If your organization has a thriving volunteer program, you’ve probably brainstormed ways to channel all that enthusiasm into other forms of support. Nonprofits and associations often succeed in one area of support or supporter engagement while having room for improvement in others. Finding the perfect balance between volunteer and member engagement is a major challenge for many organizations.
There are a few tried-and-true methods for encouraging your volunteers to become or regularly participate as members. These methods double as general best practices for maintaining sustainable engagement strategies across all of your programs.
In this guide, we’ll explore top tips for increasing member engagement, improving all of your supporters’ experiences, and helping members and volunteers see how their support fits into your mission.
Use integrated management tools for a bigger picture
Integrating your technology means ensuring all your tools speak the same language. This allows your organization to streamline tasks like volunteer engagement and membership management. This tip can benefit nearly every aspect of your operations. Even the smallest associations and nonprofits rely on digital tools, databases, and services, and the number and complexity will generally increase as the organization grows.
Select a powerful CRM to build a strong foundation. For example, Salesforce provides access to a wide range of additional apps and features already designed to work seamlessly on its platform.
To take full advantage of Salesforce, we recommend choosing a Salesforce partner to help you navigate implementation, system customization and configuration, and long-term planning and scalability. This partner will help you leverage advantages like:
- Automatic updates to your database and member profiles with new engagement data
- Direct access to your data
- Member, donor, and volunteer profiles with contact details and full engagement histories
- Easy access to analytics dashboards to examine engagement and performance
- Automated renewal notices, dues processing, and other logistical tasks
Most importantly, look for a cloud-based membership management software built to work directly with your database. This helps unify your efforts and keeps your data stored on one central platform. Fonteva’s AMS platform is Salesforce-native, meaning that your membership data will be consolidated, ensuring no insights about either your volunteers or members fall through the cracks.
Host engaging events for members
Using integrated database, membership, and event software makes managing your events in Salesforce easy. Because information about all of your supporters is stored in the same easy-to-access database, you’ll know what types of events will be most engaging for both members and interested volunteers.
Nonprofits with membership programs can engage volunteers and allow them to experience the perks of being a member with the following event ideas:
- Host unique thank-you events just for members. Be sure to invite a few of your most devoted volunteers who are good prospects for membership upgrades.
- Offer temporary promotions to volunteers. Provide one-time discounted or free event tickets, priority parking, or early access to registration to volunteers, allowing them to “sample” your membership benefits.
- Create unique rewards and events just for member-volunteers. This level of support and engagement requires extra thanks, which can motivate others to get involved in new ways. For example, allow these supporters to stack volunteer and member discounts on merchandise.
These events are also an excellent opportunity to steward your relationships with members by showing appreciation for and rewarding their support. This shows volunteers that you value your members and encourages current members to renew.
Promote corporate philanthropy options
Corporate philanthropy refers to the various ways that a business promotes social good. These initiatives support nonprofits through financial gifts, in-kind donations, volunteering programs, and more.
For instance, Fionta participates in Pledge 1%, a popular global initiative to hardwire philanthropy into corporate policy. There are several kinds of corporate philanthropy, with some of the most common programs being:
- Matching gifts are financial donations businesses give to match employees’ contributions to nonprofit organizations. If an employee donates $50, the business will match the gift by donating another $50 to the organization.
- In-kind donations or non-financial gifts of goods or services. For example, a consulting firm may offer pro-bono strategic planning services.
- Volunteer grants, which are also called Dollars for Doers, are when employees match the time an employee spends volunteering with a financial donation.
- Volunteer time off (VTO) refers to paid time off that employees can use to volunteer for charitable causes.
Encouraging your supporters to take advantage of their employer’s corporate philanthropy program can deepen your relationship with donors who increase their impact with matching gifts and provide a concrete goal for a time commitment for volunteers who want to boost their impact on your work.
These benefits are particularly important if you want to engage more volunteers with your membership program. There are often considerable overlaps between an organization’s groups of volunteers, members, and donors.
