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Home » Featured, Volunteer Recruiting

7 Steps to Better Volunteer Recruiting

Submitted by James Higginbotham on March 8, 2010 – 4:40 amNo Comment

I am routinely asked how to recruit new volunteers. Each time, I ask how they have been doing so far and I get varied responses, including “we ask the same people until they say ‘yes’” and “we don’t have a volunteer recruiting strategy”. Recruiting volunteers takes time, focus, and effort.  Here are my top 7 steps to help make recruiting volunteers a little less painful.

  1. Recruit with enthusiasm, because people will know otherwise
  2. Define the activity using a half-page job description to provide clarity
  3. Put in a time limit, along with a trial period where they can bail with “no questions asked”
  4. Find people who know people so that you aren’t recruiting by yourself
  5. Work with other leaders to help place people, as not every volunteer will be a fit for your ministry or theirs
  6. Restructure your team to make positions easier, allowing for a lower time commitment
  7. Create opportunities for a one-time serve by grouping small stand-alone tasks into opportunities for non-commitment

Like these steps? Consider downloading our FREE eBook on Recruiting Volunteers, with more details on the 7 steps outlined above, a 5-step process for improving your volunteer recruiting, and job description examples.

Don’t let a difficulty of recruiting volunteers get you down! Instead, learn how to be more effective at recruiting volunteers.

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