How Charities Can Attract Volunteers Like Uber
Raise your hand if you can volunteer every third Thursday of the month to my charity.
Didn’t think so.
While it may be unfair to conclude that society’s short-term attention span deters long-term commitments; it does appear to be a feature of modern American society, not a bug.
For nonprofit organizations, recruiting and retaining volunteers is mission-critical. Many charities would fold without its unpaid workforce. But how do you bring new volunteers into your cause in a world filled increasingly by project-based employment?
The rise of the Gig Economy may offer nonprofits a road map for building a stronger and more effective volunteer community.
Motivation to Volunteer
What motivates people to volunteer is a relatively unexplored topic. There has been some attempts to model the motivation of volunteers at special events, but the psychological trigger that causes them to volunteer remains elusive.
While we may not understand what prompts a person to volunteer for one cause over another, we do know that people who volunteer expect a depth in their volunteer experience.
Gone are the days where nonprofits blindly assign the next item on their to-do list.
It appears that volunteers want the same things donors seek: a way to measure the social performance of their investment into a cause.
I call this concept Return on Impact, and for the volunteer, it is a way to measure the impact of an investment of their time.
The Gig Economy
Once upon a time, musicians were the only people who looked for gigs. Today, nearly 45-million Americans offer some kind of good or service in the peer-to-peer, or Gig, economy.
People who offer services typically describe their experiences as positive. They enjoy the freedom of working without set hours despite not having benefits that traditional 9-to-5 employees receive. Herein is the key: whether someone rents a room on Airbnb or contracts to build a shed on Handy, each is an event-based project.
It begs the question, can nonprofits leverage the event-based volunteer?
Skills-Based Volunteering (SBV)
The concept of Skills-Based Volunteering is not new. AstraZeneca Canada and Endeavour Volunteer Consulting ran a pilot project specifically to measure the value of employer-supported skills-based volunteering.
The results of their project showed that SBV can product valuable returns for employers, employees and communities at large.
Event-Based Volunteering in Action
In early 2016, the American Red Cross in Chicago and San Diego hosted an event-based opportunity for OpenStreetMap. About 120 people volunteered their time on a Saturday to help map roads in Africa. This SBV opportunity contributed to the need for reliable and accurate maps in an area of the world frequented by the ICRC and other international humanitarian aid organizations.
Successful use of event-based volunteerism doesn’t require your nonprofit to be a large international relief organization. Event-Based Volunteer opportunities can be large or small, only limited to your need and imagination.
Most of the volunteers had backgrounds in Internet technology and were familiar with OpenStreetMap., but few had ever volunteered for the American Red Cross.
Six months later, several people who volunteered for that one event are now Red Cross volunteers.
And it didn’t require anyone to make an indefinite, open-ended, or long-term commitment.
