I hosted a few people from volunteering organizations to share their learnings about Virtual Volunteer Management. Sharing below some interesting takeaways everyone shared towards the end-
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Creating Magic Moments - To keep your volunteers engaged and make them feel happy about the work they do, it’s important to continuously create magical moments for them.
Suggested actions: Get your beneficiaries to write a note or make a card without any occasion and send a picture or a printout to the volunteer, do social media shout-outs for your volunteers, If your volunteers do teaching or mentoring, acknowledge their efforts on Teachers’ Day or Guru Purnima. -
Flexibility- We think virtual volunteering is already so flexible. How can we make it more flexible?
Suggested actions: Always offer more than 2 slots for your virtual activities, if possible allow absentees to watch a recording and then answer a quiz about the session so you they watched the recording. Make your activities fun enough that people don’t want to miss it. -
How do you make sessions more engaging:
suggested actions: Get people to do something that they don’t do in their daily jobs. Don’t ask a CA if they would volunteer to do your accounts, but offer something they don’t get to do in their job, Include Fun icebreakers even if they sound silly like asking people what they wish to eat and then use that food item as a prefix to their name for the whole activity. -
Preventing Drop Outs-
Suggested actions: Identify WHY is the person volunteering. Is it to do something better with their time? To meet new people? To get a certificate only? To try something new? and offer them something that aligns with them. Secondly, tell them how their absence will deprive your beneficary of something meaningful in life.
While this may prevent dropouts slightly, always plan to recruit more than you need so even if people drop out (which they inevitably will), you have enough people.