Volunteers are an invaluable resource for your nonprofit organization. Their time and commitment to...
If your organization relies on volunteers to manage significant aspects of its day-to-day work, maintaining volunteer engagement is critical to your success. When volunteers feel like an integral part of your organization’s community and understand how important their work is to furthering your mission, they’ll be more satisfied with their experience and more likely to support your efforts long-term.
Effective communication is central to any engagement strategy. While it can be tempting to send message after message in the hopes that your volunteers will respond to one of them, your engagement efforts will be more effective if you prioritize quality over quantity.
In this guide, we’ll discuss four ways to make the most of your organization’s volunteer communications, including how to:
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- Segment Your Volunteers
- Leverage Multiple Communication Channels
- Balance Automation With Personalization
- Ask Volunteers for Feedback
These strategies are a good starting point for any type of volunteer-fueled organization, whether you’re recruiting them to manage your school PTA’s fundraisers, take care of rescue pets at your animal shelter, or help run special events at your museum. Let’s dive in!
1. Segment Your Volunteers
Segmentation is the process of dividing your organization’s supporters into outreach groups based on shared characteristics. This way, you can tailor your marketing messages to resonate with each segment.
When segmenting all of the supporters in your nonprofit’s database, you might create a general “Volunteer” segment to distinguish them from donors and other individuals involved with your organization. However, if you want to hone your volunteer outreach, you should further categorize your volunteers based on their involvement with your organization.
Some specific volunteer segments to note in your database include:
- First-time volunteers
- Event volunteers
- Remote or virtual volunteers
- Volunteers who serve on a recurring basis (weekly, monthly, annually, etc.)
- Volunteers who hold leadership positions (for example, serving as mentors or chairing volunteer committees)
- Volunteers who are also donors
- Volunteers whose employers offer corporate volunteer programs such as volunteer grants or company-wide service days
- Volunteers at risk of lapsing (i.e., those who haven’t meaningfully engaged with your organization in more than 12 months)
Each of these groups has different needs and preferences when it comes to the content and timing of your communications. For instance, volunteers who hold leadership positions likely need frequent updates on your organization’s various initiatives and priorities, while event volunteers may only want to hear from you when an event is coming up. Identifying these characteristics allows you to send targeted communications that each segment finds useful.
2. Leverage Multiple Communication Channels
To effectively accommodate all of your volunteer segments’ preferences, you’ll need to communicate through several marketing channels. While you shouldn’t go overboard with repetitive messages, a multi-channel strategy expands your reach and makes it more likely that volunteers will hear what you have to say to them.
Make sure to incorporate these communication channels into your volunteer outreach:
- Your organization’s website. Create a volunteer hub or portal that volunteers can navigate to from your main site and find everything they need to know about upcoming opportunities, participation guidelines, recent successes, and more.
- Email. Research shows that the average professional receives a whopping 121 emails per day. To stand out in your volunteers’ crowded inboxes, write compelling subject lines and concise email copy that they’ll be more likely to open and read.
- Text messages. Texting allows you to get in touch with volunteers quickly, so it’s effective for last-minute updates and other brief reminders. Ensure volunteers are familiar with your organization’s SMS number so they don’t misconstrue your texts as spam.
- Print communications. While digital messages are fast and convenient, offline channels still have a place in your volunteer communication strategy! For example, an eye-catching flyer can encourage volunteers to sign up for an opportunity when they visit your facility, and handwritten thank-you notes show you truly appreciate their support.
According to NXUnite’s nonprofit marketing guide, your organization should track relevant performance metrics from each of your communication channels, such as email open rates and traffic to your online volunteer portal. That way, you can understand which communications resonate most with your volunteers and put more time and effort into those channels going forward.
3. Balance Automation With Personalization
With a multi-channel communication strategy, your organization will likely end up sending dozens of messages to volunteers each week. So, it’s important to find ways to streamline content creation and message delivery to ensure your team isn’t overwhelmed.
Doubleknot recommends leveraging email and SMS marketing tools with automation capabilities so you can schedule messages in advance, quickly transfer segmented contact lists from your supporter database, and eliminate the need for manual data tracking. Content generation solutions powered by AI can also help you develop website copy and email templates more quickly.
However, if you incorporate these solutions into your volunteer communications, don’t let personalization fall by the wayside! Configure your marketing tools to insert each volunteer’s name into the greetings of emails and text messages, as that small gesture can humanize your organization and help deepen your relationship with them. Additionally, rather than copying and pasting AI-generated messages, edit the outputs to align with your organization’s unique writing style and effectively address your target audience.
4. Ask Volunteers for Feedback
Besides personalized communications, another way to show that your organization values its volunteers is to ask for their feedback on their experiences. Send out surveys to your volunteers a few times a year to gather their input on a regular basis. These surveys should take five minutes or less to complete and include a variety of questions, such as:
- How did you find out about our organization and its volunteer program?
- On a scale of one to five, how satisfied are you with your overall volunteering experience?
- What has been your favorite part of volunteering with our organization?
- If you could change one thing about our volunteer program, what would it be and why?
- How do you prefer to learn about volunteer opportunities, news, and updates (e.g., through the volunteer portal, text messages, emails, or another method)?
- How frequently would you like to receive volunteering-related communications from us?
Track your survey responses and analyze them to identify your volunteer program’s strengths and areas for improvement according to your volunteers. As you implement their suggestions, communicate about the changes you’ve made to show that your volunteers’ voices have been heard.
Every organization that relies on volunteers is different, so you’ll need to adapt these strategies to align with the size and preferences of your volunteer base, as well as your engagement needs. Segmenting your volunteers and asking them for feedback can help you understand your audience better. Once you get the lay of the land, you can implement a multi-channel communication strategy that effectively balances automation with personalization to achieve your organization’s goals for volunteer satisfaction and retention.
About the Author: Shannon Scanlan, Solutions Engineer
Shannon has been helping nonprofits grow their digital and direct marketing programs and use technology to reach new audiences, raise more, and improve efficiency for over 17 years, working for organizations such as the ACLU, The Clinton Foundation, and The Metropolitan of Art among many others.
She’s been working at Doubleknot for the past 5 years, helping clients implement Doubleknot solutions to boost revenue and streamline operations so they can focus on what matters most: their mission!
