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Persistence and patience when recruiting volunteers

Don’t panic if you are just starting out and recruitment of volunteers appears to be taking a lot of time and effort. It will be worth it.

Passionate advocacy may not always attract the volunteers that are so badly needed – but persistence and creativity will eventually pay off. Volunteering is deeply engrained in the British psyche - one in seven of the population is already a volunteer so it is not a new idea.

It's worth bearing in mind that asking a busy person may be more likely to result in a new volunteer than finding someone who has not previously volunteered.

Online methods of recruitment can be especially attractive to younger people. 

Barriers to volunteering

Understand what prevents people from volunteering some of their spare time to scouting is really important. Answers to these questions should not come from your own assumptions but from concrete facts based on research. You can find this out by asking people who do not show any interested in helping out as well as collecting information from any of your team that may decide to stand down from their role. Doing this will help you identify the barriers to getting involved.

These will be different from group to group, but will likely include:

  • the opportunity to take part in other alternative activities

  • lack of time

  • lack of knowledge about the scouting and our programme

  • a negative image of scouting

  • having heard negative experiences from others

  • scouting being too expensive or perceived as too expensive

  • scouting being too exclusive or perceived as too exclusive

  • scouting activities are too far away from their homes

Once you identify the most frequent and biggest barriers, you will be able to develop a recruitment strategy to work around them. For example, sometimes just changing the time of meetings so that they do not conflict with other activities allows people to volunteer. Knowing exactly what the most recurring and impactful reasons are for people not joining or leaving will allow you to make the right changes in the way you deliver scouting.