Top 10 Tips to Keep Your Volunteers Engaged

Crafting strong content helps you resonate with your supporter base and helps to build an engaged community of volunteers. It’s also a cost-free marketing strategy, which can be a seriously powerful tool for nonprofits with limited funding. Doing this effectively takes some time (and a lot of trial and error), so we’ve outlined our top 10 tips to help set you up for success.

1. Set clear goals: Set out clear objectives for your content. For example, understand whether you want to increase awareness about your cause, drive supporters to your website, recruit volunteers, or increase donations.
2. Know your audience: Carry out research to deeply understand your target demographic. Identify their needs, preferences, pain points, and communication preferences. Once you’ve done this, it can be really helpful to create audience personas that represent different segments of your target audience.This will help you tailor content more effectively to each group.
3. Create compelling content: Create content that aligns with your audience’s interests and provides value. Use storytelling, relevant examples, and engaging visuals to make your content captivating (photos, videos and reels are where it’s at!).
4. A/B test your content: A/B testing is a strategy used in marketing, which basically means comparing two versions of something to determine which one performs better with your audience. For example, you could test variations of content on your channels, using slightly different headlines, images, call-to-actions or content length, to identify what resonates most with your supporters. You can similarly experiment with various channels, such as social media platforms, blogs, podcasts, videos, email blasts or SMS blasts. Assess which channels generate the most views, engagement, volunteer sign-ups or donations (depending on your goals).
5. Consider SEO (Search Engine Optimisation): Incorporate relevant keywords and phrases in your content to improve search engine visibility. This ensures that your content reaches a broader audience. There are lots of different keyword research tools out there, like Wordtracker, that you can use. It’s as simple as entering some key words you think are most relevant to your business or services, and the tool will generate a list of the top keywords people are most commonly searching online with, when looking for services related to your business. Once you have this list of top keywords, save it somewhere and try to use them as much as you can throughout your marketing content.
6. Monitor social media engagement: Keep an eye on social media platforms to gauge how your audience responds to your content. Pay attention to likes, shares, comments, and mentions. If you notice a particular post is getting more traction than others, try to do more of that going forward.
7. Engage in conversations: Interact with your online community using volunteer management software, and across your social media channels via comments and direct messages. Engaging in conversations builds trust and fosters a sense of community.
8. Repurpose successful content: This is an easy win, and we’re personally all about reusing and recycling! Identify content that performs well and repurpose it for different channels or formats. For example, turn a successful blog post into a video or podcast episode. You can also do something as simple as reshare an old video or post, with a new, more relevant caption. People won’t remember every single post you’ve ever published, and if they do, it doesn’t hurt to double down on your message.
9. Stay up to date with trends: Keep abreast of industry trends and the latest developments in content marketing. This will help you stay relevant and maintain your audience’s interest. There are always plenty of great articles on this online, so the answer is only a search engine away!
10. Be Consistent: Consistency is key to building a genuinely engaged and loyal community of volunteers. Create a content calendar and stick to a regular publishing schedule. You can also use cost effective tools to schedule your social media posts for you (Instagram and Facebook even have this functionality available within the app, and it’s free!), so you can be productive when you have the time, and then sit back and let the robots do the work for you throughout the week ahead!

Remember, crafting strong content is an ongoing process of refinement and adaptation. And honing your organisations’ true ‘voice’ or brand identity takes time. Continuously test, review and improve your content strategy, and don’t be afraid to try something new! If in doubt, circle back to these top 10 tips, and use them as a checklist to make sure you’re still on the right track.

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