Volunteering magazine article, issue 109, July/August 2005
Joe Saxton and Elisha Evans of think-tank, nfp Synergy, outline how to match volunteers motivations with rewards and recruitment.
If you wanted to build a house, would you hire a grocer? If you wanted your garden tended, would you call an accountant?
Of course not. So why do we insist on matching volunteers with tasks with which they are not particularly suited? And why are recruitment messages so consistently generic and unimaginative?
In the report Understanding Canadian Volunteers, Norah McClintock recommends a five-step process for targeting specific volunteers for specific tasks in a considered and effective manner. When thinking about motivations, remember to consider not just hard motivations like learning skills, but also the more self-interested motivations and altruistic motivations outlined below.
1. Define the task/role that needs to be addressed (wish list)
2. Select an appropriate target group
3. Consider:
- What are their motivations?
- What are the barriers to their involvement?
4. Based on key motivations and barriers, consider how the task/role could be packaged
5. Outline your message
- What will the volunteer gain?
- What will the task/role accomplish for your organisation/for the community?
When designing the tasks/roles that need to be addressed, it is vital that organisations continually refer back to their vision and mission. What is the organisation trying to achieve? How is it trying to do this? Are there things the charity would like to achieve that are not currently being addressed? And finally, what are the discrete tasks and roles in all of this for which volunteers could be responsible, also called a wish list?
By taking this vision/mission driven approach, charities not only ensure that volunteers are being managed effectively to fulfil the organisations purpose, they also make it easier for volunteers to see the point in what they are doing. It makes it easier to communicate and sell the ways in which volunteers are actually making a difference.
For those organisations that lack volunteers, the use of the wish list of volunteer tasks and more targeted advertising will help attract the right volunteers. For those lucky organisations that have a surplus of volunteers it will provide a strategy for actually utilising their talent and good will!
When designing your message, it can be useful to keep in mind a series of words that have been found to grab readers attention: Gain; Achieve; Win; Avoid; Special; Easy; Health; Discover; Love; Unique; Amazing; Free; You. Of course, it is also important to have a good understanding of the groups you are targeting.
In order to understand what motivates volunteers it is critical to understand, however, the new generation of volunteers are living their lives. They are more time-pressured. They have more choices. They have more leisure time and more ways to fill it. They have more technology at their fingertips and through it more ways to explore and understand the world in which they live. All of this makes time, not money, the most precious resource for many potential volunteers.
Gazinta volunteer managers ignore it at their peril!
For American academic, Lee Burns, the ability to maximise the ratio of satisfaction to time the amount of satisfaction derived/amount of time invested = Gazinta has become paramount for citizens of the western world. He explains that this can be done in one of two ways: by increasing the amount of satisfaction gained during any given period of time (e.g. by ensuring everything a volunteer will need to get their work done is ready when they arrive) or by reducing the amount of time taken to achieve the same amount of satisfaction (e.g. by ensuring the volunteer has access to time-saving computer programmes).
This may sound like Californian new age mumbo jumbo but volunteer managers ignore this equation at their own peril!
So the successful recruitment of volunteers relies on matching motivations with peoples personal lives. And as peoples personal lives get more complicated with more pressures, then volunteer managers will need to be more imaginative, flexible and marketing-led in understanding what volunteers want and need.
This article is an extract from nfpSynergys forthcoming report on volunteering in the 21st Century.
