Understand your volunteer needs

This is step one in designing your recruitment strategy

You can't plan recruitment without understanding your recruitment needs. When you go shopping for clothes you generally don't buy a shirt or a blouse simply because you like it, and even when you buy something on impulse your mind considers a range of factors such as can you afford it, does it fit you, will it match other clothes you already have, is it suitable for work?

Before going out to find new volunteers you need to know why you need them and what you want them to do. Do you need people to help run your sections? Run special programmes? Plan a specific event?, or someone to help with admin. or become a member of your group executive?, etc.

The number of people you need will influence how you go about recruiting them.

The following sections will help you identify and prioritise your current volunteer needs.

Designing roles that motivate volunteers

Research shows that organisations that offer a variety of roles and ways to get involved are amongst the most successful to engage with new volunteers. The choice of roles also encourages people to stay involved for longer.

A useful exercise is to meet with members of your scout group leadership and executive teams and encourage them to identify areas of work where they feel under pressure or would find it helpful to have some more assistance. Use the exercise below (and the templates provided), to encourage your team to think about new ways they could work with volunteers.

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A process to help identify new volunteering opportunities...

Keep a log of the tasks you undertake in a week or month (as appropriate)

Mark each task in one of the following ways

***  you could easily designate this to a volunteer(s)

 **   you could do this together with a volunteer(s)

   *   you don't want to, cannot, or it would be inappropriate to, delegate this to a volunteer(s)

 Feel free to leave unmarked any items that you can't decide about for the time being but make sure you return to these at some point soon

 Finally think about those tasks and activities that you could and would like to be done but neither have the time nor resources to achieve. Which of these could volunteers do?

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Using the tasks you have identified you can shape new role or task descriptions.

Another consideration is creating ‘virtual volunteering roles’, which involve carrying out tasks that can be done at home using a volunteer’s own computer. This is becoming more popular and these kinds of roles are attractive to people because they can do them at home and easily fit them around other commitments. There are many obvious roles and tasks that fit this category such as website design, newsletter publication, managing social media, updating badge records or keeping the group's finances.