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:
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!
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:
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.
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:
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.
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.
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:
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.
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!