Volunteer Recruitment Campaigns

Warm Body Recruitment

Introduction
Volunteer recruitment is one of those balancing acts that volunteer managers are always engaged in. You would like to have enough volunteers so that you can get the work done, but you don't want to have more volunteers around than you can make use of. You would like to have enough potential volunteers to sort through for the best candidates, but you also don't want to spend all your life interviewing and then rejecting unsuitable volunteers.

This article discusses ways in which volunteer programs have approached the issue of recruitment, and concentrates on examining four different methods of planning recruitment campaigns. Each is quite different in what it seeks to accomplish and in what it is effective in accomplishing.

Warm Body Recruitment
"Warm Body Recruitment" is the first type of recruitment process. Warm body recruitment is effective when you are trying to recruit for a volunteer position that can be done by most people, either because no special skills are required or because almost anyone can be taught the necessary skills in a limited amount of time. Examples of jobs suitable for warm body recruitment include a ‘hugger’ at a Special Olympics event or a worker an Information Booth. Warm body recruitment is particularly effective when seeking large numbers of volunteers for short-term simple jobs, such as those who would help at a special weekend event.

Methods for Warm Body Recruitment
Warm body recruitment consists of spreading the message about the potential volunteer position to as broad an audience as possible. The theory is that somewhere among this audience will be those who find this position interesting.

The primary methods for Warm body recruitment are:

• Distribution of agency brochures or posters.
• Use of public service announcements on television or radio, or newspaper
• advertisements
• Speaking to community groups

• Distribution of Agency Brochures

There are a great number of possible sites for distribution of agency information. The intent is to place brochures in locations where people are likely to pick them up and read them, and or where people can actually utilize the brochures in helping the people who come to the site. Possible sites include:

1. Job counseling office
2. Libraries
3. Post offices
4. Tourist information bureau
5. Chambers of Commerce
6. School counselors
7. Church bulletin boards
8. Community centers
9. Volunteer Centers
10. Hospital waiting rooms
11. Shopping malls

Some programs, particularly those which deliver services within an identifiable neighborhood, might best benefit from a simple ‘door-to-door’ distribution campaign.

• Public Service Announcements

Put an ad on television or radio, or write a good classified ad for the newspaper. Perhaps only .01% of the population would be interested in your volunteer job, but if over one million people see the ad this could result in 100 applicants.

Despite many current new efforts to involve volunteers by mass media processes, it is difficult to count on this method to solve all of your problems. In the 1990 Gallup Poll only 6% of all volunteers reported having learned about their volunteer job via mass media.

It may be difficult for you to adequately describe a complicated job in a format which fits the short framework of a newspaper ad or a radio or television public service announcement. If you do attempt to construct such an ad you might wish to concentrate on ‘selling’ the needs of your client population, since it will be simpler to describe their needs than it will be to describe the entire job. Other motivational needs which might be mentioned include the provision of training or other support to the volunteer in preparing for the job, and the availability of flexible scheduling to make it easier for the volunteer to meet the time requirements for the job.

The following are some sample newspaper classified ads which do a good job of being both brief and fairly compelling:

• The King County Sexual Assault Center believes that all people, including children, have the right to be free to live without the fear of sexual violence. We also believe that victims of sexual abuse and their non-offending family members deserve support to alleviate the trauma of sexual abuse in their lives. Volunteer opportunities are currently available in a variety of areas and we are recruiting now for our October and January training sessions. Please call xxx-xxxx to help eliminate sexual violence in your community.
• Death Valley National Monument - This large desert valley, nearly surrounded by high mountains, contains the lowest point in the Western Hemisphere and is known as the hottest spot in North America. Here you can find spectacular wildflower displays, sand dunes, Scotty's Castle, and remnants of the gold and borax mining days. Volunteer Jobs: Opportunities that exist in the winter are involved with interpretation, campground host program, and curatorial work. Contact: Death Valley National Monument, 619/7862331.

It is important to realize that even if ads like the above do attract a volunteer, they will not by themselves guarantee that recruitment is successful. You will still need to individually motivate the potential volunteer about the job and the agency. The mass media techniques

will simply serve to get you close enough to the volunteer to make the actual recruitment pitch.

