Recently, a dear friend of mine, a professor, recommended one of his students to me. Having just graduated from college, she wanted to explore working in the nonprofit sector. She was willing to volunteer almost full time in order to get some experience and to see if this was a career path she might want to pursue. She was particularly interested in learning more about fundraising. I valued the professor’s judgment, so I sent e-mails to various understaffed social justice organizations that do good work, asking whether they could use someone like this. No one could. “It is a great offer, but I don’t know what I would have her do” was the common theme.

Another friend, recently retired, wanted to become involved in climate change work. Interviewing to volunteer with a few organizations, she expressly said she was willing to help with fundraising. “Do you have rich friends?” one director asked her. “I could raise $2,000 to $5,000 fairly easily” she said. “We are looking for much bigger gifts than that,” he replied.

It is a sad commentary on movement-building organizations when they cannot figure out how to use someone who is smart and willing to start out volunteering nearly full time, or someone else with a lot of experience who is willing to ask friends for money. In asking various friends who are unemployed, underemployed, or retired, I have found these types of responses to be a pattern. Some have even filled out online forms designed for volunteers and received no response.

In the decades preceding the Great Recession, many organizations found it had become difficult to recruit and retain volunteers. There were far fewer traditional volunteers—people who didn’t need to work for pay, as their spouse or partner earned enough for the entire family, and many more people were holding down more than one job and had no “free” time to offer. Since 2007, the situation has changed. The Great Recession that began in 2008 threw hundreds of thousands of people out of work and many have not returned to full-time paid employment. And the Baby Boom generation began to retire, potentially freeing up millions of volunteers over the next couple of decades as Baby Boomers age. Baby Boomers really built the nonprofit sector, and many want to keep active.

Many organizations’ fundraising programs rely too heavily on staff. In very large organizations, the frequent solution to fundraising problems is to “staff up.” But an organization cannot “staff up” to the extent needed to have a truly effective fundraising program, and even if it had the money to hire enough staff, that is not an appropriate use of donations. Organizations need to look back to volunteers to make the wisest use both of donations and of expensive staff time. If an organization needs help managing volunteers, the solution is not to get rid of the volunteers, but to hire a volunteer director or help the development director make that part of his or her skill set. Using your time to mobilize volunteers is far more useful than using your time to do everything yourself, which you can’t do in any case.

To be fair, there are grassroots organizations that have dozens of regular volunteers. They have volunteers who also have full-time jobs, children, and other volunteer commitments. They have volunteers who are on welfare, who are single parents, who travel extensively for work, who are elderly and not able to come to meetings at night, and so on. In other words, some organizations are successful in recruiting and keeping volunteers, which includes using them appropriately so that both the organization and the volunteers feel it is worth the effort. What we need to do is focus on how, rather than how hard it is, to have a successful volunteer program.

In this chapter, I share six things you need to do in order to recruit and keep volunteers who are willing to help with fundraising. As you will see, these actions are not completely dissimilar to what you need to do to recruit and keep donors, and they are parallel to what is required to recruit and keep good board members (who, in some ways, are the ultimate volunteers).

INVITE PEOPLE TO PARTICIPATE IN FUNDRAISING

Many development directors lament that no one volunteers to do fundraising. From this, they conclude that no one wants to, but this is often not the case. People have no idea of the range of tasks and skills involved in fundraising, and how many of these skills they actually possess. Many fundraising volunteers have told me that, prior to being on the fundraising committee or involved in some fundraising activity, they thought fundraising would involve writing proposals, about which they knew nothing, or would require asking their own friends for money who, they would explain, couldn’t give thousands of dollars. So they concluded there was no way for them to be usefully involved in fundraising.

There are dozens of behind-the-scenes tasks that volunteers can do. Paid fundraising staff need only to observe their own work; when they see that they are doing something that a reasonably intelligent person could do with a little bit of training, they should ask: “Why am I doing this when a volunteer could be taking it on?” Save yourself for work that is too detailed, too complicated, or that actually does require experience and skill, and move all other tasks off to board members and other volunteers.

The first step, then, is to describe fundraising in all its variety, and to show volunteers that they could successfully complete a number of development tasks. Thank-you notes, thank-you calls, prospect research, data entry, and maintaining social media accounts are all examples of behind-the-scenes work that do not require asking anyone for money. Create a “Wanted” column on your website that describes specific needs and ask people to contact you. Put an occasional column in your newsletter that asks people to become involved in fundraising. Make it sound fun and interesting. And then answer people who contact you!

Some people will be interested in more difficult tasks or in working with a team. Ask those people to join a committee with a specific focus. Invite them to be involved in fundraising strategies that have a goal and are time-limited, and make sure you provide appropriate guidance and training. Major gift campaigns, house party programs, and special events are all examples of such activities.

Above all else, volunteers want to feel useful, and there is no more useful place than fundraising.

