THE IMPORTANCE OF SUPPORTING VOLUNTEERS

The Challenge: A global charity sought to improve the performance of its team of volunteer fundraisers, located throughout North America and the Caribbean.

The Solution: We implemented two-way communications with these important stakeholders and re-tooled the way the charity was training and supporting its volunteers.

- To prepare them to succeed as fundraisers, we brought all volunteers to a central location and trained them over a weekend. Volunteers worked directly with board members and key staff to learn best practices and to begin working as a team.

- To provide ongoing support, we advised agency staff to contact volunteers once a month, to coach and provide help when needed.

- To give volunteers another level of ongoing support, we created a two-page monthly newsletter with fundraising tips, detailed program information and key messages to help them tell the story of the agency as they met with organization members in their community.

- To maintain brand consistency and to convey key messages to the organization's 125,000 members, we created a series of PowerPoint presentations used by volunteers in their communities and presented by board members during the organization's annual convention.