Volunteer engagement: Asking and rewarding, online and in-person

Event details

Your volunteers are some of your strongest advocates, and when trained effectively, they can amplify your message in powerful ways. This session is designed to help you create structures that set volunteers up for success while motivating them to keep coming back.

Hosts Flore Blondel-Goupil and Michael O’Neil will share practical strategies for recruitment, recognition, and retention. From gamifying engagement to treating volunteers like valued guests, you’ll learn how to build a culture of belonging that inspires volunteers to step into leadership roles, make effective asks on your organization’s behalf, and stay for the long term.

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Your volunteers are powerful messengers, so set them up for success and a long-term relationship with your organization. In this session, you’ll learn how to:

• Set up volunteers for success - Learn to create clear volunteer roles with defined skills, commitment levels, and boundaries, plus how to use NationBuilder's volunteer pages and permission sets for better onboarding
• Recruit effectively with proven techniques - Master relationship-building strategies, assumptive language, hard asks, and psychological techniques like "foot in the door" and "door in the face" to motivate volunteers
• Gamify volunteer engagement - Discover how to use leaderboards and recognition strategies to reward real contributions over time, with examples from successful organizations like Protect Our Winters
• Leverage NationBuilder's volunteer management tools - Get hands-on demonstrations of volunteer pages, tags, paths, permission sets, and social capital filters to streamline your volunteer operations
• Apply the restaurant guest analogy - Understand how to treat volunteers like valued guests by offering a "menu of options" that matches their interests, skills, and availability for maximum retention

What's on the agenda

• Create clear volunteer roles with the right tools and onboarding
• Use relationship-building techniques and assumptive language to recruit effectively
• Gamify engagement with leaderboards and recognition tactics
• Streamline operations with NationBuilder’s volunteer management features
• Apply the “restaurant guest” analogy to match roles with skills and interests