Attract the Best Volunteers: Stop Recruiting and Start Attracting

By Dr. Bill Wittich

Membership is critical for all non-profits. These new volunteers must include a mix of younger, middle aged and older members. The key thought in this book is to change from recruiting to attracting. This is a book about volunteers and change.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Nov 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781928794028

Book preview

me

Introduction

This is a book about volunteering and change. Maybe it is about change and then volunteering. Change is hard for everyone, but very difficult for community non-profit agencies. John Kotter in an article on change in the Harvard Business Review said that 70% of change efforts fail to achieve their desired goal.¹ Wow! Should we bother? My answer is that a non-profit is usually in that other 30 percent that gets things done. Think about food banks or the senior center or clean water programs around the world. We can make change happen. But changes in our volunteer agencies is a a slow movement.

Yes, this book is about Change and Volunteers.

Volunteer leaders have the ability to build a nimble team that is engaged and focused on continually getting better. They can see their organizations grow, expand and build better communities.

Volunteering is a critical change area for all non-profits. When we talk about non-profits we are discussing the typical community non-profit agency as well as those in government and all faith-based agencies. The method of attracting new volunteers to your organization is basically the same regardless of whether you are religious, governmental or community-based. This material applies to national and international volunteer-driven organizations as well. For all of us it is critical to continue to add new volunteers, because every year volunteers leave for a variety of reasons. They move away, they pass away, they lose their interest, and they run out of money, they disagree with the way the organization is going. It does not really matter why they leave, it is important to find new people to replace those who leave. It is another concept to think about all the techniques of retaining our volunteers. It is extremely important to work hard to retain our outstanding volunteers but that is another book. Too many volunteer agencies spend months thinking about how to recruit new volunteers into their organization. It is far more important to learn to attract volunteers into your organization. It is the goal of this book to help you to sense the difference between recruiting and attracting volunteers.

If your non-profit is not attractive to a number of people in your community, you might as well stop recruiting. Attraction must come first. This is a major change for organizations to move from an older view of recruitment to a new area of building attraction for their program.

Wikipedia tells us that attraction means the drawing of one object towards another. In the volunteer world it means drawing one person toward an organization. It is the quality of attracting, the charm that creates an attraction. It is a person or thing that does the attracting. In your case it is the leader or volunteers who attract others to join the team. Or it might be the cause that attracts volunteers to join the organization to do meaningful volunteer work. Think about your attraction to a restaurant in your neighborhood. It might be the food that has attracted you. Or it might be magnetic force of the owner or host at the location that attracts you to return to the restaurant. It might even be a combination of the food, location and people that is attractive to you.

The question we need to deal with in this book is how do we entice guests to visit our organization and not only to come back but to convert them into committed and dedicated volunteers willing to show up on a regular basis.

We will need to decide exactly who we want to attract and why. We know that many agency directors are telling us to be engaging and if we engage our guests will it help them to decide to volunteer. Maybe Seth Godin has it right in his book Tribes² when he says that a tribe is a group of people connected to one another, connected to a leader, and connected to an idea. Godin says that Tribes need leadership, they need connection and growth and something new. They need change. His major theme in the book rings with me. That is You can’t have a tribe without a leader and you can’t be a leader without a tribe. Is he talking about our group? I think so. Where is a strong non-profit without a strong leader? And where is a strong leader without a non-profit?

Maybe this book is about change, volunteering and being a strong leader with a tribe.

We’re not asking just anyone to volunteer. We’re looking to attract busy, successful, motivated people who care. The key thought is that we are not looking to recruit warm bodies; we are looking to attract the right people. Attracting the right people means you must put together a program that will help to locate these people. In the corporate world, we call that marketing. In the non-profit world, we call that Public image.

You have to build your marketing first before anyone even knows you exist.

Improving your public image is a tool used to build attraction in your organization. Public image allows people to see what you offer even before they see themselves volunteering in it. Marketing in the past meant putting articles in your local newspaper. Today enhancing your public image might mean using various forms of social media to gain the eyes of those prospective volunteers. Of course, we still continue to market in all those ways that all businesses use to attract attention. That means getting to know the local news media, joining the chamber of commerce, and maybe belonging to local service organizations.

Your audience needs to know that you are in their community. Prospective volunteers either live or work in your community and in either case they need to know that you are there. It is true that you need to invite people to visit your organization, but unless they are aware of all the good things your group does, it will be more difficult. Publicity is an on-going mission as you work to attract prospective volunteers. Very few people volunteer for an organization about which they know nothing. It is difficult at times to attract volunteers for a strong exciting agency, but next to impossible to attract them to an organization with low visibility. Prospects will usually ask others about their decision to join a volunteer group and if their friends have never heard of you it will be tougher to gain new volunteers.

Today many volunteer agencies are not effective in attracting volunteers into its fold. Their numbers of volunteers have not changed over the past years with the exception that they may have lost a few volunteers. You visit the typical agency and you see the mix of middle-aged and older volunteers. They may have added a few volunteers to its roster but not many younger volunteers. This book will explore how non-profits can be successful in growing its volunteer base of all diversity. I think most of us will agree that if your non-profit is to remain a strong community service or faith-based organization then we must continue to add new volunteers.

Your volunteers must include a mix of younger, boomer and mature volunteers. It must include gender and ethnic diversity as well. It is this variety that increases the quality of a non-profit’s volunteers. It is important that your volunteer base mirror the community that the volunteers serve.

Mark Levin in How to Attract and Keep Members in the New Marketplace³ says it so well, It’s not your father’s (or Mother’s) organization anymore.