Charities are often on the front line when it comes to supporting people in need. Their mission is to help those who are struggling and make their lives better. They have a huge responsibility, but they can’t do it alone. That’s why an effective website can make a big difference for charities! A website can become an essential tool that will help them attract more volunteers online.
This blog post discusses why websites can be really important to charities and community groups when attempting to expand their volunteer workforce and make waves in supporting their service users.
One of the big frustrations for charities is building a volunteer workforce capable of expanding their vision. Yet, we see so many examples of websites that don’t deliver with this. Recruitment is a way to capitalise on your website by streamlining the process and empowering your volunteers.
Creating a volunteer avatar
In computing, an avatar is a graphical visual representation of the user. They could be the user’s alter ego or character – an icon or figure representing a particular person in a video game, Internet forum, etc. Within the context of digital life, an avatar can also refer to the personality or nickname used by or assigned to a person.
When thinking about how you’re going to attract volunteers, you need to have a think about who they are and what they stand to give and gain from the volunteer experience at your charity or community group.
By creating an avatar, you are able to target your website, social media and marketing efforts to match their wants and desires – this in turn helps you talk to more of the people who will benefit the charity and less of the ones that will not.
Who are your volunteers?
Have a think about your current volunteers and their backgrounds and consider answering some of these questions:
- What is the typical age of your volunteer workforce?
- Do the current workforce identify by a particular gender?
- At what stage of their professional career are our current volunteers?
- How did we attract our current volunteers?
- Where do most of our volunteers live?
- Do a lot of our current volunteers participate in certain activities?
What do perspective volunteers need from the experience?
Have a serious think about the type of people you want volunteering for you and where they come from. Are they former service users who are looking to give back to the charity? Are they people looking to gain real-world experience before jumping to the next step of their career? Are they looking to return to the workplace and need to demonstrate their ability with voluntary experience and a good reference?
You might have a volunteer who is looking for an opportunity to improve their CV, or you could be recruiting people with skills that your charity lacks. In any case, it’s important to know what the person wants to get out of volunteering and how they can bring something different to the table.
What are their skills?
If you’re looking for someone to run a fundraising event, it might not be as important that they have experience in the sector. On the other hand, if you want someone to do your social media or PR, then you’ll need them to come with some relevant skills honed through practical and academic study.
Touching Hearts
Even more so than when you’re attracting donations, when attracting volunteers you’re looking for donations of something more valuable than money – time.
It’s vital that you make the emotional connection with your potential volunteers and this doesn’t happen in one swift move. It takes time.
Think about your social media presence, the whole website and what your ambassadors are saying. A lot of people don’t choose to volunteer their time based on logical reason, it’s done on emotion.
The want and desire to commit to your cause, the feeling of being needed, the idea that they can make a difference – these are all things you need to be able to offer in order for them to become your volunteers.
Your website is so crucial because it may determine whether or not someone decides to volunteer with you. It has considerable power than any other way of getting people involved and interested.
Create stories that connect with the people who can give their time to your charity or community group.
Use your existing volunteers
Word of mouth has often been regarded as the best way of marketing pretty much everything. Invespcro’s 2019 research suggested that 64% of marketing executives feel that it’s the most effective form of marketing and that 86% of customers trust word of mouth reviews and recommendations over other sources.
Tap into your existing volunteers and bring them on the journey to expand your volunteer workforce – they’re likely to be the people working alongside the new team member the most.
The happiest and most enthusiastic of your existing volunteers will make a great case study. These case studies will make a great pitch to anyone on the fence about whether or not to volunteer with your charity or community group. That’s because these case studies, done properly, are a shining example of how volunteering with your charity has helped someone like them make a difference – which benefits them (think about the skills and experiences the individual volunteer needs for their career development) and your cause.
Make it easy and friendly with this process
Always have an easy volunteer enquiry form. Make it easy and approachable for people to enquire about volunteering with your charity or community group.
And that is all it is to start with – an enquiry. Just a few contact details and why they might be interested.
You build a process that showcases how great you are. Remember that you are asking them to buy into your charity or community group with something more valuable than money – their time.
This could involve showing them around your premises and having a chat or making a friendly call to get more information, for example. The website is the first step to gain and gauge interest – a personal touch makes a big difference in getting the emotional connection with your work to make the time commitment you are looking for.