Charity Leaders Share Their Strategies for Recruiting the Best Volunteers

VOLUNTEERISM

By Marilyn Dickey

Four years ago, Big Brothers Big Sisters of Kentuckiana matched 300 boys and girls with volunteers who served as their mentors, friends, and role models. Although that seemed impressive, twice that many youngsters were still waiting to be matched with volunteers.

The organization, which has offices in Louisville and serves 10 counties in Kentucky and Indiana, has always been chronically short of volunteers, says its executive director, Jeri Swinton. People used to balk at making the commitment Big Brothers Big Sisters asked of its volunteers, says Ms. Swinton — to spend three to five hours a week with a child for a year.

But recently, the charity has been trying to mold its programs to suit the needs of busy people. Instead of requesting a specific time commitment, she says, the group now asks volunteers to simply maintain “regularly scheduled contact” with the youngsters.

As a result, in the past four years, the number of volunteers has jumped from 300 to 700, and the Big Brothers and Sisters meet with their young charges an average of three and a half times a month, she says — nearly as many encounters as the organization had previously required. People start out thinking they don’t have much time to volunteer, says Ms. Swinton, but they grow attached to the children: “They end up seeing the child just about as much because once they start seeing them, they realize it’s fun.”

The best recruiters are in tune with the needs of their potential volunteers, says Ms. Swinton. They try to offer opportunities that accommodate people’s limited time and attention spans and that are stimulating and rewarding. Organizations that tend to be short-handed — such as those in remote areas or that require a big commitment — are finding ways to attract new recruits, despite those obstacles.

Even charities that usually attract enough volunteers should keep actively recruiting, too — especially if they value diversity, says Susan J. Ellis, a volunteer-management consultant in Philadelphia and author of The Volunteer Recruitment (and Membership Development) Book (Energize Books, 2002, $18.95).

She notes, for example, that while elderly volunteers may persuade their friends to join them, they usually don’t bring in people in their 20s. “If what you want is a wide range of volunteers,” she says, “you have to do more outreach and not rely on the casual nature of who brings their friends in.”

No matter how a nonprofit group recruits, Ms. Ellis says, it will find the greatest successes with appeals that include detailed job descriptions. “Be as specific as you can,” she advises. “You don’t want 600 people calling you. You want one person calling you who’s qualified and available at the right time.”

Recruiting Online

In his job overseeing volunteers for Hopelink, in Redmond, Wash., which recruits volunteers to help provide an array of social services, Brendan Grutz has found that the easiest slots to fill are those that require one day of service. “People’s lives have to be in order to make a long commitment,” he says, “whereas a one-time volunteer just has to be free for the weekend.”

The promise of social interaction is also an advantage when recruiting volunteers, adds Mr. Grutz. He notes that he has a tough time recruiting drivers to pick up donated food, for instance, because it is solitary work that also requires a regular commitment of three or four daytime hours during the week.

Like many other managers of volunteers, he posts his openings on his group’s Web site, but reports that he has had more luck when he posts on two Internet sites — Volunteer Solutions and VolunteerMatch — where potential volunteers can type in their ZIP codes and search for jobs in particular categories. Over the past 12 months, he says, he has received 248 applicants from Volunteer Match alone, although he could not say how many of those applicants became volunteers.

Volunteer Solutions, which is run by the United Way of America, in Alexandria, Va., currently lists 12,000 opportunities from more than 6,500 charities and so far this year has referred more than 20,000 potential volunteers, according to Rhonda Veugen, Volunteer Solutions’ director at United Way of America.

Ms. Ellis says these sites offer a good way to find the right person for the job, because charities can list as many detailed job descriptions as they want to free (on Volunteer Solutions) or for one monthly fee ($11.95 on Volunteer Match). When volunteers find service opportunities online, they can learn a lot about the charity and about volunteering requirements by browsing the organization’s Web site. In some cases, they can even apply online, which can save both the volunteer and the charity time.

The Salt Lake Organizing Committee of the 2002 Winter Olympic Games recruited nearly all of its 40,000 volunteers through its Web site, says Kristin Lundgren, who oversaw the committee’s search for volunteers. During the two years the organization spent recruiting volunteers, it conducted an advertising campaign, sent out direct-mail appeals, and enlisted recruiters to speak to community and business groups. In each case, the message directed people to the committee’s Web site for more information and to fill out the lengthy application form.

“We did have paper applications, but we did various things to try to minimize the amount of data entry we would have to do,” says Ms. Lundgren, who is now a development associate at the Utah Symphony and Opera, in Salt Lake City. People who didn’t own home computers, she says, were asked to visit a library or other places where they could apply online.

The Challenge of Location

Some charities struggle to find volunteers because their location is inconvenient for potential supporters, or because the commitment they require is too great for most.

