As a good start, if you’re holding an event, is to make sure everybody gets invited or if you’ve not got the resources to hold an event that everybody receives your ‘thank you for being an awesome person’ correspondence if you’re sending it. You definitely do not want to miss anyone no matter how small their contribution has been!
Volunteer’s week is also being touted as a great way to give people a taster of the volunteering life (and thus get new volunteers) but if you don’t offer them something interesting to do they won’t want a taster in the first place. Put forward the roles you need help with and ask people how they would like to make a difference and for a breakdown of their skills. You can log these details into your CRM and tailor the roles you offer to these newcomers. Of course they might need to do a little something they don’t really want to but if you make the majority of it quality then they’ll enjoy it and come back again.
If you then go on to offer your volunteers a rich and rewarding experience that’s brilliant but if you don’t keep in touch with them they could slip through the net. The first step would be sending a thank you for signing up to volunteer using automated email providers. Then when it comes to the time to contact them with details of volunteering opportunities you have the data on what they would like to do so you can match them to right role. If you took further information like skill set and any health issues that might make it difficult for them to do a certain task then you also make sure you’re not offering them an inappropriate role.
Volunteers save you a lot of money and so making sure they stick around and are happy is essential. The above data collection can also be done with current volunteers on a regular basis with the outcomes logged into the CRM and quick reports produced on the data. This will give you clear indications of what’s working and what’s not and help your volunteer manager (who probably has several other roles if you’re a small charity) save time and make volunteers feel valued and provide them with the kind of volunteering experience they want. Doing this builds a relationship of trust and mutual respect which is an atmosphere people want to be in.
What are your plans to celebrate your volunteers hard work? Let us know and to find out more about how a CRM could build you valuable and lasting relationships get in touch with us here.