How to Build the Best Volunteer Opportunities
In our last blog post, we wrote about the importance of keeping your United Way’s volunteer opportunities in-house so that volunteers can build relationships with United Way rather than your partner agencies. In this blog post, we’re discussing how to build in-house volunteer opportunities.
The Bare Essentials
In order to most effectively strengthen and build relationships, your in-house volunteer opportunities should embody three characteristics.
1. Low Barriers to Access. When a volunteer opportunity has low barriers to access, it is easy for people of all ages and backgrounds to participate in the opportunity. To ensure low barriers to access, there should be no separate training sessions required of participants prior to your volunteer opportunity, and participation in your opportunity should be free to community members. Volunteer opportunities with the lowest barriers to access are family-friendly and open to all ages.
Timing is also important to consider when it comes to maintaining low barriers to access. Whether you offer one, short volunteer opportunity or multiple shifts during a day-long volunteer opportunity, the most successful volunteer opportunities are typically no more than three- to four-hour commitments.
2. Accommodates Large Groups. Without a volunteer coordinator or your own United Way program, you are unlikely to have time to organize more than one or two in-house volunteer opportunities each year. Therefore, it’s important that your opportunities are open to as many volunteers as possible. When choosing your volunteer opportunity, be sure that it can accommodate a large number of people.
3. Aligned with Your United Way’s Work. As we discussed in our last blog post, strengthening and building relationships requires that volunteers develop an emotional connection with your United Way and your work. To build an emotional connection, you must help volunteers understand the local issue their efforts are impacting and what United Way is doing to address that issue. In other words, your volunteer opportunities should align with your United Way’s work. Therefore, if your United Way is not working on childhood literacy, your United Way should not host a volunteer event related to childhood literacy.
The Power of Packaging
While coordinating a large-scale volunteer opportunity that aligns with your United Way’s work and has low barriers to access may seem complicated, it doesn’t have to be. For United Ways that struggle to coordinate in-house volunteer opportunities, packaging events are often a logical solution.
Packaging events are volunteer opportunities where people come together to fill bags, kits, backpacks, or baskets with needed materials that are then distributed within the community. While packaging events can look slightly different in every community, they are wonderful volunteer opportunities for United Ways for several reasons.
1. Accessible to Many. Packaging events do not require in-depth training or significant commitments of volunteer time. Additionally, this type of event is safe and can easily include the whole family, which is appealing to a broader portion of the community. Lastly, packaging events can include many volunteers and rarely last more than three hours.
2. Easy to Align. Packaging events can be easily customized to align with each United Way’s work. If your United Way is working to address homelessness, your packaging event can focus on building kits of personal care items, blankets, socks, or other essentials. If your United Way is working to address early literacy, you can fill backpacks with books and other educational materials. If your United Way is working to address hunger, you can pack sack lunches or holiday meal kits.
If you decide to distribute your packages through another organization, it is critical that you keep the focus of your packaging event on United Way – not the organizations who will receive the packages. Remember, the purpose of an in-house volunteer opportunity is to strengthen volunteers’ connection to your United Way – not partner organizations.
3. Expandable. Packaging events can lend themselves to multiple phases or volunteer opportunities if you’d like to engage your community multiple times. Beyond your day-of packaging event, there are also opportunities for volunteers to hold collection drives to gather the materials that will be used in the packaging event. Additionally, there can be opportunities for volunteers to distribute the completed packages to individuals or organizations within your community.
A great example of what an expanded packaging event can look like comes from United Way of Summit County. United Way of Summit County’s Page It Forward Book Drive uses all three engagement opportunities to get the Akron, Ohio community connected to United Way’s work. The process begins with collecting books through a book drive in the community, followed by a day to sort, clean, and package the books, and a day to distribute the books. What could have been one simple volunteer event became three unique opportunities to strengthen old relationships and build new relationships within the community.
Start Building
If your United Way doesn’t have its own volunteer opportunities, it’s time to stop volunteer matchmaking and start offering your own in-house opportunities. While this may seem like a daunting task, providing opportunities for your donors and community to engage with your United Way is critical to strengthening old relationships and building new relationships.
So, there are no excuses. Set a goal to organize an in-house volunteer event, reach out to other United Ways for advice, and make it happen.