How to take your Volunteer/SME recruitment to the Moon!

Recruiting is a vital component to any successful volunteer/SME program, and over the years, we’ve learned a thing or two on what works to recruit new blood into your program. While we’re not advocating for your volunteer/SME program to make a GameStop-like meteoric rise and fall, we’d love to give you some tips to help your organization improve your recruitment numbers!  

For some organizations recruiting a new set of volunteers each year may be more challenging than expected. We all assume that if a member joins a professional organization, they will at some point serve as a volunteer, however that may not always be the case. Some organizations struggle with recruiting new volunteers or may have the same volunteer participate in the same committee year after year, leading to volunteer burnout or challenges when creating diverse committees and workgroups.

Identifying solutions to improve your volunteer recruitment efforts is imperative for creating diverse teams, decreasing volunteer burnout, and increasing better output from your workgroups. Here are a few ways you can make sure you’re finding the right volunteers for your organization:

Requirements & Expectations
Just as you would with a paid position, outline the individual job descriptions, and provide a layout of responsibilities. Define your program’s expectations, including long-term goals that align with the overall goals and objectives of your organization, as well as policies and procedures that your volunteers will need to follow. 

Communicate, communicate, communicate!
A single email or a social post is not enough to entice prospective volunteers to sign up. Remember, not all of your members are on social media or may not even read your emails! Be sure to identify all your communications channels, such as social media, emails, newsletters, websites, etc. Develop a plan, write engaging copy with a clear call to action and start recruiting! 

Word of mouth recruitment
Remember, you already have a large talent pool of existing volunteers/members who know other members/prospective volunteers. Reach out to your existing talent pool and ask them for recruitment help. A small incentive like a $25 gift card to a local coffee shop or a discount on a resource from your organization is a great way to engage your existing volunteers/members and broaden your search to grow your volunteer list. Additionally, word-of-mouth recruitment is an excellent way for your members/volunteers to endorse your organization and volunteer program. 

Segment your audience
If you’re searching for volunteers with specific skill sets or interests, tap into your existing database of volunteers to sort, filter, and identify who is the right fit for the role. Tools like Lineup allow users to gather and sort through existing data that has been collected and recruit in a centralized space. 

Request feedback
No one is perfect. There may be times when you’re missing out on opportunities to connect with your volunteers. Requesting feedback is an excellent opportunity to know what challenges they faced and what improvements your organization can make to streamline the volunteer recruitment process.

Find a suitable Volunteer Platform (hint hint: Lineup)

Finally pairing your program with a volunteer platform that allows your program managers to balance all the needs of your program is crucial. It’s impossible to improve your recruitment of volunteers or SMEs if collecting and organizing the data is difficult. Without a proper platform to organize your program, things are bound to fall through the cracks, and your volunteers and your program will suffer as a result. 

Lineup offers associations and certifying bodies all the tools they need to recruit, organize, and manage their volunteer/SME programs. We believe that a better volunteer/SME program is built on better data and improved visibility into that data. That’s why we created Lineup forms, an innovative tool that allows program managers to solicit information from their volunteers that flows directly into the their profile allowing any program to easily recruit new volunteers and create and maintain better data on their existing volunteer. Take a step to improve your volunteer/SME recruitment and try Lineup for free today!