How-to Guide: Recruit and Retain Strong Volunteers
Clickable Table of Contents:
Introduction
Bonded, organically-growing, diverse teams are best-suited to scaling and sustaining the kind of quality work that makes a real impact on a close race. There is no shortcut to building such teams but there are absolutely best practices, norms, and orientations you can easily adopt to get there. While it takes time, this is what Sister District does best. We grow teams election cycle after election cycle to create lasting Democratic infrastructure, and welcome more people into our progressive organizing community
Recruitment – building capacity for increasing impact – along with authentic face-to-face voter contact is our best tactic to winning campaigns. Continuous improvement in the area of growth is key to avoiding leader burnout and maintaining healthy teams. Try making creativity and effort toward growth visible. Celebrate it. Communicate about and prioritize growth such that it functions in your culture as a source of pride.
Use this guide to learn the best practices to build a team of volunteers and leaders and keep that team happy, engaged, and growing.
Recruitment
Recruitment Targeting
The first step to recruiting new volunteers is to figure out where to target that outreach. Of course we want anyone and everyone to be involved with Sister District. But we don’t necessarily have time for that. We want to focus our recruitment efforts on groups that we know will be most likely to get involved. Starting with…
Your Friends and Family: The best people you can get involved are the folks that are easiest to reach and you already have a strong relationship with. First, you know they will answer your call — or maybe you see them in person every day! Which can be half the battle of recruiting new volunteers. You can craft your recruitment proposition to be tailored to their interests…or you can call in a favor 😉 When you bring a friend, partner, family member with you to volunteer activities, you have just doubled your impact. That’s a big return for a small effort.
Active Volunteers: The hottest (non-family/friend) volunteer leads are people you have already engaged with this year. These are people who know the importance of our work, want to be involved, and are ready to go. Reshift every single volunteer.
The best way to grow your team is to have the same folks come back week after week, while you also add new volunteers. Make sure your volunteers are signed up for the next event before they leave. It’s easier to get them shifted when they are right in front of you instead of trying to call, text, or email them later.
Use the social pressure of the event to get volunteers signed up again. Whether on Zoom or in person, ask your volunteers when you will see them again and if they say “I don’t know,” give them the next meeting time and ask if they can come.
Use Mobilize event sign-ups and/or Action Network volunteer tags to pull a list of folks recently involved. In Fall 2024, a Sister District Organizing Manager pulled a list of everyone that had completed a National Phonebank and wasn’t scheduled for a GOTV shift and recruited them to come back. Reach out to your Organizing Manager to help get your list of most active volunteers.
Brand New Volunteers: Brand new volunteers find Sister District online and through social media every day. When new volunteers sign up for your team’s list, reach out right away and welcome them to the community! They signed up because they want to be involved, so find the right opportunities for them. It’s important to have a New Member Engagement role on your team to reach out to new sign-ups. You’ll introduce yourself, provide them with relevant information, assess their interests, and get them plugged in. Try to get every person that you have this conversation with to commit to attending at least one event.
Inactive Volunteers: Reach back out to folks who have volunteered with you in the past. You already have a personal connection with them and a personal touch can help reignite their motivation. Reach out to your Organizing Department Staffer to get help pulling a list of past volunteers from Action Network and/or Mobilize.
Methods
There are three main tools we use to recruit new volunteers and grow our teams. The most important element across all three to remember is that consistent communication is key to keeping volunteers informed and engaged.
Email: Email is a great way to keep your volunteers informed about all the upcoming events and activities your team is hosting. Use weekly newsletters to maintain consistent communication about efforts, and specific “Call to Action” emails to catch volunteers attention and highlight important efforts or special events. Check out the How To Guide: Email Editor for a detailed outline of how to build an effective email program.
Recruitment Calls: Phone calls are the most effective way to engage and recruit volunteers by personally inviting them to join your team’s activities. Each call helps volunteers know and build relationships with their team leaders, increasing the sense of community, and helping the volunteer know they are individually valued and wanted. This builds a layer of trust and familiarity that lowers the barriers and hesitations to entry. Use the Volunteer Recruitment By Phone Guide to get started setting up your recruitment calling program.
Scale to Win: Text recruitment can be an easy way to catch the attention of potential volunteers. Use Scale to Win to invite volunteers to special events like big fundraisers, weekends of action, and important phonebanks. Reach out to your Organizing Manager to learn more about using this system.
Best Practices: Making A Strong Recruitment Ask
To start, what is a “recruitment ask?” A recruitment ask, or just “ask” for short, is how organizers indicate inviting someone to an event, fundraiser, phonebank, or otherwise engaging them in our community.
