According to a report from Volunteering in America, over 77 million adults volunteered for an organization in 2017, worth an estimated value of nearly $167 billion. That’s a lot of volunteer management!
Does your organization rely heavily on volunteers? If so, you’ll want to be sure to have an effective volunteer management plan. Throw in some creative technology solutions to help manage your efforts for a comprehensive approach. We’ll explain how you can easily handle your volunteer management system — and how ThankView can help!
What Is Volunteer Management?
Volunteer management covers everything from recruiting volunteers to training and retaining them. With most organizations relying heavily on volunteerism to keep operations in full swing, you can have volunteers help your organization in many different ways.
Some of the tasks you might assign to your volunteers are:
- Event help: greeters, registration desk help, event setup
- Administrative: filing, handwritten thank-you letters, answering phones
- Skill-based: web or logo designers, attorneys, grant writers
- Committees: ambassador committees, fundraising committees, advocacy groups
You’ll want to have a thorough plan in place that outlines the details of your volunteer management strategy. Having a clear outline can help make the work of volunteer coordinators a bit less overwhelming!
Here are a few questions to consider when creating your donor management plan:
- Where will you recruit volunteers?
- What specific volunteer roles are you looking for?
- What will volunteer job descriptions look like?
- What will your onboarding and training process look like?
- How do you plan to keep volunteers engaged?
- Will you establish requirements or prerequisites to becoming a volunteer?
With so much diversity from nonprofit to nonprofit, there may be organization-specific points you’ll also want to be clear on when rolling out your plan. You can identify the types of roles you’ll need volunteers for, and how you’ll train or onboard them.
Select Volunteer Management Software
Even with a detailed plan for managing volunteers in place, you’ll probably use at least one type of software to help manage your volunteer data.
You may already be using a customer relationship management (CRM) tool, but most are optimized for financial donors. Look for a volunteer management platform, which will include functions for registering volunteers, scheduling, and even email reminders. With the number of time-saving and automation features included, volunteer management software is a smart addition to your tool kit!
There are tons of other services you can use to support your volunteer management practices. Two that we like are time tracking software like Track It Forward so your volunteers can log their hours, or SignUpGenius to help with scheduling and sign-ups.
Digitize Your Volunteer Recruitment and Onboarding
Recruiting volunteers can be time-consuming and disruptive to your other duties, but can’t be ignored. In fact, it will likely always be an ongoing process, so it’s best to have a calculated strategy. You can streamline your recruitment process with the tips below!
Recruit With Video Storytelling
Make sure you have a compelling story to share. Explain to your prospective volunteers why your organization is deserving of their time, and what their efforts will do. Everyone’s time is valuable, so you’ll want to share the emotion behind your mission.
Did you know that videos are 600% more effective at marketing than print or mail combined? Capture the attention of your prospective volunteers fast with a fun and engaging recruitment video. You can use ThankView to record a recruitment video that you can then send via text or email. This easily shareable video format is sure to supercharge your recruitment efforts.
Request Video Applications
Having an application process for your prospective volunteers is beneficial to both your organization and prospective volunteers. This allows you to collect the volunteer’s history, interests, and contact information in one place. For prospective volunteers, an informative and organized application process can build trust and confidence in your organization.
To keep the process as engaging as possible, you can even request a video response from your applicants, asking them to share about themselves and answer a few questions. Seeing their personality come to life will help you see if they’re a good fit.
Here are a few areas you can ask volunteers to touch on in their video:
- Past volunteer experience
- Special skill sets
- Community service involvement
- Why they are interested in your organization
- Types of volunteer activities or fundraising events they want to participate in
With ThankView, you can easily add a call to action button right to your recruitment videos. This will make it even easier for your prospective volunteers to quickly respond indicating they’d like to apply after you’ve captured their attention with your recruitment video.
Create Onboarding Videos
You’ll want to ensure your volunteers feel welcomed and prepared right from the start. Create an onboarding program to get your donor acquainted with your organization. You can create a volunteer handbook that covers any policies or procedures that your volunteers should understand before they begin their role.
Try sending a “welcome to the team” email to show your volunteers you’re happy they’re on board. With ThankView’s video sequencing feature, you can send an email with not just one, but two videos. You could use this to send a one-on-one welcome to your new volunteer, thanking them personally by name, combined with a second video explaining next steps.
Improve Volunteer Engagement
Once you’ve recruited and onboarded high-quality volunteers, you’ll want to be sure to have a plan for maintaining engagement and commitment. You’re more likely to receive a continued commitment from your volunteers if you are communicating with them regularly.
Outside of your normal donor or supporter newsletter, you can create a newsletter tailored to volunteers. Stay in touch with your volunteers regularly to promote better volunteer engagement levels.
If you have the right software, you can view an individual volunteer’s engagement level, like with ThankView. It’s easy to monitor your volunteer communication engagement right on the Metrics page.
See real-time statistics on who has viewed your communications or shared them. Keep an eye on who is and is not opening your communications to keep your lists as effective as possible.
You can use segmentation to categorize your volunteers based on the types of events your volunteers have supported in the past, or based on their self-identified preferences. Keep your past volunteers in the know by letting them know about new opportunities and save time by sending the right volunteer opportunities to the most likely candidates!
Keep the lines of communication open and offer regular feedback. For volunteers you may not have the opportunity to see in person regularly, or at all, stay in touch with regular video communication for a personalized touch. You can send quick clips of feedback from a recent event they volunteered at, or touch base on a special occasion like their birthday.
Show Volunteer Appreciation
While you are regularly communicating with your volunteers, you’ll want to be sure your communications express your gratitude for their service to your organization.
According to the Independent Sector, as of July 2020, the estimated value of a volunteer hour was $27.20. Your volunteers are indeed valuable — don’t forget to show them that you know their worth!
Recognize and thank your volunteers as much as you thank your monetary donors. So how can you show them how much you value their work? Brag about the great work your volunteers do everywhere you can.
Include video footage from your most recent event, highlighting the hard work of your volunteers, in your next social media post or newsletter. Show your appreciation loud and proud with a quick video that can convey a lot of hard work and possibly recruit future volunteers at the same time.
Send a thank you shortly after your event, or schedule regular thank yous for your long-term volunteer positions.
You can be certain your volunteer feels valued by sending a personalized thank you video. With ThankView’s dynamic personalization feature, you can actually create any number of personalized videos in seconds, giving you the ability to thank everyone by name.
Collect Volunteer Feedback
You can further show your donors how much you appreciate them by asking for their opinion! Because your volunteers are the heart and soul of most organizations, their feedback is invaluable and they will probably feel honored you value their thoughts.
You’ll want to assess your volunteer program regularly to ensure it’s a mutually beneficial program. Use your volunteers’ feedback to continually improve and evolve your program to make it as rewarding as possible.
Send video requests to your volunteers to ask them to share their experiences volunteering with you by shooting a video on their smartphone. You can ask for a more general review or include specific questions you’d like your volunteers to respond to. Include a link to these tips for shooting a video with a smartphone here so your volunteers can share quality feedback you could then use as a testimonial.
Excite Your Volunteers With Personalized Communications
If you’re ready to step up your volunteer management process and improve your volunteer retention, we should talk! Schedule a demo with our team today to see what personalized videos can do for your organization.