Meals on Wheels programs, which deliver food to the needy, are often short-handed because they depend largely on volunteers with free time during normal business hours. But some of them have the added burden of needing people who can work in rural areas or high-crime neighborhoods, says Eric Howell, executive director of a Meals on Wheels program in Minneapolis that serves a troubled region of that city.

One Meals on Wheels program in a crime-ridden section of Los Angeles has had so much trouble recruiting volunteers that it uses only staff members to do the work, which cuts into the food budget, according to Enid Borden, chief executive officer of Meals on Wheels Associations of America, in Alexandria, Va. But other branches of the organization have recruited volunteers from for-profit companies that operated in tough neighborhoods. The charities sometimes work out arrangements with the businesses to provide employees on a rotating basis to deliver meals during their lunch hours.

The Minneapolis Meals on Wheels has gotten volunteer help from American Express, Pillsbury, and many much smaller businesses over the years, and it has worked out well in the past, says Mr. Howell. But recently, the bad economy has shrunk his volunteer pool, he says.

“We’re 300 volunteers in the hole since September 11,” he says. “Before that, we were 550 volunteers strong.”

Because of layoffs, he says, American Express now supplies 250 fewer volunteers than it did a few years ago. And when Pillsbury merged with General Mills — which is located in the suburbs, far from Meals on Wheels’ offices — the charity lost even more volunteers, forcing staff members to deliver meals much of the time.

To combat the volunteer shortage, Meals on Wheels hired a coordinator of volunteers in January who has focused her recruiting efforts on local businesses, says Mr. Howell. She has been venturing into nearby office buildings, taking down the names of businesses listed in the lobby directories, and cold-calling them to ask for their participation. So far, says Mr. Howell, this method has won the help of two law firms, which have promised to provide a total of 20 volunteers, and U.S. Bancorp, a financial-services company that has thousands of employees in the charity’s neighborhood and has vowed to take over some meal-delivery routes in the fall.

Common Interests

Some organizations seek out the people they serve, or those with demonstrated interest in their missions, as volunteers.

The Denver Museum of Nature & Science has a broad spectrum of volunteer jobs to fill and sometimes has to find many helpers quickly, says Paula J. Meadows, the museum’s manager of volunteer services. Recently, it had six months to find at least 300 volunteers with an interest in space science to help out with a new exhibit on the subject, she says. Volunteers would take part in a variety of activities, including working in teams to conduct research on the subject on the Internet. Ms. Meadows sought help from astronomy clubs, from local corporations that employ people in the space industry, and from university physics and astronomy departments — a total, she reckons, of 75 different sources.

Sending out general press releases to the news media would have cast a wider net, she says, but the more focused approach saved time and turned up 400 volunteers with the right skills, culled from about 700 responses.

Sometimes former clients of a charity are interested in volunteering for the organization. Many people whose homes were built by the Chesapeake Habitat for Humanity, the Baltimore branch of the housing charity Habitat for Humanity International, have volunteered for the organization’s committees, says Marisa Canino, the group’s development director.

The Chesapeake Habitat produces a newsletter that goes out to all the homeowners it has helped, which always mentions ways in which homeowners can get involved with the charity. In addition, because Habitat requires 300 hours of “sweat equity” from its homeowners to qualify for its homes, the organization’s staff members become well acquainted with clients and their skills, and thus have many opportunities to solicit them for volunteer help. Several homeowners, for instance, hold jobs in social services and have nurturing personalities, says Ms. Canino, and these qualifications caused staff members to single them out as good candidates for the selection committee that screens potential homeowners.

Having former clients volunteer on the selection committee is particularly useful, she says. Applicants for Habitat homes need to gather tax information from the previous two years as well as landlord references — a process that can be daunting for some candidates, and having the guidance of others who have been through the process can help ease the way. “It gives them an accurate picture of what to expect,” she says, “and a sympathetic ear.”

Attracting the Younger Generation

Although many charities are aware of the large pool of young volunteers — created by school programs that encourage community service and encouraged by news-media coverage of social issues — some organizations go out of their way to court them.

For example, the Idaho Foodbank, in Boise, has made a special effort to attract young people, says Roger Simon, the food bank’s executive director. It often holds youth-oriented events, such as a sock hop, a sleepover party, a sweet-16 birthday party — all of which included food sorting as one of the activities.

The charity’s mixture of fun with the serious business of providing nutritious meals for people in need has helped ensure that it never has trouble recruiting volunteers, says Mr. Simon. In fact, he says, the organization sometimes has to turn people away.

Few charities have trouble recruiting during November and December, he says, when much of the public is filled with the spirit of holiday giving. But the rest of the year, he says, poses challenges for charities looking for helpers, and thus it is important to keep coming up with new ideas when recruiting volunteers: “People coordinating volunteer programs need to keep reinventing themselves.”

What are your favorite strategies for recruiting volunteers? Tell us in the Volunteerism online forum.