If you work in the NFP sector and a part of your work involves recruiting volunteers, you may be struggling, like so many others, to attract more people, engage them and retain them once they have become volunteers. Luckily, there are those large volunteer organisations that have invested time, efforts and resources in developing a working strategy that helps them deal with those problems. And, what is even more fortunate, there are happy to share it with us.

One such organisation is New York Cares, the largest volunteer organisation in New York, which is responsible for providing volunteers for more than a 1,000 NFPs in New York (which means they work with more than 50,000 volunteers every year!). Having this in mind, there is no wonder that the core of their strategy is based on communications. In this blog post  on volunteermatch.org, Nancy E. Schwartz provides us with precious insight into the organisation’s collected directly from the source. According to her, these principles can be applied to any organisation working with volunteers, no matter how big it is or where it is located.

Basically, the Volunteer Communication Strategy of New York Cares can be divided into four main categories, and when you read about them, you will see that you may already be doing, or at least planning to do, something from each category.

Segmentation

So, the first of them is related to segments. As you know only too well, all volunteers are different but they can be grouped into segments – groups of volunteers with common interests, aims, preferences, needs etc. So, if you want to engage as many volunteers as possible, you can’t communicate with all of them in the same way. You need to find out what you know about each segment (based on volunteers from the segment you know) and plan your communications based on that knowledge. Speak to them in their own words and through their own interests.

Communication

The second category is related to targeted communications. This is basically the same concept, but you take it to the next level. Once you have divided your volunteers into segments, you need to target each one accordingly. For example, New York Cares divided their volunteers based on their level of engagement. You can choose any criteria you want, as long as it helps you to efficiently create the segments. What you need to do in terms of communications is be frequent – don’t let your volunteers forget about you. In addition to that, make sure that the communication is two-way. You want to learn what a particular segment’s needs are and provide for them.

Tomorrow’s post will follow on from here, with two more key components of your volunteer communications strategy.