New wave volunteers require new wave platforms
Young people today are believed to be more environmentally, socially and politically charged than ever before. Data from global research consultancy Edelman Data & Intelligence shows 70% of Generation Z (those born between 1997 and 2012) are involved in a social or political cause and a recent Oxfam survey found that they are currently the most likely age group to donate their time to volunteering.
As the need for charities and their volunteers climbs to an all time high, with social and economic pressures mounting and an increasing proportion of the charity sector reporting dwindling volunteer numbers, keeping younger demographics engaged is crucial for good causes to navigate the ongoing economic turbulence.
Charities must now consider how they can engage an audience of digital natives competing against a range of other causes, not to mention an ever-expanding number of options to spend leisure time.
This can be a particularly daunting task for many charities which are still adapting to fast-moving digital environments. Ensuring that end-to-end the volunteer journey feels natural to a new cohort is becoming increasingly important to build a strong, engaged volunteer community.
Awareness of your cause
Knowing there is a new wave of volunteers on the horizon, filled with fresh skills, ideas and energy is exciting. But, before you can get volunteers through the metaphorical door, they have to hear about you and your mission to encourage them to join you.
Digital spaces are constantly under competition as countless brands battle it out for space on timelines, sidebars, banners, and pop-ups. So, adopting a scattergun approach is not likely to harbour strong results.
Creating relevant online content that links through to virtual sign-up forms delivers an easy, one-stop shop for getting your message out there and connecting it with how people can get involved.
Instead of charities using physical sign-up forms for opportunities, which can be misplaced or forgotten in the back office, modern online volunteer management systems (VMS) allow people to apply digitally from the comfort of their home, knowing that their application is being processed straight away. Behind the scenes at the charity, timely and repetitive parts of the application process can then be automated, relieving the strain on your resources.
Automatic reminders can be sent out to update applicants as they progress through each stage, or to check-in with them if they haven't opened the application for a while. Something as simple as these nudges can help boost engagement with sign-ups, and hopefully reduce drop-outs.
Retaining the right people
The average member of the Gen Z group is expected to already live a fast-paced lifestyle surrounded by countless, finely-tuned apps all vying for their attention.
Providing the unbeatable volunteer journey and living up to the expectations of technology among Gen Z is rooted in simplicity and intuitiveness. The gold standard of this is allowing users to get everything they need in one place in a way that just makes sense.
For volunteers, this means a place where they can check out their shifts, what events they have coming up, communicate with others and complete tasks, all without getting lost in a labyrinth of standalone apps all with their individual usernames and passwords.
Being able to dip in and out of training, briefing documents and community news is a welcome feature for busy people who volunteer in their spare time. Similarly, creating a space where volunteers can come together with like-minded people and be invested in your cause together. Simple features like this will help empower volunteers and keep them in the loop like one of the team, while also keeping them motivated to stay involved.
As well as this, a VMS with integrated rotas makes it easier for volunteer teams to manage their tasks. Volunteers can see new opportunities and easily sign up to them, allowing them to develop new skills and experiences to keep them motivated. The ability to keep up with what's going on in real time is what sets the modern volunteer journey apart from more traditional paper or spreadsheet based methods.
This is without mentioning the benefits for volunteer managers, for whom having a centralised approach means that the charity has a clear picture of volunteer contributions, and can accurately measure the impact of its volunteer programmes. As charities look to provide a great overall volunteer experience, managers are freed to support their teams’ success, without the burden of additional admin from disjointed electronic forms or documents that need to be emailed, tracked and stored securely to comply with GDPR.
Building a community
We already know that when thinking about uniting people online, social media is the king. It can form a key player in your toolkit for spreading a message. When you look at the bigger picture of what makes social media so successful, there is another, deeper lesson that can be learned from them: building a community.
Building relationships and a sense of community between volunteers has and will always be an important part of what keeps teams engaged during tough times. While many people may volunteer out of loneliness and boredom, finding a sense of connection through a common mission with others is a driving force behind why some get involved with volunteering in the first place.
For all charity team members, a volunteer management system can become a community hub of co-volunteers and friends. Internal messaging means that all communications stay within the system, so teams aren’t dragged out into different applications or emails, helping to drive engagement. With an online focused community it's even more important to have these channels for communication and compensate for having less face to face time as a group.
Whether your charity has a national or international focus, or you are engaging volunteers in specific communities, features like interactive maps can be utilised to help local groups in a community keep up to date with events in their area. Depending on your aims this can be used to coordinate events with ease, or provide local updates that are more insightful.
Covid-19 thrust us into the era of “co-working”, and this isn’t something reserved for spreadsheets in office buildings. The work done by charities is often complex and requires whole teams of volunteers. A VMS can help to easily show the impact of volunteers by empowering them to record hours, tasks or other measures of contribution taking away the need for managers to record this for their teams. Where ages, lifestyles, skills and availability are varied across a group of volunteers, having a system they can all use keeps them united and working fluidly and more efficiently as one.
Looking forward
Moving to mobile systems is also a great bet on future-proofing your charity’s workflows. As smartphones become more powerful and able to handle even greater tasks, our reliance on them for more aspects of our lives will increase.
Increasingly people's personal lives are stored almost entirely on their phones, from plane tickets to digital wallets, and already many rely on them for their work, while the youngest generations are most intertwined with their devices.
If it’s not already here, it is not so hard to believe that just over the horizon there is a world where people build whole careers working from their mobile devices alone. New workplace practices will become norms as new generations grow up with them and this also goes for volunteers.
Getting the tools together to create a digitally enhanced and intuitive volunteer experience will improve the experience of Gen Z, but it is only the start. At the start of 2023, the oldest among the next generation - Gen Alpha - are beginning to enter their teenage years and it is not long before they enter the volunteer ecosystem too.
It's impossible to say what the landscape of technology will look like in almost a decade, what the next generation will believe in or what their expectations will be. One thing is for sure, however - digitally native volunteers are here to stay, and charities will need to move with the times to keep them interested, and to keep volunteering relevant.
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