As an association leader, you know that your organization relies on its members for more than just their dues. They make up your thriving community of motivated professionals, help you expand your industry network, bring new perspectives, and spur innovation. Their capable helping hands allow your organization to do much more than it could on its own.
As Fonteva explains, providing volunteer opportunities to members is one of the best ways to keep them engaged in your association. You might create a list of leadership roles, like this one from ASAE, or a roundup of more service-based responsibilities, such as those offered by the ALS Association.
Either way, these volunteer opportunities keep your members connected to your association, deepen their engagement, and help you further your mission. Let’s explore some strategies you can implement to connect members to the right volunteer opportunities for them.
Understand Members’ Preferences
These days, personalization is at the crux of almost every strong marketing strategy. Recruiting volunteers for your association is no different. To be successful, you must understand and address members’ interests, preferences, and behaviors.
Some of the ways to do this when promoting your volunteer opportunities include:
- Sharing member surveys and assessments: Create and share surveys or assessments for members interested in volunteering with your organization. Include questions about members’ interests, skills, and availability in surveys, and offer self-assessments that help them better understand their strengths related to volunteering.
- Leveraging automation: Use technology to automatically match volunteers to roles based on a defined set of criteria. For example, Salesforce allows you to set up custom automation rules and screening processes. You might use information gathered from the surveys and assessments mentioned above or simply filter members by the skills and qualifications they have.
- Personalizing communications: Do you send regular emails or other messages to your members? Consider adding a volunteer spotlight to these messages with tailored recommendations. For example, you might suggest specific roles based on a combination of member’s location, experience level, skill set, or interests.
Apply this guidance to other areas of your operations, too. For example, when choosing fundraising ideas, make sure they correlate to members’ interests and affinities for certain causes. Whether you use it for general marketing, fundraising, or your volunteer program, personalization will enhance experiences, boost engagement, and strengthen your community.
Unify and Optimize Your Efforts
Recruiting volunteers can be difficult—in fact, finding and retaining volunteers is one of the top challenges organizations like nonprofits and associations face. To enhance your recruiting results, consider how you can eliminate potential roadblocks.
Are your opportunities asking for too large of a time commitment? Is your association accurately describing the roles and responsibilities? Are you framing volunteering as an engaging, fulfilling opportunity for professional development? Is the path to becoming a volunteer clear?
If you aren’t saying “yes” to each of these questions, it may be time to pause and unify your efforts. Review and revise each of these areas accordingly:
- Volunteer role descriptions: These descriptions should succinctly and accurately describe the purpose, responsibilities, and requirements of each role. Detail the time commitment needed and any qualifications members must have. This way, members can easily identify the best fits for their skills and interests.
- Processes and guidelines: Make sure there are documented, standardized processes and guidelines that anyone who touches the volunteer program is aligned on. Share these documents across your team to give members consistent experiences.
- Messaging: Review member-facing messaging and processes to ensure becoming a volunteer is as simple as possible. In this case, applying to become a volunteer qualifies as a conversion, so provide a link to the application form in any marketing message you share about the program. Test the form regularly and confirm that instructions are clear.
- Feedback mechanisms: Do you have a way to collect input from members and staff? If so, do you implement that feedback? This is a great way to identify roadblocks, inefficient or confusing processes, and other opportunities to help you improve the program and boost engagement.
- Program management: Managing volunteers across multiple association chapters, time zones, and communication channels can be challenging. If you’re struggling to juggle these responsibilities, take a look at your current program management tactics and technology. It may be time to upgrade your volunteer management platform.
Pairing your volunteer management technology with a comprehensive association management system (AMS) will further facilitate your program and enhance efficiency. You’ll be able to keep efforts coordinated across your team, collect and report on more accurate data, and streamline processes for staff and members.
Spread Awareness of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Programs
Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is the concept that business should operate in a way that promotes social good. Often, businesses create CSR initiatives as well as programs that their employees can participate in. These programs increase employees’ impact and incentivize them to volunteer.
If your association is a 501(c)(3) organization, it may be able to reap the benefits of corporate volunteering programs, such as:
- Volunteer grants: Also called Dollars for Doers, these programs award financial grants to organizations where employees volunteer a certain number of hours. This incentivizes volunteering and brings additional funding to the organization.
- Volunteer time off: 360MatchPro defines volunteer time off (VTO) as “a form of paid time off employees receive specifically to volunteer.” VTO exists in addition to other PTO or sick time, requiring employees to use it solely for volunteering.
- Employee-led volunteer programs: Some companies empower employees to propose and lead volunteer initiatives. This can involve group or company-wide volunteer days, skill-based volunteering, free training and development programs, and more.
Spread awareness of these programs, along with other CSR initiatives like matching gifts, to help members identify ways to boost their impact. Using a corporate volunteer database will allow them to quickly search for their employer, learn about their CSR initiatives, and review participation criteria.
Promote Micro Actions
According to Golden, micro actions are “task-based activities that require minimal time commitment from the volunteer.” Engaging volunteers in micro actions offers a host of benefits, such as allowing remote volunteers to participate, requiring only a small time commitment, reducing costs for your association, and functioning as the first stepping stone to long-term volunteer support.
Some examples of volunteer micro actions for associations include:
- Sharing social media posts on members’ personal accounts about upcoming association meetings and events or new resources to reach more potential members.
- Referring colleagues or friends to the association, inviting them to events, etc.
- Completing feedback surveys, participating in polls, and joining mentorship programs or other initiatives.
- Developing compelling written or video testimonials that your association can use in marketing materials.
- Creating, sharing, or commenting on blog posts and other website content.
Track participation in these initiatives using your AMS to understand which tasks are getting done. Additionally, this can help you identify which micro actions are the most popular and which may need to be streamlined or promoted.
Consistent, deep member engagement and trusting relationships are the keys to association growth. With a robust volunteer program, you can strengthen both of these areas at once, especially when you deliver personalized recommendations to your members. Use these tips to place members in volunteer roles that will have a significant impact on them, those they help, and your association as a whole.
About the Author
Erin Lemons, VP of Marketing
Fonteva
Erin Lemons joined Togetherwork Association Solutions with over 15 years serving as a marketing director, event producer, and project manager creating robust marketing campaigns and initiatives that focus on the growing and ever-changing technology needs of the association industry. She leads the marketing teams and strategy at Fonteva and Protech.
About Fonteva
Fonteva's innovative applications enable customers to manage complex member, donor, vendor and sponsor relationships on the Salesforce platform. We manage the entire financial process from the creation of products, through complex pricing schemes, to the processing of payments with support for over 100 payment gateways in more than 70 countries.
