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.
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:
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.
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:
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.
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:
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.