As every manager of a NFP organisation knows only too well, the burning out of volunteers is one of the main problems in the sector. It is important to know that along with the other reasons why volunteers cease to be interested in volunteering, a strong factor is the lack of attention to their efforts. If you want to keep your volunteers happy and motivated, you will have to make them feel special and what better way to do so than acknowledging the difference they make. In this sense, using your blog to celebrate the volunteers at your NFP is a great idea with a lot of potential.
Devoting
a section in your blog to your volunteers is a solution that can help in more
than one way. To start with, your volunteers will be pleased to know that you
are interested in what they have to say and will be happy to share their
opinion, views, feedback or memories. Bearing in mind that most of them may be
too shy or modest to share that they volunteer,
celebrating them in your blog will do that on their behalf and may turn very
useful if a prospective employer makes the effort to google them for more information.
And finally, you will have fresh and unique content for your blog, which will
contribute to your search engine optimisation and will have a positive effect
on the online image of your NFP.
As
to what volunteer-related content you can publish in your blog, that’s the
easiest part of the process. Your volunteers have special events in their
lives, some of them related to the organisation. If an elderly volunteer
celebrates an important anniversary (like a 70th birthday or 10 years
at the organisation), you can celebrate them in a blog post – a short interview
and a nice photo will do. Otherwise, you can start a rubric of the ‘Ask a
volunteer’ and ‘Our volunteers’ feedback’; every week a different person
can share their organisation-related thoughts. Or you can ask around the
company for interesting or funny stories from the volunteers’ experience and
share them with your blog readers.
An
example of an organisation that makes the effort to celebrate their volunteers
in their blog is Oxfam Australia. Navigating in their website, you
can easily reach the section of the blog devoted to the volunteers and there
you can see posts similar to the proposed above: Volunteer Spotlight which
focusses on a person and their story; a
message from one volunteer to another; commemorating the retirement of a
long-term volunteer, etc. As already mentioned, this can only bring benefits to
your organisation and your blog, and it will be a precious little act of
attention for your volunteers.
Having
said all this, if you think it is high time you did something special for your
volunteers, try celebrating them in your blog post. Making them feel special is
sure to invigorate them and make them even more passionate for your NFP’s
activities. And besides this, your prospective volunteers will read positive
stories of current people working with you, which is a great plus for your
recruitment strategy. All in all, blogging about your volunteers is a win-win,
so make sure you try it soon!