• Speaking to Community Groups

One of the best methods for warm body recruitment is to arrange presentations to local clubs and other groups. Such presentations can serve both to inform the public about what your organizations does and to recruit new volunteers. In following this method of recruitment, be sure to:

1. Deliberately select the groups before whom you wish to speak. There are two types who are most helpful: those groups whose membership regularly participates in helping out in the community (Rotary, service clubs, etc.), and those groups whose membership as individuals are likely to have a common interest with your cause. Schedule these types of groups first.
2. In seeking entry to speak to the group, consider going through a group member. The member can serve as your authenticator to his/her peer group, paving your way to a more receptive audience. They can also make it more likely that you will be invited to speak. Many groups have program chair who is often desperate to find speakers.
3. Try to time your speaking to meet with the group's processes and your needs. Find out what other projects the group is already committed to and time your talk to coincide with their need to develop a new project. Determine how much lead time they need and make sure that your request is not too precipitous for them to meet.
4. Pick your presenters carefully. Make sure the person who is speaking can explain what your agency does and exactly what is needed from the group. Consider sending a volunteer who can speak forcefully about the worth of the effort.
5. If possible, utilize a visual presentation, with slides, pictures, etc. to increase interest. If your presentation is boring, the group may assume that your jobs will be too.
6. Be prepared for people to offer their services. Take along brochures, examples of jobs for which they are needed, sign-up sheets, etc. If someone expresses interest, don't leave without their name and phone number, and commit yourself to following up with them. Follow-up as quickly as possible.
7. Be prepared for too much success. You may need to have a back-up plan to handle the entire group wanting to volunteer together to help you out, not just a few individuals. If several group members decide to volunteer, you will need to consider ways in which they might work together while performing the volunteer work.
8. Remember that at some point during your presentation you should directly and unequivocally ask the audience to volunteer. Very few people will insist on volunteering for your program without being asked to do so.

Evaluating Warm Body Recruitment
Warm body recruitment only has one disadvantage: it works. This may seem strange, but the difficulty lies in that warm body recruitment will effectively recruit people if you distribute enough information, but it will do so in a way that gives the volunteer manager control over neither quantity nor quality. A warm body campaign will bring in potential volunteers but you will not be able to predict their numbers of their inclinations, and you will have to do a lot of juggling to make things fit well together, sorting through the possible volunteers and potentially running the campaign several times.

Targeted Recruitment
The second method for volunteer recruitment is called Targeted Recruitment. Targeted recruitment takes a very different approach to locating potential volunteers. Targeted recruitment works best when the job you wish filled is not one that is suitable for most people, either because it requires a specific skill, a specific commitment, or a specific characteristic or trait.

A targeted recruitment campaign is designed to track down the few people in the community who have the required skills rather than to broadcast a message to all the community, including those who you would have to reject if they showed up for an interview.

With this approach we determine the kind of person who would really like to do the job and track them down.

A targeted recruitment campaign involves answering a series of questions:

• What are the skills/attitudes needed to do this job? (I.e., if we draw a picture of the type of person who could do this job and would enjoy doing it, what would they look like? Cover age, sex, hobbies, possible occupations, related interests, and whatever else better illustrates the picture.)
• Based on this picture, where can we find these types of people? (Think about work setting, educational background, leisure time organizations and activities, publications they might read, parts of town in which they are likely to live, etc.)
• What motivations of this person can we appeal to in our recruitment effort? (Self-help, job enhancement, socialization, learning new skills, career exploration, leadership testing, giving back to the community, keeping productively involved, meeting new people, etc.) Here are some questions you can use to help answer the "Where can we find these types of people?" question:

• Who currently has or does it? What jobs or occupations does it show up in?
• Who once did it and has now quit or retired?
• Who would like to be doing it, but is now in a job where it is not possible? Who was educated in this, but now has a different type of job?
• Who could learn to do it?
• Who is now learning to do it and intends to do it more in the future? What schools teach this subject?
• Who can get someone else who is qualified to do it? Can we find a teacher or a senior practitioner in this skill who can recommend and encourage others in their field to help us?
• Who has such a radically different job that this would be an exciting novelty?

Targeted recruitment tends to work best when you are looking for a particular type of skill, such as experience in accounting. It tends to work somewhat with psychological characteristics, but only if they are sufficiently identifiable (such as a love for children or a liking for sports) that they can be readily traced by going beyond internal mental states into outward physical manifestations. You can also, however, utilize targeted recruitment in some cases if you are trying to find individuals who possess the degree of commitment needed by your organization. Start by examining the motivations and backgrounds of current volunteers in the position to find out if there are any common factors. Do they all have the same type of motivation? Do they have similar backgrounds or education or experiences or occupations? Do they come from similar groups? Did they all hear about the job in the same fashion? Common factors will enable you to identify populations who seem to like the job despite its requirements, and the commonality will enable you to locate others from that population group.

Recent research studies can provide examples of this approach. A study of 4-H volunteer leaders found that 4-H volunteers who continued in their leadership roles tended to differ from their discontinuing counterparts in geographical location, number of children in the family and number of children who had participated in 4-H. Other studies have found that individuals willing to work as volunteers in the field of mental retardation differed from non-volunteers in that they placed less emphasis on success (both social and economic) and greater emphasis on values such as equality, personal expression, and growth.

