How do you find and keep volunteers?

What technologies do you use to recruit volunteers, and how have these tools changed your approach to finding and managing volunteers?

For ideas on how other nonprofits are using the Internet to find and engage volunteers, check out our article Shared Wisdom: Recruiting and Managing Volunteers, where nonprofits discuss their online recruitment tools and strategies. Have you tried any of the tactics mentioned by these nonprofits? Share your experiences here.

I found the article... kinda skimpy. Sorry. Also, the lead implies that volunteers are all about saving money -- this is a very old paradigm view of volunteers, as well as a dangerous one to take with donors (hey, we're going to cut our grant to you for next year -- just fire half your staff and get some volunteers to do the work!).

In addition to recruiting and managing volunteers myself, I'm always researching the effectiveness of online tools to recruit volunteers. The online tools that get mentioned most in my conversations with nonprofits, far and away above anything else:
VolunteerMatch
Idealist.org
Craigslist
The organization's own web site

If you are looking for online volunteers and are serving the developing world, the UN's Online Volunteering service gets excellent reviews from users.

Some organizations have great success contacting tech-savvy professional associations in their area online -- for instance, in Austin, Texas there's HerDomain, and and email to that group was often all I needed to recruit all the tech volunteers needed (and usually a lot more than was needed).

But even more importantly -- organizations should make sure they are ready to put volunteers to work immediately, or to give candidates an immediate next step in order to volunteer (completing a more-detailed application, attending an onsite orientation, etc.) before engaging in any recruitment. The number one complaint I get from people who want to volunteer is that they use the aforementioned online tools to respond to a call for volunteers, and the organization never gets back to them, or responds months later when the person is no longer available for volunteering. I fear the nonprofit community is turning off thousands of people from volunteering because they post volunteer recruitment messages to the aforementioned online tools before they have fully defined the task, defined the steps to screen candidates and get the finalists started immediately, etc. By not being ready to deal with candidates immediately, nonprofits can look unprofessional and unorganized -- and create bad PR for themselves.

Also, an organization should never limit itself to using only online tools for volunteer recruitment, even tech volunteer recruitment. Traditional local volunteer centers are still great resources for recruitment, as are the human resources offices of large employers in your area, colleges and universities (I always had the best luck contacting the English department rather than the career services department when recruiting volunteers, even tech volunteers), and even high schools -- and all can usually be reached by email.

As for keeping volunteers -- that's a whole different subject/discussion, really. I'll respond to that later, after others have had a chance to respond.

Thanks for your comments, Jayne. You make some excellent points about working with volunteers. The additional tools you list are, no doubt, great resources for nonprofits to use in finding volunteers.

This Shared Wisdom article is by no means an exhaustive, all-encompassing roundup of tools to find (or keep) volunteers. Instead, this article highlights the stories of a few organizations and how they found their volunteers online.

That said, anyone should feel free to add their own experiences, stories, and thoughts about volunteers in this thread.

Thanks for sharing your insights.