Volunteers are a significant lifeline for every nonprofit organization in the world. Even when they aren’t contributing monetarily, the time and physical efforts spent furthering your nonprofit’s goals can be worth a lot. According to a survey in 2017, about 25.1% of adults in the US volunteered for one profit or another, contributing about 8.8 billion hours.
Thus, in light of how much value volunteers are capable of bringing, it is only essential that your nonprofit invests in the best resources, strategies, and systems to engage and utilize its volunteers excellently. Proper volunteer management consists of all the various methods nonprofits use in the recruitment, engagement, tracking, and retaining of their volunteers.
There are several processes used to execute this, but one of the most efficient ways to do so today is through the use of volunteer management software. In today’s world, smart nonprofits use membership management system to organize and engage their volunteers most effectively. Such a system also helps in building and maintaining a membership management database.
With excellent volunteer management software in place, your nonprofit can build a wonderful volunteering experience that is both rich for your volunteers and reward for your organization. Here are some actionable strategies to upgrade your volunteer management practices.
Strategies for Volunteer Management
Before we discuss strategies for volunteer management, we must first discuss its components, as their understanding is foundational to proper execution. To properly structure your volunteer management system, the entire process must be delineated into 4 distinct parts which are;
- Recruitment
- Engagement
- Tracking
- Retention
Each of these is discussed below:
- Volunteer Recruitment:
This is the first stage of the volunteering funnel. The process involves strategically promoting your nonprofit’s cause, attracting volunteers to sign up, and then screening them. It is important to remember that this stage is not about getting as many volunteer sign-ups as you can but rather attracting the right fit for your nonprofit and its goals.
The right individuals will be passionate about your nonprofit’s particular objectives and will have the specific skills needed to bring them about. Thus, your nonprofit must be intentional about establishing beforehand its preferred or ideal kind of volunteering candidates and go after that.
Strategies for excellent volunteer recruitment include:
- Utilizing multiple marketing channels to spread awareness of your nonprofit, its objectives, and its volunteering opportunities
- Creating and promoting volunteer applications that are precise and compelling
- Organizing events to attract and educate prospective volunteers
- Volunteer Engagement
After recruitment, the next stage in volunteer management is engaging your volunteers. Your volunteers must be properly engaged to create value and prevent them from feeling demoralized. Recognition of their talents and skills from the recruitment stage is important as it will guide your decision-making in this stage.
There are many practices that you can effectively utilize to engage your volunteers which include;
- Regularly promoting and providing incentives to appreciate and motivate your employees.
- Creating channels for consistent communication of important information such as announcements, shift reminders, and appreciation emails. It is important that you and all volunteers are on the same page.
- Granting your most passionate volunteers leadership, and other opportunities
- Volunteer Tracking
This is an integral part of volunteer management. This stage of volunteer management involves automating communication processes so that you and your nonprofit’s volunteers are constantly updated as to which duties have been served, which programs have been executed, and hours spent working. Keeping a record of hours spent volunteering is very important.
- Volunteer Retention
This is one of the most difficult, but very essential parts of volunteer management for every nonprofit. The better they are treated during their service, the greater the chances they will be retained later on. The key to nailing this stage is ensuring that there is impeccable communication, motivation, and feedback.
Some interesting strategies for bringing this about include;
- Matching volunteers with opportunities and duties that are best suited to their skills and preferences, thereby encouraging motivation and increasing satisfaction. This is why it is important to collect data about their interests and skills.
- Constantly expressing appreciation and gratitude for their efforts. This can be done through various means such as gifts, souvenirs, emails, and thank you notes. Regardless of the means chosen, appreciation must be a priority.
- Providing volunteers with detailed reports illustrating their efforts and their impact. This will not only serve as proof of their service(in case they need proof of it somewhere) but will also give them satisfaction as they can see their goals being met.
While all of these strategies to help you manage the volunteers for your nonprofit seem straightforward, pulling it off isn’t easy. One integral part of the arsenal of every volunteer manager is membership management software to help them effectively execute and integrate all these strategies.
Why You Need Membership Management Software for Your Nonprofit
Membership management software is a great asset to every nonprofit seeking to manage its volunteers. Depending on the number of volunteers, and the number of different operations and projects to be coordinated, volunteer management can be very complex. Therefore, utilizing volunteer management software can help you to easily organize all of your required data while coordinating your volunteers.
Getting volunteer management software is essential because it will help you;
- Track volunteer hours: As explained earlier, tracking is an essential part of the volunteer experience, and using volunteer management software makes data tracking easier, in real-time, and more accurate.
- Collect and categorize volunteer data: Because your nonprofit would have collected a lot of data in the process of recruiting and engaging your volunteers, you need a system to properly store and process that data. With a membership management database, your nonprofit can easily store all this information, and even process it to create volunteer profiles according to their interests, skills, and volunteer activity.
- Schedule events: Volunteer management software will enable you to schedule events, announcements, and other kinds of important information and share that information with everyone else. This ensures that everyone in the organization is up to date.
- Establish channels of communication: Especially when you have a large team of volunteers, keeping everyone updated can be a hassle. Online membership software prevents that. Not only are you able to share important information with your volunteers but you can receive feedback too.
Conclusion
The significance of volunteering is increasing in our society but so is the complexity. However, with the right membership software, the multiple responsibilities and strategies involved in running your nonprofit and managing its volunteers can be simplified and effectively integrated.