Evaluating Targeted Recruitment
Targeted recruitment is a highly efficient form of recruiting. In its ultimate form, the volunteer manager literally identifies people by name to approach about volunteering. Targeted recruitment also tends to work because it helps you to think about possible motivations that can be used in persuading a potential volunteer to become involved. Targeted recruitment is the ideal process for seeking involvement of new types of volunteers, because it forces you to begin to think through the needs and interests of that new population, and leads you to pro-actively seek that new group instead of waiting for them to come to you.

The limitation of targeted recruitment is that it is labor intensive, requiring thinking, tracking and tailoring for each volunteer position. This means that it probably is best selected when you are trying to fill a volunteer position that has a high value for the agency and which cannot be filled by simpler means.

Combining Targeted and Warm Body Recruitment
By carefully wording your mass media communication you can actually make use of targeted recruitment. Consider this elegant ad, from Washington, DC:

Interested in the arts? Volunteers know what goes on behind the scenes at the Kennedy Center. Call the Friends of the Kennedy Center.

While distributed via mass media, this ad makes use of targeted wording to appeal to a certain audience. The key words "behind the scenes" provide a strong incentive to those of artistic bent who wish either to meet and mingle with stars or to get to help with stagecraft. Contrast its effect with the following ad which utilizes exactly the same wording, but with a very different result:

My Sister's Place, a shelter for battered women and their children. Hands-on with hotline and shelter work. Behind the scenes with committee work.

By utilizing targeted recruitment techniques to identify the motivations of likely volunteers you can design a mass media campaign which will generate a greater number of qualified and interested applicants.

Concentric Circles Recruitment
Concentric circles recruitment is the lazy way to always have a flow of replacement volunteers applying to work at your agency. It works off of the simple theory that those people who are already connected to you and your agency are the best targets for a recruitment campaign.

To envision the theory of concentric circles, simply think of ripples in a pond when a rock is thrown in. Starting in the center of contact, the ripples spread outwards, with each successive wave striking another, getting larger with each following wave. Concentric circles volunteer recruitment operates in the same manner.

To utilize the concentric circles theory, first attempt to locate a volunteer for the position by starting with the population groups who are already connected to you and work outwards. You can capitalize on the fact that most volunteers are recruited by those people who they already know by asking the incumbent in the job to recruit a friend of theirs to replace them. You might look among former clients or your current volunteers for a replacement. This approach will make it more likely to get a positive response, because the group of potential volunteers with whom you will be talking will already be favorably disposed toward your agency, or least will be informed about it and what it does.

The significance of this factor is suggested by the following information from the 1990 Gallup Survey on Volunteering:

These results indicate one of the simple reasons for the remarkable success of concentric circles recruitment. Since it often involves face-to-face recruitment by those who already know the people whom they are approaching, one of its strengths is the personal testimony of the asking volunteer. During the conversation the volunteer can say, either directly or indirectly, "This is a good volunteer job with a good agency. I know this because I worked there and I think it is worth your time to work there too." This is a very credible and a very persuasive argument that mass media techniques and appeals from strangers have a hard time equaling.

Even more direct evidence of the efficacy of concentric circles recruitment was seen in a result of the 1987 Gallup Survey, also available from Independent Sector: among those who have been the recipients of services by a community agency, 23% volunteer; among non-recipients, only 9% volunteer. The service received need not have been given directly by the soliciting agency, but may instead be only of a similar type to that received by those being solicited. One campaign to recruit volunteers for the alcoholism treatment unit in a hospital consisted of letters to members of a local Alcoholics Anonymous group.

Each letter was jointly signed by the volunteer coordinator of the hospital and by a current member of the AA group (thus tapping two elements of the Concentric Circle concept).

These examples demonstrate that a clear strength of the concentric circles theory is that it concentrates on approaching those who may already have a good reason for helping out, either because they have received services themselves or they have seen the impact of the services on others. They have thus become convinced both of the need for the services and of the ability of your program to assist those with that need; all that remains is to demonstrate to them that they are capable of helping in meeting that need.

Ideal groups around whom to structure your concentric circles recruitment include:

• Current volunteers
• Friends and relatives of volunteers
• Clients
• Friends and relatives of clients
• "Alumni" (Clients and volunteers)
• Staff
• Donors
• People in the neighborhood
• Retirees in your field or subject

In short, any population group which has already been favorably exposed to your program makes an excellent target for a concentric circles recruitment effort. All you need to do to capitalize on this receptivity is to start a ‘word of mouth’ recruitment campaign and a constant trickle of potential volunteers will approach your agency. Continually stress to all of these groups that they are essential to your recruitment campaign, and help them in knowing the types of volunteers for whom you and looking and the ways in which they can assist in finding and recruiting these volunteers.

