Volunteers are the backbone to most any nonprofit. VISTAs (who are also a type of volunteer) often have to set-up and develop volunteer recruitment and management programs and systems. Occasionally this is part of a VISTA workplan, but typically VISTAs create volunteer programs because they find that accomplishing their work without additional help would be nearly impossible.

What can volunteers do for you? Well, just about anything. Some nonprofits even have executive directors who are volunteers. Volunteers can fill any type of role, need, or niche.

Before You Recruit

Keep Outreach Materials on Hand
Outreach and recruitment materials are key towards getting qualified volunteers to come work with your organization. You should have a ready-to-go set of solid recruitment materials at your organization, which should include:

• Single-sheet flyers or posters
• Promotional DVDs
• Ready-made “blurbs” about organization and volunteer needs (to be posted in community newsletters, college newsletters, volunteermatch.com, etc.)
• Volunteer Fair kit (includes flyers, posters, reports, DVD’s, fold out display, banner with organization name)

Know the Legal Requirements
Your organization needs to be up to speed on exactly what the legal requirements for your volunteers are. For example, if you are finding volunteers to work with an afterschool media production program in a Boston Public School, you need to have each volunteer CORI checked (essentially a criminal background check) before they can work with any students or youth.

Create Applications and Agreement Forms
You may want to create a volunteer application form, but most nonprofits DASCorps members serve with are rather small, so often times volunteers will be brought on ad hoc and informally without an application. However you should definitely have a volunteer agreement form drafted that each volunteer must sign that stipulates their responsibilities and your organization’s responsibilities.

Recruitment

Define Your Ideal Volunteer
Draw up a list of the skills and qualifications for what you would call your ideal volunteer for each opportunity your organization has.

Find Your Targets
If you are looking for more technical volunteers with skills in web design or media production, then go find a local college or university that has a program strong in those departments. If you have a concert fundraising event, you can probably recruit unskilled volunteers locally through personal contacts or through posting at community centers.

There are also many effective online volunteer matching services as well such as volunteermatch.org, idealist.org and craigslist.org to post opportunities (especially easy if you keep ready-made recruitment ‘blurbs’).

Colleges, Universities, and Service-Learning
Colleges and universities are excellent sources of skilled and motivated volunteers. Nearly every college now has a volunteer or community service center that coordinates volunteer opportunities with local organizations for their students. Contact the volunteer/community service center director and explain your needs and they will likely recruit on-campus for you.

Service-Learning is a new movement at colleges and universities. S-L (also sometimes referred to as ‘experiential learning’) connects students’ course work with real-world community action. Typically these opportunities must be coordinated 2 months prior to the start of the next semester.

Individual professors may offer S-L opportunities or a local college/university may even have their own Service-Learning Department. S-L volunteers typically can do both direct service and/or capacity building depending on the course and the professor. It is highly recommended to seek out S-L opportunities.

Volunteers are not Made, but Asked
Most people will be more than happy to volunteer with you if you simply ask. Passive methods of volunteer recruitment such as flyers and online posting may get some volunteers, however research shows that most people will not seek out volunteer opportunities, but will volunteer if asked directly.

The Independent Sector, a nonprofit think-tank, published research stating that of “51 percent of teens reported that they were asked to volunteer, 93 percent actually did. The results were stark if young people were not asked: among the 49 percent who were not asked, 24 percent actually volunteered. In other words, teens were nearly four times more likely to volunteer if asked than if they were not.”

Interview Process
You will probably want to conduct an interview with potential volunteers unless it’s for one-off, informal events. During the interview you will want to lay out expectations of both the volunteer to the organization and your organization to the volunteer. It’s a good idea to get a ‘feel’ for the volunteer and make sure the opportunity is actually in line with their personal or professional interests of the volunteer.

When possible the staff person who will most closely work with the volunteer should be present during the interview. Definitive scheduling and availability of workdays, dates and hours should also be determined during the interview process.

Orientation
All volunteers should receive a basic orientation to your organization and how their volunteer work fits in with your organization and its mission. If necessary be ready to provide any training to ensure the volunteer is up to speed and prepared, for example if a volunteer is working with a youth media program that’s doing a photo project, make sure the volunteer is trained on digital camera use and Photoshop prior to volunteering.

You may also want to give the volunteer a printed out detailed job description, contact information for their supervisor, and even an organizational handbook (if you have one). If nothing else, make sure volunteer tasks are clear, concise, and communicated. Nothing extinguishes a volunteers’ spirit like not knowing what they’re supposed to do or being unable to say what they’ve accomplished after they’ve finished.

Management (VISTAs cannot directly do this!)
As you can guess, and hopefully what Project HQ informed you of during your PSO, VISTAs cannot be direct supervisors of volunteer labor. VISTAs can develop outreach materials, run recruitment drives, create orientation materials, but cannot be the direct supervisor of volunteers. The reason: CNCS tells us there was once a lawsuit concerning a VISTA who supervised volunteers. ‘Nuff said.

But this does not prevent you from creating volunteer management systems or databases, which are essential to managing any volunteers. The database system should include the name of the volunteer, phone number, address, why they joined, when and where they volunteered, etc.

There are a number of cheap and easy ways to set-up a volunteer management system/database on a shoestring budget. Here are some low-cost methods:

• Spreadsheets with Microsoft Excel
• Open-Source Content/Constituent Relationship Management software such as CiviCRM, Drupal, and Joomla
• Google Docs spreadsheets and documents which are free and can be shared with anyone else who has a Gmail account
• Salesforce.com Foundation donates free licenses to nonprofit organizations (www.salesforce.com/foundation/)

Retention
Informally known as the “60 day window”, the first 2 months a volunteer is with your organization is the length of time it takes to shape the volunteers’ attitudes towards the work, their supervision, and your organization. Make them feel like they belong or you may lose them after this period. Building volunteer relationships, recognizing volunteers, and maintaining open and clear communication are all key to retention.

Tips toward keeping volunteers happy, productive, and committed:

• Take time to know your volunteers’ personal and professional skill-sets so you can put those to work for your organization
• Make organizational language and terminology easy to understand (ditch confusing acronyms)
• Proactively communicate news and events about your organization with volunteers
• Reimburse volunteers for reasonable expenses incurred such as travel or food
• Take your volunteers out to lunch
• Have a volunteer recognition event or dinner with your volunteers and organizational staff

Evaluation
You will want to evaluate your volunteer program so you can:

• Assess the quality of volunteer experiences with your organization
• Measure the impact your volunteers have had with your organization and its programs
• Find ways to improve your volunteer program
• Identify causes of volunteer turnover
• Develop recruitment strategies based on how people found out about volunteering at your organization

If you have already set-up a volunteer tracking database, evaluating your volunteer program will be much easier since some data will already be available to assess. This data is typically demographic and will help define the “who”, “what”, and “where” of your volunteers and program.

Beyond your database, you should develop and schedule regular volunteer surveys and exit interview questions. Here is where you can find out the “how” and “why” behind your volunteer program. All you have to do is gear your questions towards the information you want to see, such as “why was your experience as a volunteer good or bad?” or “how can we improve our volunteer opportunities?”

Further Resources
Free Management Library/Management Help
Idealist.org Volunteer Management Central
CiviCRM
Salesforce.com Foundation