There are a few key elements to making a strong recruitment ask to a volunteer. Recruitment asks should be: urgent and specific, personal, and layered. Let’s look at each of these elements:
Urgent and Specific: Volunteers, like all of us, are very busy. Our recruitment asks should include the specific information for when, where, and how volunteers can get involved and emphasize the urgency of why we need their support now.
For example: “We are calling voters for Candidate X’s to make sure supporters have a plan to vote next Tuesday. We know this race will be won by reaching every voter we can and making sure they turnout. We’ll be calling over Zoom from 5:00pm-7pm ET this Wednesday, can you join us?”
Personal: The best way to develop committed volunteers is by helping each volunteer find their own personal motivation to be involved. Is there an issue they are particularly passionate about? Are they looking to be a part of a community that is fighting for progressive change?
The reasons we do this work are three-dimensional but our asks are often two-dimensional. “Will you canvass with us on Saturday?” is two-dimensional. As you connect, listen and learn, you can shape your invitations in three-dimensions. Chances are that sharing how doing this has been fun/helpful/valuable for you will help someone see how it can be so for them. Check out this article on “Getting to a person’s why” for some prompting questions to ask to guide these conversations.
“Share, Don’t Tell”: Share your own personal stories for why you got involved or how you’ve enjoyed your experiences volunteering so far. There is great beauty and adventure to be found in doing this work. Show others what you’ve found and help them envision what they too can expect to find. For example, in recruiting someone to a phonebank: “I talked to a woman last week who was going to be out of town on Election Day. She forgot to request an absentee ballot so I helped her find an early vote location to vote early in person before she leaves.”
Layered: Our volunteer asks should be layered in two ways: addressing any hesitancy a volunteer may have and providing secondary, and tertiary options to get involved. Often, volunteers won’t say yes to our initial ask. It’s important to ask follow up questions to understand where they are coming from so that we provide the best opportunities to stay involved! There are usually two reasons why volunteers say no: 1) They have fears or hesitancy about the specific event (often phonebanking or canvassing) 2) They aren’t available at the time we offered. We can find what works best for our volunteers.
Addressing hesitancy: there can be a lot of misinformation and misconceptions about what volunteering for a campaign entails. If we can correct these notions we can open up an opportunity to a volunteer who otherwise thought volunteering was not right for them! Here are a few common fears and how we can disarm them:
- “I don’t want to argue with people” – me neither! The campaign doesn’t either! They want to only send us to engage and learn about voters who will likely vote our way.
- “I’m no expert, I wouldn’t be good” – I’m also not an expert! We will start with a training, you’ll have a script, and most often we’re just gathering important information by asking questions. Also, if we do talk with someone who is undecided or not sure they want to vote, we have the script and LISTEN and speak from the heart – this is more effective than facts and figures anyway.
If the volunteer still isn’t interested in the first ask after addressing these hesitations, then we can layer our asks with other opportunities for them to be involved in our community. At Sister District, there is a place for everyone.
Always have a primary, secondary, and tertiary ask you can make for volunteers to either attend the next event, donate, write postcards, or help out on the leadership team.
Still getting no’s? Our final layer is just to get the volunteer information to potentially act on later: “I understand, we’ll have lots of opportunities to get involved in the future, whatever that looks like for you.”
When volunteers are busy: If volunteers are busy now, or can’t make the date and time we’ve offered, have other options available! Can they join the phonebank or canvass next week? Come to the next event? Donate? Write postcards? Help the leadership team? Use your conversation to find what skills and time commitment they have and where they can best fit into our team.
The last key element of layered asks is asking big! If a volunteer says yes, great! Keep going and see how else they can and want to be involved. We are making these asks to win so don’t be shy: don’t settle for 1 shift when you could have 5. Ask the volunteer to sign up for a recurring shift each week, see if they are interested in helping lead the event, have them to commit to bringing a friend.
Volunteer Retention (aka How to Keep People Coming Back)
So you’ve recruited these amazing new volunteers, congratulations! Now, how do you get them to stay involved? We like to say that “volunteers come for the cause and stay for the company.”
There are a few key ways to encourage volunteers to keep coming back for more. We’ll get to that, but first, we need to make sure they show up! Between recruiting volunteers and building community at your events, confirmation calls and texts are an important step towards increasing attendance at in-person or virtual events.
Confirmation Calls
Confirmation calls are the calls that we make to all registrants in advance of an event, to remind volunteers of the details of the event and confirm their attendance. Confirm calls, or “confirms” are also a great way to remind volunteers of their commitment, show them they are individually valued, and let them know you’re excited for their presence at the event. They’re a great way to lay the groundwork for strong relationship-building, and help volunteers feel comfortable joining, especially if it’s their first time.
