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Know your opportunities
- Be sure your volunteer opportunities are integral to achieving your group or organisations’s aims and objectives
- Prepare volunteer role descriptions which clearly explain what is involved
- Acquaint yourself thoroughly with each opportunity, including its purpose, responsibilities, and what the value of the experience is for the volunteer
Create a clear path to your door
- Put together a process for application and screening and don’t start recruiting until everything is in place
- Ensure that everyone involved in your organisation knows who to direct enquiries to.
- Respond promptly. Aim to answer initial enquiries within 24 hours
Make your recruitment messages friendly
- Produce publicity that answers potential volunteers unspoken question of why should I volunteer for you?
- In your publicity, answer other typical questions that new recruits ask eg what will I be doing? How often and when and where?
- Reassure potential volunteers that they will be trained and that you will support them
- Avoid words like “need” and “desperate”. It scares volunteers away
Get your message out
- Consider all available methods including word of mouth, leaflets and posters, talks and presentations, local newsletters, websites and local media coverage
