There are a few keys to a successful volunteering program, but one of the most significant, and often overlooked, is having clearly defined and specific volunteer roles.

Consider this. Your not-for-profit community group needs volunteers and decides to advertise.

‘Volunteers needed! Come and volunteer for our community group. You won’t get paid but you will get to feel awesome about the contribution you’re making to your community.’

Or

‘Volunteer nursery manager needed! Volunteer ten hours a week to help run our seedling nursery and support our team of nursery volunteers. Our nursery supplies 20,000 seedlings every year for local revegetation work.’

Which one do you think is more likely to result in a passionate, committed volunteer contacting you for more information?

Good volunteer programs clearly define roles and responsibilities

People are much more likely to commit to volunteering if they know exactly what’s expected of them and that their skills are going to be utilised with maximum impact. For this reason, it pays to clearly articulate exactly what roles you need volunteers for and what your expectations are.

Rather than a generic call for help like “we need volunteers”, it’s important to offer compelling roles with clear job descriptions that will give people a good idea about what it is you want them to do.

Creating meaningful role descriptions will make volunteer positions much more attractive to volunteers, will make the experience more rewarding for those who do step up and therefore create much more impact for your organisation in terms of delivering its mission.

Here’s how to do it:

• Brainstorm all the jobs you need volunteers for (tip: remember volunteers want meaningful roles not just basic tasks)
• Group those little jobs into actual positions but make sure those roles aren’t overwhelming
• Write a basic description for each position. Consider: what the role will be called, what the overall objective of the role is, what all the activities are, how much time they’ll take, what sort of commitment you’re looking for and what the term of engagement is (people like an opt out clause)
• Collate instructions, procedures, passwords, rules and background information related to each position so that it forms part of a recruitment or welcome pack for the new volunteer
• Be specific. For example, asking someone to cook a BBQ once a month for a season of football is much more likely to garner a ‘yes’ than simply asking for ‘catering volunteers’.
• The goal is to never need to say ‘we need volunteers’, but rather ‘we need specific skills to do A, B and C’.

When defining those roles, make them as appealing as possible

Volunteers don’t just want to know what you need them to do, they want to know why? That is, what’s your mission and how is their work contributing to that.

You need to make sure the role sounds like something a person would actually want to donate their time towards. Why would someone give their spare time to your cause, event or program if it didn’t?

When you have a clear mission, this becomes much easier. Volunteers will immediately understand what the impact of their work will be.

Consider the five reasons why people volunteer and make sure you’re ticking off as many of those reasons as possible for the people you’re hoping to recruit.