TAKE THE TIME NECESSARY TO ORIENT VOLUNTEERS TO YOUR FUNDRAISING PROGRAM

A two-hour in-service orientation in which you go over your budget, your fundraising goals, and your progress to date will set a good example of transparency and allow people to ask questions they have or voice concerns. Such a meeting can also educate your volunteers about the context in which your fundraising plan is developed, as described in Chapter One, including how many nonprofits there are, where money for nonprofits comes from, who gives that money away, and so on. This in-service meeting should focus particularly on your case statement; have volunteers practice describing your organization to each other and answering questions about it.

Volunteers need to feel “in the know,” and they need to feel competent with regard to describing mission, goals, and objectives of the organization. We often think a volunteer is unwilling to ask for money when, in fact, he or she may feel insecure about discussing the organization. Volunteers have often told me: “I didn’t ask for the money because I thought I might do more harm than good in trying to explain what the organization is doing, and I didn’t want to look bad by not knowing all the complications of the work.”

HELP EACH VOLUNTEER CHOOSE THE FUNDRAISING STRATEGIES HE OR SHE WILL FEEL MOST COMFORTABLE USING

By allowing volunteers to choose the work they will do, you play to their strengths. In The Accidental Fundraiser, Stephanie Roth and Mimi Ho describe three broad categories of activities that volunteers will prefer, depending on their personality and confidence: entertaining, selling, and asking. Those who prefer to raise money by entertaining happily host house parties and are good at organizing other special events. They know how to make people feel welcomed, and they are good at thinking through what would be fun or interesting for a group of people. These volunteers often like to work in groups; you will often find them on special event committees.

People who prefer to sell things are excellent people to staff a booth selling t-shirts, mugs, books, or other items that your organization produces or distributes. They will sell products to friends, neighbors, and family, and they can be relied on to sell tickets to events. However, they are less willing to ask for money directly. The third type of activity, direct asking, engages fewer people. People in this group are likely to have a little more experience with fundraising and they have the tolerance to be turned down, knowing that if they ask enough people they will get the money the organization needs. Many of these people are or have been in sales or real estate and have overcome their own barriers to asking (see Chapter Eight). Some of them come from countries where taboos about money are not as strong as in the United States. Both the sellers and the direct askers have stopped taking rejection personally.

Of course, some people are good at all three approaches, and a minority of volunteers are not comfortable with any strategy that requires talking to people about money. This group can nonetheless be put to work doing anything that you need in fundraising that does not require talking to people about money directly: writing thank-you notes and the like.

Paid staff should as much as possible focus on doing things that an organization really could not expect a volunteer to do. Tasks that require technical knowledge, that are tremendously time-consuming, that involve directing other people, or that involve a lot of sequencing should take up the bulk of a staff person’s time.

REMEMBER THAT GOOD ENOUGH IS GOOD ENOUGH

Staff-volunteer tension can come about when a staff person wants the job done perfectly—according to her or his own definition of perfect. For example, in a small nonprofit, two volunteers took on the task of writing and sending the e-newsletter, scheduled to go out on the third Tuesday of each month. Over a period of six months, three newsletters went out on time and three went out two days late. Some of the newsletters had a few typos. These lapses were too much for the staff person, and she took the job back from the volunteers. If the volunteers had commonly been a week late with the newsletter and if it were riddled with typos each time, her action would have been justified. But these volunteers were for the most part both reliable and thorough. Far too often in dealing with volunteers, the best becomes the enemy of the good.

SHOW GENUINE AND FREQUENT APPRECIATION

Remember United Farm Workers’ Cesar Chavez’s dictum for organizing: “People are far more appreciative of what they do for you than of what you do for them.” Thank them often. Thank-you notes, thank-you calls, and brief mentions at meetings go a long way. Flowers, plaques, and ribbons are fine, but they are not as important as the occasional grateful word or an invitation to join the staff for pizza or to come to a board meeting.

GIVE VOLUNTEERS TIME OFF

People need time off for good behavior. Many volunteer fundraisers have found that their reward for doing their work well is more work. “Ruby, you did such a great job with the auction. You are a natural! Once you catch your breath, do you think you could chair the membership drive?” Such a comment is a sure way to guarantee that Ruby will run, not walk, away from your organization as soon as she can.

Make sure that, unless any one volunteer insists otherwise, volunteers have at least two or three months between intense fundraising activities and that they are encouraged to become involved in other aspects of the organization as well that may require less intensive concentration.

Keep in mind, then, that what may be most efficient for getting a job done thoroughly—excellent staff people doing every piece of work to their satisfaction— is rarely most effective for building an organization and developing new leadership. As you concentrate on working with your volunteers, remember that you are ultimately trying to ensure that the organization will be able to continue, even as key people move on to other things. By keeping your eye on the prize of longevity and stability of the organization, you will structure your volunteer involvement activities much differently, and you will find that there are plenty of people who want to be active, engaged volunteers.