by Jayne Cravens

How Volunteers Can Help With Fundraising Activities

10 Ideas

All employees at a nonprofit should be looking for ways volunteers can be involved in their work. Same for lead volunteers - those who have an ongoing role with your program. Involving volunteers in your organization's activities shows the community that you want them to be involved with your organization on a deeper level than just making financial donations and it shows you value community investment. It can also connect you with services and resources you could not access otherwise. It helps promote your organization as one that is transparent and welcoming. Yes, it can also mean that a task can take longer than if you just did it yourself, and volunteer involvement does NOT always save money - in fact, in terms of staff oversight, it can be expensive for an organization to involve volunteers. But the benefits far, far outweigh the negatives.

There are a variety of ways of volunteers can help nonprofits in their communications, outreach and marketing activities. Here are some ideas (and I've involved volunteers in MOST of these activities myself when working at nonprofits):

Share your social media messages with their own networks. Your board of directors should be doing this regularly, but invite ALL of your current volunteers to do this. Every social media message is a fundraising message (and a volunteer recruitment message and an awareness-building message). They don't have to share every message, of course (nor should they), but their sharing of such shows their endorsement and can help encourage their friends to give.
Staff a fundraising event: help organize the space beforehand, greet people as they arrive, thank people for coming, help clean up afterwards, etc.
Visit a local library and compile lists of the area's largest employers and the largest corporations and businesses in the area by budget and by number of employees (online searches for this information tend to generate results that are behind paywalls). You can then use this information to think about to target these companies in your fundraising activities.
Using Internet searches, look for news articles and blogs from the last five years about employees from a company engaged in some kind of volunteering effort in your area. Consider targeting that company for a group volunteering event at or through your organization; very often, these companies will also donate financially (and you should feel free to ask them for a donation in association with a group volunteering effort at your organization, to offset the costs to your organization for arranging such).
Make or update a list of contact information for a specific audience you are trying to reach: all the communities of faith (churches, temples, mosques) in one zip code, all of the social groups in your area (Rotary, Kiwanis, Optimist, etc.), all of the computer science faculty at a nearby college or university, all of the nonprofits focused on clean water issues in a state, etc.
Help to staff an information table or booth at an event (but remember that they must be trained for to appropriately represent your nonprofit). Remember: every communications activity, every outreach activity, is also a fundraising activity!
Research a topic you need to write about, or double check all of the resources you've gathered using an AI tool, to confirm they are accurate and not hallucinated.
Translate fundraising-related text from English to another language, or editing the translation work of others, or editing a translation you created using an online tool, to assure it's accurate and appropriate.&
Help to prepare a mass mailing (folding brochures or cards, putting items in envelopes, putting address labels on envelopes, etc.).
Be a part of a fundraising campaign, asking their contacts to donate to your organization. This can be as simple as giving all volunteers a graphic and text that solicits donations for your organization and asking them to each post it to their own social media accounts. This can be volunteers hosting a house party for friends, and having a representative from your organization talk about your programs and then ask for donations. This can be your board of directors being trained to call at least five friends and asking them to donate.

Have more ideas? Share them here.

Remember that, before you recruit for any of these roles, you need to have the expectations of the role IN WRITING. Here's advice on how to write a volunteer role description that will screen out people who wouldn't be appropriate, will screen in the best candidates, and will better ensure success (because expectations will be CLEAR).

Also, volunteers will need to be trained about what is, and is not, appropriate to say when talking about the organization and why it needs funding.

Also see:

Examples of online volunteering roles and activities (virtual volunteering).
The most comprehensive list anywhere.
How Volunteers Can Help With Communications, Outreach & Marketing.
Also WHY it's so important to have them in these roles.
How Volunteers Can Support the Person In Charge of Volunteer Engagement
The person in charge of volunteer engagement at a nonprofit, NGO, charity, school or other civil society organization or mission-based program primarily recruits and manages volunteers that are supporting other staff: the program staff, for instance, may need mentors for clients or people to clean up a public space or to foster animals. The fundraising staff may need volunteers to staff a donor event. But the person in charge of volunteer engagement should also be thinking about how volunteers can help with volunteer engagement - with recruitment, onboarding, training, support and recognition of volunteers. This resource provides information on how and why to do that
Short-term Assignments for Tech Volunteers
There are a variety of ways for mission-based organizations to involve volunteers to help with short-term projects relating to computers and the Internet, and short-term assignments are what are sought after most by potential "tech" volunteers. But there is a disconnect: most organizations have trouble identifying such short-term projects. This is a list of short-term projects for "tech" volunteers -- assignments that might takes days, weeks or just a couple of months to complete.
One(-ish) Day "Tech" Activities for Volunteers
Volunteers are getting together for intense, one-day events, or events of just a few days, to build web pages, to write code, to edit Wikipedia pages, and more. These are gatherings of onsite volunteers, where everyone is in one location, together, to do an online-related project in one day, or a few days. It's a form of episodic volunteering, because volunteers don't have to make an ongoing commitment - they can come to the event, contribute their services, and then leave and never volunteer again. Because computers are involved, these events are sometimes called hackathons, even if coding isn't involved. This page provides advice on how to put together a one-day event, or just-a-few-days-of activity, for a group of tech volunteers onsite, working together, for a nonprofit, non-governmental organization (NGO), community-focused government program, school or other mission-based organization - or association of such.
Creating One-Time, Short-Term Group Volunteering Activities
Details on not just what groups of volunteers can do in a two-hour, half-day or all-day event, but also just how much an organization or program will need to do to prepare a site for group volunteering. It's an expensive, time-consuming endeavor - are you ready? Is it worth it?
Make All Volunteering as Accessible as Possible: advantages for your program & how to do it

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