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CLASS Grants: Working with Volunteers

Volunteers are the heart and soul of any community outreach effort and are key to the success of your CLASS project. These suggestions will help you recruit, motivate, and retain your volunteer team!

Recruiting Volunteers

• Ask!
• Pass around sign-up sheets.
• Promote ownership.
• Show the value of getting involved: Remind potential volunteers that your project will help them become better teachers and make a real contribution.
• Demonstrate incentives (class credit, party, resume building, helping others, etc.).
• Actively seek out underclassmen, who may have more time and a greater need for the experience.
• Ask folks about volunteering during your membership campaign.
• Have a booth that promotes your CLASS project and recruits volunteers at the same time.

Motivating and Retaining Volunteers

• Promote the importance of the project to those it's helping.
• Create ownership. They won't want their project to fail.
• Tap the volunteers' strengths. Get them to make posters if they are good at art or in graphics. Use them for public relations if they are good speakers.
• Conduct occasional group goal-setting and self-motivation sessions, and provide time for volunteers to share their experience with the project.
• Invite inspirational speakers to motivate your volunteers.
• Listen and respond to volunteer input.
• Give them responsibility. Put them in charge of subcommittees, work groups, etc.
• Ask them make progress reports at local meetings.
• Encourage them to recruit more volunteers.
• Let volunteers know they are needed and appreciated.
• Always remember to say, "Thank You!"

Six Ways to Thank Your Volunteers

1. Tell them how much they're needed and appreciated.
2. Throw a party to recognize them.
3. Organize personal "thank-you's" from project benefactors.
4. Develop a system of rewards and promotions.
5. Create opportunities to recognize volunteers, end-of-project goals, and media successes (local paper, college newspaper).
6. Recognize volunteers at your chapter meeting.

Managing Your Project

• Recruit enough volunteers to cover all the work your project is committed to accomplish.
  
  
• Don't overload individual volunteers. Rotate people from task to task to avoid burnout.
  
  
• Make sure volunteer assignments are clear, specific, and manageable. Develop an orientation sheet that lists key information including event schedules, addresses and phone numbers of project coordinators and volunteers, parking locations, bus and transportation schedules.
  
  
• Hold training sessions and insist that every volunteer attend before working on your project. Remember training will be ongoing because there will always be attrition from your volunteer ranks.
  
  
• Make sure working conditions are good and safe and that volunteers know where to get any materials they need to complete their assignments.
  
  
• Provide adequate supervision and feedback. This helps ensure the job gets done correctly and gives volunteers the feeling that what they are doing matters. Incorporate volunteer feedback to further develop the project.