If you’re reading this, chances are you want to know how you can lighten your workload as a volunteer coordinator, or other member of a non-profit organization, while increasing your effectiveness and strengthening your organization. Typically, in the volunteer recruitment process you would contact each of your prospective volunteers individually or cast a wide net and have staff waiting to take calls from people interested in the event. This would take a lot of time, effort, and money on the part of your organization, however, and it would mean that staff within the organization are tied up and unable to assist with any of the other aspects of the event. Furthermore, it means that your campaign to generate volunteers is often done only using a single method of communication.
Automation can benefit you a great deal. Consider the following. Campaigns to achieve any business goal are almost 40% more effective when they take place across multiple different channels of communication. On average, less than 15% of organizations use this kind of automation. Imagine being more effective while using fewer resources on the volunteer recruitment process and having more hands and minds to focus on the events that you host.
Being able to amplify the success of your volunteer calls while being able to focus your attention elsewhere sounds pretty good, right? In this blog, we’ll talk through the process a little bit, so you can see how automation would benefit a non-profit organization. To learn about the process in detail, and how you can set it up for yourself you can check this blog out.
Knowing the details listed above, however, you might wonder: Is there a way I can produce a volunteer recruitment campaign with multiple touch points, tailored to the preferences of my volunteers and not have to dramatically increase the time I spend in the office? There certainly is, with an automated volunteer organization solution! Here are four ways that you could benefit from such a solution.
Reduced Manual Workload
There’s a lot that goes into successfully coordinating a volunteer event. You have outreach, recruitment, task assignments, and more. You have thank you messages to send and vendors and contractors to communicate with, all while trying to actually plan and execute the event itself. A lot of this work is divided among a team of people, but it can still be pretty daunting. By implementing an automated volunteer recruitment solution, you can reduce that workload, and allow recruiters and outreach staff to help with other tasks.
In an automated solution, all of these different messages to volunteers, both recruiting and coordinating them, can be sent automatically using a few forms to manipulate data. The sent messages will be personalized using the criteria that was put in the template beforehand and the volunteer will have all the information they need. Applicants not selected will get a thank you and all of these interactions will take only moments.
Save Time, Save Money
Operating manually is something that you already know is going to take up a lot of your time. You block off entire days for some tasks, such as interviewing or reading applications. On top of that, when operating manually there are certain things that are near impossible to do. You can’t verify that Applicant A got your call, for example, or that Applicant B read your email. You don’t know who to expect on your interview day, or who has confirmed they would be available on event day. With an automated solution, that’s not the case. You have all the knowledge at your fingertips to know who opened their digital messages via SMS and email, who answered their phones. You can collect RSVP confirmations and other replies and view them in your reports and even have the applicant’s data updated with additional information based on how they interact with your automated messages. In short, you have more time, need to spend less money on recruitment, and have more freedom and versatility in how you handle this process.
Your Data, Your Control
During the recruitment process, a number of message interactions, web form responses, and other actions that the applicants take can help automatically apply tags to their profile in your database. These tags can be used to filter applicants into different groups, allowing you to only interview the most pertinent people for a given job. It also allows you to see where some of the others might fit better elsewhere. Based on these tags, applicants might receive different emails, explaining what it is your organization needs from them. This can continue straight through to the event itself, allowing you to send out confirmation of selections, job assignments, requests for equipment, and more.
Projects, Managed
Once the volunteers are recruited and the events are planned, then it’s time to put together the last pieces. Recruitment doesn’t always end there. Someone could get sick or otherwise not be able to make it. You want to have a backup list of applicants who were good options, but who you didn’t have enough room to bring in. A simple click and you can put out a recall to previous applicants telling them that you need more volunteers. With a limiter on the response pool, you won’t get too many respondents and those available can tell you so. If you are overseeing more than one event in a day, you should also be able to use automated tools to determine what tasks leading up to and during the event are done and which ones still need doing. You should also be able to determine who is working on what.
Those are four benefits to the use of automation and right about now you might be wondering where you could find a solution that combines all of these features. SimplyCast has built a new volunteer recruitment process that will carry you from recruitment to event day and allow you more control and efficiency in your operations. There are also many other benefits, these were just our top four picks!
If you’re interested in learning more about our automated new volunteer registration solution, we are only a click away!
Simply request a one-on-one demo with our experts and let us show you!
