Phase 3: Growing Your Club

Determine where volunteers can help your club reach its goals - You can’t do it all alone! To grow your club and reach more alumni, you need to recruit volunteers to pitch in. Use your database to identify alumni who fit the profile of someone who might be interested in volunteering (eg. someone who’s enthusiastically and repeatedly participated in the past), then send them an email inviting them to sign-up on a volunteer page. Here are some best practices for recruiting volunteers:

• Set goals - Your can set a variety of goals right in your club’s NationBuilder Dashboard tab. These goals might include how many volunteers you’ve recruited, how many event registrations you’ve collected over time, and how many members your club has.
• Based on your goals, define the types of volunteers your club needs - People like to know what they’re volunteering for. Present alumni with several specific volunteer opportunities. For example, if you are looking to increase event attendance, you may want to recruit a group of volunteer club ambassadors responsible for spreading the word within their own social networks. If you are looking to diversify your club’s social event schedule, recruit a group of event volunteers who commit to hosting one event each year.
• Create paths - Don’t let your volunteers fall through the cracks. With Paths, you can set-up your Volunteer page to trigger a Path and point person each time someone signs up. The Volunteer Path will help to clarify what steps the point person needs to take in order to effectively onboard the new volunteer.
• Learn more - http://nationbuilder.com/goals_dashboard and http://nationbuilder.com/create_paths

Distribute ownership among volunteers and track their progress - NationBuilder makes it easy to empower volunteers with tools for multiplying your club’s reach. In order to grow, clubs often have to overcome publicity and awareness challenges. Since your club (and the School) may not be in direct contact with alumni, it can be very effective to equip volunteers with simple methods of publicizing club events and other invitations within their own peer networks. Here are some best practices for using NationBuilder’s peer-to-peer features:

• Use the Recruiting page - With the recruiting page, you can decide which page on your website you want to promote and what you want them to share. Each time you need to get the word out about an event or a specific invitation (eg. JOIN the club), simply direct volunteers to that recruiting page, where they’ll be able to easily share the relevant link across a wide variety of platforms.
• Tailor your club’s social capital “currency” - You can customize your club’s social capital currency under the Settings > Defaults > Social Capital. The social capital currency will give you a single metric of engagement for each alumni.
• Recognize your volunteers - In conjunction with social capital, you can create a Leaderboard to recognize your club’s top recruiters or most engaged volunteers.
• Learn more - http://nationbuilder.com/how_recruiters_are_tracked