Confirms also help answer last-minute questions, clarify instructions, and potentially settle an uneasiness that can help your event run smoother. If a volunteer isn’t able to answer the phone, it’s also a good idea to leave a brief voicemail message and/or follow up via text message.
Use confirm calls to reiterate the location (Zoom or physical address), time and date, what volunteers should bring (if anything), and anything else they can do to prepare.
If the volunteer can no longer make it, use the opportunity to “reshift” the volunteer– encourage them to register for a future event. It’s much easier to get them signed up in the moment than to try to reach them again later, when they might not be available.
For text reminders, check out the How-to Guide: Text Reminders for more details. For more information about confirms or assistance with making confirmation calls, please contact your Organizing Department staffer.
Training
Training is an essential part of preparing your volunteers for success. If they are first-timers, training is also a great way to welcome them into your volunteer community, and help them feel like part of the team.
Training helps to frame each volunteer’s first impression of your team, and sets their expectations for their action and the organization. A clear, concise training will reassure the volunteer that their time will be effective and well-spent. Critically, it also helps us create a strong foundation so that we may avoid frustrations or misunderstandings down the road.
We want every volunteer to understand the value they bring to our campaigns when they choose to volunteer. Trainings should outline not only the “what” and “how” of a particular volunteer activity, but why it supports the campaigns. Drawing that connection between their work and how it directly impacts the election is key to creating happy volunteers.
Set Expectations and Define Success: Training allows us to outline expectations and define success for our volunteers. For example, if a phonebanker expects to reach every single voter they call, they are going to be unhappy when that isn’t the case. When we outline that a 10% contact rate is normal, expected part of phonebanking, they will reframe how their experience should feel. By helping a volunteer broaden and redefine (i.e. success also means finding wrong numbers and non-supporters) their perception of success, they will emerge feeling much more effective. This reframing builds volunteers’ resilience, and helps them stay joyful, even on days with low contact rates.
They are also more likely to return because they know their time was well spent!
Be Patient: Every volunteer comes from a different background, and some may struggle more with technology like Zoom or our phonebanking software. Don’t let technology be a barrier to participation! We encourage you to have someone at your event who is prepared to provide tech support to those who need a little extra time to learn the system. If you’re using Zoom, consider sending a leader to a breakout room with the volunteer. Depending on capacity, this person can also be a staffer or Organizing Fellow. For more information on tech support during your phonebank or at other events, please contact your Organizing Department staffer.
Community Building & Developing Leaders
Community building is one of our favorite parts of organizing. We create fun, welcoming, and creative communities bound by a passion for activism and a commitment to progress. There are a few key elements to keeping our communities strong and vibrant:
Trainers and Greeters: Whether meeting over Zoom or in person, always have someone designated to welcome new and returning volunteers alike. Have an icebreaker question to ask and have volunteers respond in person or in the chat. Allow people a few minutes to share stories and connect before jumping in. For new volunteers, reassure them that you will provide training and answer questions shortly.
Get Creative! Change up the theme and style of your events to keep volunteers engaged. Have fun and get silly with it and others will too! Sister District New York City once had a well attended “Prince”-themed phonebank! Add prizes or competitions to provide incentives for participation. Meeting in person? Everyone loves snacks.
Want to spice up your phonebank? Try a phonebank battle! Check out the Phonebank Battle Case Study for how our chapters in Portland and the East Bay increased volunteer engagement and had a ton of fun through their phonebank battle.
Track & Celebrate Progress: Make sure volunteers know what success looks like, and have a system to capture successes (e.g. our phonebank dial tally forms) so you can track progress and keep volunteers updated on phonebanking, texting, postcarding, or fundraising efforts. Celebrate individuals and the collective publicly – on calls (shout out individuals, or have people tell their success stories), in group emails, in your team newsletters, on social media, etc. There are so many ways to do this – you could create a goal thermometer for dollars, doors, or dials, make a leader board and turn it into a friendly competition, or give out prizes!
Check out an example Phonebank Leader newsletter here and an example wrap email to Sister District National Phonebank volunteers here.
Build Personal Relationships: Our Sister District community supports not only our candidates, but also each other. Ask how your volunteers are doing. Remember their names. Listen, share, listen, share, and listen some more. Start with deepening your existing connections and set about making new ones.
Consider one-on-ones: these are individual meetings between a volunteer leader and a volunteer. Ask them about themselves, why they got involved, share about you, explain how this has been an enjoyable experience for you. These meetings can break the ice and make the new person feel more comfortable and feel that they have an ally, someone they can come to.
