Building a Community Within Your Volunteer Program in 2021 (& Beyond)
As a volunteer manager, recent events have almost certainly thrown you for a loop. With a global pandemic keeping most people indoors and large in-person events on pause, your volunteer programs have likely had to undergo some major changes as well.
In response to these challenges, many nonprofits and other organizations began to bring their missions online, including their volunteer opportunities. As our circumstances around the pandemic remain uncertain, perhaps you’ve sustained virtual volunteer opportunities to keep supporters engaged and working toward your mission.
While virtual volunteering is a great way to continue cultivating support for your mission, it does lack face-to-face interaction, a vital component of community-building. Fostering a community among your volunteers is vital to not only encourage future support, but to provide volunteers with genuinely valuable and meaningful experiences. But what are the best ways to build a community when most activities have to be done online?
From the moment you recruit a volunteer to the moment they lead their own event, you should provide the tools and opportunities for them to engage with each other and develop a sense of community. This guide will walk you through some top tips you can use to build a community within your volunteer program in 2021 and beyond:
Provide a dedicated place for online engagement
Encourage networking between volunteers
Turn volunteers into leaders
Host volunteer appreciation events
Your volunteers are some of the strongest supporters of your cause, and your organization would not be the same without them. Helping your volunteers create a community within your organization will not only make your volunteer program stronger, but also make the actual experience more valuable and fulfilling, leading to valuable engagement and retention boosts down the line.
Provide a dedicated place for online engagement.
Volunteering should be a great experience for both the organization and the participants. While most volunteers sign up because they’re passionate about the cause and task-at-hand, that might not necessarily be enough to keep them as regular, retained participants in your program.
Building a community within your volunteer program is a large part of keeping participants engaged with your mission and feeling connected to a larger cause.
However, with many volunteer opportunities moving to the online space, it’s harder to encourage your volunteers to engage with each other. How are volunteers supposed to get to know one another past just a name on a computer screen?
Consider creating a dedicated place for volunteers to engage online. This can either be a website where volunteers log on and discuss their thoughts with others or a more comprehensive platform. Look at your current volunteer management strategy and review what tools and opportunities you currently offer. Some platforms can even work well with external community-building tools like Slack.
Throughout it all, make sure your online community is a place where volunteers can:
Receive event updates and announcements
Introduce themselves and connect
Post and respond to polls
Comment on posts and react to messages
This way, whenever volunteers have an issue, a question, or just want to interact with each other, they know exactly where to go and feel supported by your organization when doing so.
Encourage networking between volunteers.
Now that you’ve established a dedicated place where your volunteers can engage with your mission and each other, you have to provide opportunities to make that happen. Networking between volunteers is a great way for them to meet each other and make mutually beneficial, long-term connections.
Providing networking opportunities is a key component of community-building and helps like-minded supporters get to know one another. Remember, your volunteers are some of your most important supporters. It’s worth it to invest in those relationships, as a strong community of volunteers will drive your mission forward and pay off over time.
Consider implementing a chat functionality between volunteers. According to this Mobilize article on the effects of a comprehensive and effective group chat feature, “it is the community that [volunteers] find within [the] group chat feature that makes them stay.”
When you provide something as simple as group chat functionality between volunteers for an event, they can better:
Connect. Sometimes volunteers even send requests to connect elsewhere (like on social media) and engage with each other beyond just what the event entails.
Collaborate on the volunteer event. If there is ever an issue, the group chat feature is a great place to get quick answers to questions. For instance, with virtual volunteering becoming more popular, volunteers might be faced with technological issues. With the chat feature, this issue can be quickly solved!
Align on event information. Sometimes unprecedented challenges might cause a change in a specific event. Volunteers (or your own team) can easily update everyone by sending the correct information through the chat.
Encouraging your volunteers to engage and interact with each other is key if you want to build a community. Hand the baton over to your volunteers and empower them to connect.
Turn volunteers into event hosts.
One of the best ways to build a community is to provide volunteers (and thus your organization) with opportunities to grow. Turning volunteers into event hosts is a great way to empower your passionate supporters and get them more invested in your cause. With volunteers leading activities themselves, your organization has more resources to grow while freeing up time for you and your staff.
Your volunteer management software should provide the tools needed to help you recruit event hosts. Look for one with an easy-to-use and straightforward approval process, as well as multiple permission levels to ensure that volunteer leaders can also leverage the system.
Allowing dedicated and more senior volunteers to lead their own events is a great way to get them more involved with your organization and empower them to make a larger impact. Capitalize on this momentum by incorporating additional ways that volunteers can drive your mission forward:
Provide training opportunities so that volunteers can learn additional skills that can help them effectively advocate for your cause.
Encourage volunteers to also become donors (and encourage donors to become volunteers!)
Let volunteers use peer-to-peer recruiting tools to meet and engage with more volunteer prospects.
Promote corporate philanthropy opportunities, like volunteer grant programs where supporters can potentially double their impact on your mission. To explore this opportunity further, Double the Donation’s overview is a great starting point for volunteer grant basics.
Your volunteers are some of the most passionate supporters of your cause and are eager to create a bigger impact. Providing opportunities like becoming your own event host or receiving additional training ties volunteers closer to your mission and community.
Host volunteer appreciation events.
Throughout it all, your organization would not be where it is without your volunteer community. Make sure they know how important and vital their support is by properly showing appreciation for all of their hard work.
Thanking your volunteers and letting them know how much their combined efforts mean to your cause not only gets volunteers feeling good and proud of what they’ve accomplished, but also encourages them to continue to be involved with the community.
You likely already send thank you letters or emails to your volunteers after an event. To show even more appreciation, consider throwing them a volunteer appreciation event. Even if your current operations are strictly online, there are ways you can pivot the celebration, like:
Film a thank you video. This can be not only from key members of your organization but also the people who the volunteers helped.
Host a virtual volunteer appreciation gala. Encourage volunteers to dress up at home and provide some fun activities that they can do together, remotely.
Livestream a concert or another live performance. Show your appreciation to volunteers by hosting a fun concert that they can experience from home.
Your volunteers deserve to know how much their effort is appreciated. For more inspiration, we’ve gathered our 50 favorite volunteer recognition ideas to explore.
Building a community within your volunteer program is all about engagement and retention. The stronger and more tight-knit the community is, the more supporters are invested in your mission and willing to go the extra mile to ensure that tasks get accomplished. These tips can help you provide the foundation for that community and empower your volunteers to connect and grow together.