Volunteer Recruitment

Volunteer recruitment is a hot topic for community organizations throughout Canada and the southeast is no exception! What exactly is volunteer recruitment? and how has it changed over the last 20 years?

Volunteer recruitment is all about matching your organizations needs to the skills and interests of a volunteer. It is essential that these needs be linked directly to the organizations mandate and that a job description is able to be formulated with identifiable tasks and responsibilities.

Volunteers of today are very sophisticated and are not wanting to just fill a spot or be a general workhorse.

Canadians state that the primary reason they volunteer is to contribute to their communities. The next two major reasons are to use skills and experience and because they have been personally affected by the cause. The breakdown is as follows:

• to make a contribution to community (93%);
• to use skills and experience (78%);
• personally affected by the organization's cause (59%);
• to explore one's own strengths (48%);
• because their friends volunteer (48%);
• to network with others (46%);
• to improve job opportunities (22%); and
• to fulfill religious obligations or beliefs (21%).

Take a moment to reflect on these trends in volunteering and see how your organization can adapt to help meet the desires of the new volunteer. Now that you have reflected on this note it is time to ask.

According to Volunteering in Canada, 45% of non-volunteers had not become involved because no one had asked them to, which suggests they might sign up to volunteer if they were approached the right way. On the other hand, about one-quarter (27%) had no interest in volunteering and 7% had not been satisfied with an earlier experience of volunteering. These percentages are no different than those recorded in 2007.

What this tells us is that we need to be prepared to shoulder tap and ask people to volunteer and when you ask to make sure you are prepared to answer questions regarding roles and responsibility, time commitment.  You may need to negotiate some of the tasks and time commitment to match the volunteer’s capacity.

Here are the latest statistics from the 2010 Canada Survey of Giving, Volunteering and Participating.

For additional resources check out the National Volunteer Week website at www.volunteer.ca/nvw2019 or contact Tara-Leigh Heslip at South East District.

Email: cdc@southeastdistrict.ca 

Phone: 306.695.2006