletter or putting up a "Volunteers Wanted" notice.
- Developing a volunteer scheme that offers special benefits and rewards to volunteers (e.g. free membership, giveaway clothing, volunteer parties and dinner functions)
Making an approach
Most people tend to be reluctant to step forward to volunteer, they need to be personally asked. But who do you ask? It is necessary to improve the odds than simply asking everyone one-by-one and getting a large number of knock-backs, sometimes not so friendly.
The good volunteer recruitment officer gets to know most people in the organisation and establishes a special rapport with some of the members. Over a period of time, this "inner circle" is often motivated to assist, in small ways at first and then taking on major roles as confidence and commitment increases.
There are two key weapons that will assist in making an approach.
- The membership database
- The job description
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