Volunteer Recruitment Strategies

This week we're hosting a 28th Tutor/Mentor Leadership and Networking Conference in the Chicago region at the Olympia Fields Country Club. Among the workshops will be discussions of volunteer recruitment. You can see the full agenda at http://www.tutormentorconference.org

Since most people won't come to the Chicago conference, my goal is to also host discussions of volunteer recruitment and marketing strategies on the web.

In addition, I want to reverse the traditional way programs recruit volunteers and do fund raising. Instead of every program doing duplicative activities to find volunteers and donors, I feel every program should be focusing on doing good work, doing good customer service so volunteers and youth have positive experiences and are willing to help a program grow, and be telling the story of what they do via their own web site, and volunteer recruitment services like Idealist.org and volunteermatch.org.

Thus, if you're a charity and you maintain a web site that does a good job of showing why you do what you do, why you are needed where you are, and ways volunteers and donors can help you, it's possible for intermediary organizations, or people who care about your cause, to lead marketing efforts that draw members of their own networks, or business and faith groups, through the internet and to your web site.

We all know how powerful celebrities like Oprah Winfrey are at drawing attention to books and causes. What if such people devoted 30 minutes of every week to drawing attention to web hubs, which people could shop to find volunteer and donor opportunities in different zip codes around the country.

If dozens of celebrities, polititians, business leaders, etc. contributed leadership every week, this would lead millions of people to web hubs where they choose what cause to be involved in, what city, what zip code, and what organizations in that zip code are doing needed work....based on how the organization tells its story on the web, and based on the history of good work the organization has accrued.

Can this work? It's working in Chicago, but not anywhere near the degree that we need it to work.

Why am I writing this here? You and your students can take on this role, and in doing so you can show adults the form of consistent leadership they need to take to solve deeply ingrained social problems. If your kids practice this as they go through school, they will have this habit of leadership when they become adults.

If you're able to come to the conference in Chicago, this week, or next May when we do the next one, we can talk about this face to face. But if we start talking about it here, we can be showcasing the leadership of kids when we get to next May, rather than just talking about what's possible.