A comprehensive corporate philanthropy strategy can harness volunteer support, boost your revenue, maximize the impact of your volunteers and members, and encourage all of them to get more involved. Get started by exploring 360MatchPro’s list of the top volunteer grant companies to see if any of your supporters may be eligible.
Conduct smarter marketing campaigns
As you work to attract more of your volunteers to join your membership program, target your marketing strategies to directly support this goal. This should be fairly simple if you’re already using a suite of integrated tools on a platform like Salesforce.
There are many techniques you can use to encourage volunteers to upgrade, including:
- Leveraging your data. Segment your volunteers to create more targeted campaigns that appeal to each group’s preferences, interests, and motivations. For example, create segments based on how long volunteers have worked with your organization and customize your messages accordingly. Long-term volunteers may be ready to take the next step by becoming a member, while newer volunteers might want to understand the basics of your membership program.
- Creating personalized experiences. With the right technology, your organization can create unique website user experiences for volunteers who engage with your membership program. For instance, Nonprofit Cloud provides access to OmniStudio, which your nonprofit can use to create custom, guided online user experiences. In this case, you might create a truncated version of your membership sign-up process for volunteers since you already have their information.
- Use email automation tools. These tools allow you to identify the best recipients and timing for sending your appeals. Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (formerly Pardot) is a leader in this space. Its features allow you to gain insights into your volunteers’ interactions with your communications, which you can use to better segment and personalize your mailing lists.
Many organizations pursue a specific goal, like increasing volunteer interest in membership upgrades, without taking the time to develop comprehensive marketing strategies. The variety of digital outlets and tools at your disposal makes implementing effective marketing strategies easier than ever, so give appropriate attention to marketing as your team starts.
Develop engaging peer-to-peer fundraising campaigns
Peer-to-peer fundraising campaigns can boost engagement by involving donors, volunteers, and members in fundraising.
Ask your volunteers and other interested supporters to create individual fundraising pages for your campaign, then encourage them to share them online. Ideally, they’ll engage and appeal to their network of friends, family, and coworkers.
To transform peer-to-peer success into increased membership sign-ups, implement strategies like:
- Rewarding your top volunteer fundraiser with free membership for a year. This will raise interest in your membership program and incentivize volunteers to drive more donations for your fundraiser.
- Using gamification features like points, scoreboards, and badges fosters friendly competition among volunteers and keeps energy levels high.
- Creating a membership drive challenge. Ask volunteer fundraisers to secure new members or upgraded memberships for your organization within a certain timeframe.
Explore some top peer-to-peer fundraising platforms to better understand the range of features and tools available. These campaigns are perfect for rallying all of your audiences and generating the cross-engagement that encourages volunteers to become members.
Stay in touch with your volunteers
Finally, remember to take a close look at your volunteer stewardship strategy. Many nonprofits dedicate more time and energy to donor stewardship than thanking volunteers. Ineffective volunteer stewardship efforts could lead to volunteers feeling neglected and unresponsive to your appeals for membership upgrades.
Developing relationships with volunteers and expressing gratitude for their contributions helps cultivate trust and rapport between your organization and its volunteers. Follow these basic best practices of volunteer stewardship:
- Record and report individual volunteer engagement in your CRM as you would for donors. Use these details to customize outreach.
- Customize your initial volunteer application or questionnaire to include fields for any information that might be useful for stewardship purposes, like their interests.
- Use your database to identify volunteers who either haven’t heard from you in a while or haven’t engaged with you in several months. Reach out to spark new conversations.
- Cultivate a sense of community with other volunteers and members through mobile apps, volunteer portals, and membership directories.
These efforts can strengthen volunteer retention and member recruitment, ensuring your nonprofit has a stable support network. Additionally, stewarding your supporters communicates values like respect, inclusiveness, and community through actions rather than just words.
Generating cross-engagement between your volunteer and membership programs is a priority for many organizations.
By using the right tools and laying a solid foundation of stewardship, it’s easy to incorporate new strategies for cross-engagement into your programming. From events to reward systems to peer-to-peer style fundraisers, you can use a wide range of techniques to get more volunteers excited about your membership offerings.