Have some advice about preparing/designing brochures, flyers, posters,
videos, or any other recruitment technique? If you're proud of your
new material, scan it electronically and we'll post it.
Volunteer Handbook
Well-designed volunteer
recruitment and support material will help you recruit and retain
volunteers. At Leonard Cheshire, we persuaded a creative designer
and photographer to give us cut-price rates and put together an
attractive Volunteer Handbook. Now our volunteers thoroughly enjoy
reading about key policies and practical information! See the free
book available on the "Library" secton of this site.
A Picture's Worth a Thousand Words
Photographs are so important
to good recruitment materials but it's often hard to find shots
that show a diversity of volunteers doing active things. To
meet this need, the National Centre for Volunteering in London has
created the Image Bank at
http://www.volunteering.org.uk/imagebank
where you can purchase the rights to a wide array of great photographs.
Susan J. Ellis, 19 August 2003
"Revisit Your
Online Volunteer Recruitment Postings"
(from Susan's Tip of the Month in the
Monthly e-Mail
Update)
This month's "Spring Cleaning" Hot Topic leads to this
month's tip. If you post volunteer opportunities with any online
registry such as Volunteer Match, are you paying attention to what
you said? (If you are not yet making use of the wonderful free sites
available to you - in many different countries as well as the US
- go to this list of sites and explore you options: http://www.energizeinc.com/prof/volop.html.)
The online registries are growing daily and that means that every
message has increasing competition. Do a search for your zip code
or type of setting and see what other organizations come up as well
as yours. Read their postings. How does your description sound against
theirs? Is it welcoming? interesting? motivating? If not, change
it!
There is no cost to update your postings except for your time.
The Internet is a fast-paced environment and users expect up-to-the-minute
information. Anything you can do to make prospective volunteers
who read your posting in a registry feel that you want them NOW
will be more effective than a message that is clearly old and unchanging.
In general, the best way to use online registries is to post many
specific assignments rather than only a few big general ones. One
posting that says: "tutors help children ages 10 to 14 with
all sorts of homework assignments" can become the following:
- Tutors needed for three newly-arrived Cambodian children ages
10, 14, and 15 who need homework help and practice in speaking
conversational English.
- Tutors needed on Saturday mornings for teenagers who want to
improve their reading as they prepare for the driver's exam. You'll
use the state driver manual as your "text."
- Tutors needed for sixth-grade math, especially working on fractions.
The beauty of the Internet is that is allows "needle in a
haystack" searches. If you really want volunteers available
on Saturdays or with skill in sixth-grade math, this is the perfect
place to hunt. Being specific will also cut down on screening calls
from people who are generally exploring what they'd like to do.
The three examples above may not generate 20 phone calls, but if
one or two people contact you because these postings struck a chord,
you're likely to be talking to strong candidates.
Assign a volunteer to monitor all your online postings, checking
them monthly for accuracy and appeal. Be sure to delete positons
that are filled! Or at least remove them temporarily until you have
openings again. It's as much an art as a science to recruit online.
But the two keys are BE SPECIFIC and BE CURRENT.
