Interview! Bryan Kortis, Director of National Programs for Neighborhood Cats
October 14, 2017
Interview! Katie Lisnik, Director of Cat Policy and Protection, Humane Society of the United States
October 21, 2017
When I sent out a survey asking listeners what their greatest pain points were many of you answered that recruiting and keeping volunteers were big challenges. So I thought I would have Jamie (a CCP staffer and social media guru) do some research on some of the Top Online Resources for Volunteer Management out there that can help guide your organization to maximizing success.
In looking through the links below I came across some important themes:
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Know Your Needs!
Know what kind of help you are asking for and be very clear about what the job is and expectations. Many of you are so busy that you can’t even begin to figure out where to begin! So if someone comes forward and offers their time you just don’t know how to handle that. So you need to intentionally set aside at least an hour to really focus on writing out the tasks that need to be done in your organization.
I thought that this post by Best Friends to be very good at the pre-planning stages of volunteer recruitment.
This post by Petfinder has some really interesting tips on recruiting new volunteers.
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Nurturing Your Volunteers
Once you have your volunteers in place you need systems to keep them engaged and actively participating. There is a lot of nurturing that goes on with volunteers.
I found these two resources by APSCA Pro and the Humane Society of the United States to have excellent links to everything you might want in your volunteer program.
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Check in With National Organizations
Volunteer Match is the master listing site where you can post your volunteer opportunities and resources. Idealist is a good listing site, but I don’t see much for resources there. But you should check out both sites to see what you can post. It is also a good place to recruit board members. Lastly, I would recommend that you have a current listing on Guidestar. While it isn’t specifically a volunteer listing site many people look at Guidestar when checking out an organizations viability.
Here are some helpful links:
https://www.volunteermatch.org/nonprofits/resources/
As always, if you are feeling overwhelmed please go back to basics and start small. Don’t overwhelm yourself. Focus on recruiting only one or two people and work with them. Don’t bring in thirty new people all at once! Stay focused and you will see growth happen and you won’t feel so overextended.
