Using Volunteers in Cultivation and Solicitation – Part 3

If we’re going out to find volunteers for our nonprofit’s fundraising effort, where do we go to find them? How do we put together a cultivation and solicitation list of volunteers, which we will call a "C/S List"?

One thing we know is that the Baby Boomers are a hands-on lot, and that they enjoy volunteering for the organizations they support. So one of the first places we might go to find volunteers is to our donor and prospect database. We can search here for basically the same characteristics we might use to find good donors: amount, recency, frequency, size of gift over time and lifetime giving.

So get yourself a sort of those characteristics and see who you come up with. If you’ve got a database of 5,000 donors, you’ll probably get about 250 people out of that. If your database is about 10,000 people, you might come up with 500 possible volunteer prospects.

The next step would be to find out more about those prospects – who they are, where they are in the community, what they like and dislike, who in your organization already knows them, and so forth. Send the list of names to your board members, and/or program volunteers if you have such, and ask them to check off the people they know... even a little bit. Then go to each board member and ask them to tell you about each of the people they checked on the list. Pretty soon you’ll have a thoroughly annotated list and you can then begin to craft individual letters to these people asking them to volunteer for the organization.

Not all people who respond to your letter of invitation will be good material for cultivation and solicitation work. But many will be. Two ingredients might make up a process to find out: an orientation session for volunteers, and personal interviews with candidates for your final “C/S List.” You’ll get other volunteers as well, so it might be best to have some program volunteers along on the orientation so that candidates who are more oriented to program can help out there and you can skim the top of the lot for your list.

But there are other places to go for volunteers as well. For example, the next time you give an interpretive presentation to one of the services clubs in your town, take along some volunteer sheets and hand them out. These will ask for contact and preference information from those who are interested in lending a hand to your nonprofit’s mission. Do the same thing with church groups and any other groups you happen to address on behalf of your charity.

There’s another source, however, and that is to get your board members together around a table and have a volunteer-hunting party. Ask them to reveal their rolodexes and comb through them for their friends and associates who maybe haven’t been giving to your cause but who might do so and volunteer if the board member who knows them did a little cultivation with them. Here you have almost a “mentoring” situation, where each board member selects a half dozen of their peers and agrees to mentor them into volunteering and being effective cultivation and solicitation people. This is perhaps one of the most solid foundations on which to build volunteers for this work, because these volunteers will be coached and mentored as they work in ways that the director of development or executive director could never afford the time and attention to do.

Next level, go to the friends of the organization, widen the pool of people who are looking for volunteers. Keep the same methods as you scan wider horizons. Connect with people, do orientation sessions, conduct individual interviews. Make the process as personal as you can, and provide direction and training along the way.

Next up: what to do with these volunteers when you get them