Evaluating Concentric Circles Recruitment
Although a lot of effective person-to-person recruiting ‘just happens,’ we can make a lot more of it happen by systematically encouraging it. Everyone involved in the organization, both volunteers and staff, should understand what their recruitment responsibilities are within the framework of the overall plan. Each time a need for a new volunteer arises, the volunteer coordinator prepares a job description, and a rough statement of the need and possible benefits. This can be communicated to all staff, board members, and present volunteers (especially those recruited for this purpose) so that they might begin looking, among the people they know, for good candidates.

The primary advantage of concentric circles recruitment is that, once established, it will provide you with a steady supply of 'replenishment' volunteers to compensate for attrition and will do so with remarkably little work.

The disadvantage of concentric circles recruitment is that it can be very limiting, and if it is the only method of recruitment that you utilize will lead to a process of 'cloning.' Since much of it works off recruiting 'friends' it has a natural tendency to create an in-bred group, all of whom look and think the same way.

If you are a new agency you will probably not be able to take advantage of concentric circles recruitment, and will have to rely on the less effective methods of mass media and targeting. In time, however, you will build up the good will among a sufficient population group to take advantage of this simplest and most efficient method of recruitment.

Ambient Recruitment
Ambient Recruitment is a method that does not work for all groups, but which is highly desirable if you are suitable for its approach. An ambient recruitment campaign is designed for a 'closed system,' that is a group or people who have a high existing sense of self-identification and connectedness. Examples of possible closed systems where ambient recruitment might work include:

• a school
• a corporation
• a profession
• a church congregation
• a neighborhood
• a military base

In short, any place where the members of the community view themselves as related to other members and view the values of the community as personally important and meaningful to themselves.

An ambient recruitment campaign seeks to create a 'culture of involvement' among the members of this community, getting them to believe that volunteering is the 'thing to do.' This acceptance of volunteering as a value of the community then leads individual members to seek to fulfill that value by seeking to volunteer because "it's the right thing to do."

There are three steps in creating an ambient recruitment campaign.

1. Developing a Philosophy of Involvement

The first step in creating a culture of involvement consists in creating an official philosophy statement which explains that becoming involved is an important value of the group. Here is an example of such a statement utilized in a corporate volunteer program, the Green Giant Company:

"In two major ways the Green Giant Company recognizes and accepts its responsibility to participate substantially and responsibly in the society of which it is a part. Its first responsibility is to exhibit social responsibility in all of its own business activities. Additionally, Green Giant is also committed to acting with its expertise, personnel, influence, and financial resources to aid in solving societal problems and in improving overall life -quality, especially so in the communities where it operates. This commitment recognizes that one of the Company's most valuable assets is its own personnel. Therefore, to carry out this commitment, Green Giant encourages its company and subsidiary employees to participate in community and civic affairs with their personal time and talents."

This statement of philosophy creates the underpinning for the cultural value. It can appear in many forms. For attorneys, for example, it appears as §6.1 of the ABA Code of Ethics. For a church group, it is the Bible.

2. Early Indoctrination

Step two in ambient recruitment is educating members of the community about the value. This is easiest done early in their membership with the group and is best done by engaging them in a discussion of the value and its meaning. This discussion can best be conducted by others who are clearly identified as fellow members of the group and works even better if these individuals are 'opinion leaders' within the group.

One of the best ways to continue this indoctrination process is by ensuring that the community tells stories about volunteer activity, creating role models and legends who exemplify the cultural value, and in creating ways of recognizing individuals who carry out the value.

Supporting Involvement The final step in creating a system of ambient recruitment lies in building a support system.

An effective ambient recruitment campaign gets members of the group to want to volunteer, but it does not tell them where or how to become involved. Someone must still assist them with the logistics of finding a suitable volunteer assignment and must ensure that the volunteer position is one that will be personally rewarding to the volunteer.

3. Choosing Among Recruitment Campaigns

All of the campaign systems outlined above work, they simply produce different types of return for different types of effort. Picking the correct campaign system starts with identifying what you are trying to accomplish. If you need large numbers of volunteers, try warm body recruitment. If you need a specific skill or are trying to outreach to new populations, try targeted recruitment. If you want a steady flow of volunteers to compensate for attrition, try concentric circles. If you want to encourage volunteering with a defined group, try ambient recruitment. During the lifetime of your agency you will probably need each of these approaches.

©1995, Steve McCurley. All rights reserved.