Volunteer Outreach

Volunteer outreach

Finding new volunteers while you are looking for applicants can be daunting. It's a chicken and egg challenge - how can you get applicants without teams? If you wait till you have full teams, they won't have anything to do with no applicants.

So, you source applicants while sourcing students. At least with volunteers, can you continue to source them after the class starts (and you need to!)

Like the applicant process, it's a funnel. For example, some volunteers will sign up for a recruitment event, but not attend. So your goal is around 250 signups for 25 active volunteers.

How to proceed

• Make a list of organisations to contact, prioritise and start contacting them

• Create and run volunteer recruitment events

• Start your social media campaign - using the social media guide: http://bit.ly/cyf-social-media-guide

• Check the dashboard, email volunteers and invite them to the events (CYF Dashboard overview coming, ask a fellow volunteer in the meanwhile)

• If you have existing volunteers, ask them to refer a friend via Slack. Word of Mouth is CYF's most significant source of volunteers. See the data below for more sources.

Top Referral sources

• 25% colleague or friend

• 20% through search engines

• 17% through social media

• 5% through conferences

• 2% through news articles

Notes

• Corporates are good at providing structured, low-time volunteering experiences, like 1:1 mentoring or workshops, but not active core volunteers. WOM is best for active volunteers.

• Keep running events! Continue after the class starts - get the numbers and roles needed from the other teams