Read more about SD Sacramento’s “Phonomonal Phonebankers”: A group of phonebankers that come back week after week and year after year not only because they love the work, but especially because they love strong connections and community they built together.
Turn Volunteers into Recruiters: Scale your program by turning existing volunteers into volunteer recruiters. If your callers are looking for something to do before candidate endorsements are live, have them call through a list of past phonebankers to recruit callers for the new year, or encourage them to call through their contact lists. Ask new or current volunteers to bring a friend to the next event. It will help them feel more comfortable to have someone they know and can share the experience with.
In 2021, National Phonebanker Kari joined her first phonebank with Sister District and enjoyed the experience so much she invited a few friends to join her the next time around! By recruiting a few friends she was able to double, even triple, her impact on the races in Virginia. Go Kari!
Lead by example: In both volunteer activities and recruiting new volunteers, your team will take notes from you and match your energy. On a phonebank? If they see you focused on dialing voters, they will focus too. Did you bring a friend, partner, or family member to the last meeting? It will encourage them to reach out to their networks and bring friends too. Share your stories, be active, and others will follow suit. You set the tone!
Debrief and Reshift Volunteers: At the end of an event, have everyone share their highs and lows from the activity. This is a good way to build camaraderie, even if it’s commiserating about a low contact rate or rude voter. It is a good team-building opportunity and an important time for others to share what worked well for them. It also gives you the opportunity to address any final questions or concerns. If you can’t get a whole team to do this, it’s still a good activity to do individually with a volunteer, which will help you build a relationship with them and reassure their concerns.
Then of course, make sure each volunteer is signed up to come back again. Use the community at the meeting to get folks to sign on again. If using Zoom, ask people to put in the chat when they are joining next, or individually call on volunteers to make sure they have the next date in their calendar. The hardest request to turn down is one in person.
Check out our Hard Ask Memo for tips and tricks on how to best ask volunteers to return and get them to say YES. (hint: do you want oatmeal or cereal for breakfast?)
Follow up and thank volunteers: Send a quick text to volunteers the next day thanking them for joining and encouraging them to come back again soon. A quick “Hey _____, it was so great to see you at the event last night! Thanks so much for joining us and I can’t wait to see you again soon. Will you be there next week?” can go a long way to making a volunteer feel the warm welcome and their value in our community.
Read this Case Study from the National Phonebank Program. Sister District GOTV Fellows helped send follow-up and thank you messages to volunteers to create a strong phonebanking community.
Develop New Leaders by “Laddering Up”: If you’ve never heard the term “Ladder of Engagement,” it’s used to describe how we can help elevate first time volunteers or long-time activists into positions with more responsibility– for example, encouraging that repeat donor to host a house party fundraiser.
From supporter, to volunteer, to volunteer leader, we always want to move people “up the ladder” when we can. Compliment and reassure your volunteers that they are valuable members of the team. Ask them if they can take on more responsibility. It doesn’t have to be a big role, anything from event cohost, to trainer, to volunteer leader. Giving volunteers more responsibility only reaffirms their commitment, makes it more likely they become a recurring volunteer, helps your team grow even stronger, and encourages sustainability.
It’s all about the relationship you build and the extent to which you can empower your volunteer within the boundaries of their capacity, preferences, talents, and intrinsic motivations. Here is an example from within our community:
- In 2020, our Portland phonebank leader reached out personally to invite three of his most frequent phonebankers to “co-host” his phonebanks. They would have the title of Co-Host, which created good feelings and helped the phonebankers feel valued. He was clear about what they’d do: help answer questions and encourage phonebankers in the Zoom chat, help with tech support if any phonebankers had trouble with the technology, etc. One of those co-hosts eventually became a Host of her own phonebank, giving them a second weekly option. Two of the other Co-Hosts were able to lead the Portland phonebanks when our host was on vacation. He gave them shout-outs on the phonebanks themselves and in his phonebank report emails. One of the Co-Hosts ended up taking over his weekly emails to phonebankers!
Consider the route you yourself took to get to your role with Sister District. Who encouraged you? How did you make your way? What was your particular journey up the Ladder of Engagement? Think about what went well, what worked for you, and what could be improved. Pro tip: Offer a title to inspire/entice someone to take on a task or more responsibility. People like titles and positions, they help us feel valuable. A title also clarifies an organizer’s particular function.
Check out the Tips for Leadership Development article to learn more about escalating potential team leaders and how to grow a stronger team.
That’s a wrap! You now have a strong, loving, committed team of volunteers and leaders and have scaled your impact.
