Why having a robust volunteer recruitment program is so important

Volunteer recruitment and activation is the backbone of any campaign, and calling parties centred around volunteer recruitment are some of the most important campaign activities of all. Through these calling events, volunteers make calls to other supporters or volunteers to ask them to come to an event, make confirmation calls to lock in event RSVPs, or call no-shows and confirm them for a future event.

The role of the leader of a calling party is to organise a fun and impactful volunteer event which makes people feel comfortable making an ask and has them coming back to help out again.

Volunteer recruitment generally follows the following steps, where people are moved from expressing interest in volunteering, to be mobalised into action through a call from a volunteer, to then receiving training and becoming more involved after their first volunteer action.

Before the Calling Party

In order to have an impactful calling party, you need fellow volunteers with you to make as many calls as possible. This means creating an event and then promoting it to your group of volunteers. This is simple to do in SupporterBase, where you have all the tools you need to create events which automatically populate onto your campaign website, promote those events through email and SMS, and manage the RSVPs to your event. For more information on creating and promoting events in SupporterBase, see this guide.

Before your event starts, make sure you know who you will be calling, namely, whether it is your supporter group or a separate group specific to your calling party. Once you have that information you can set up a call list to streamline your calling party.

Clicking the ‘Add Call List’ button on your group page will open a pop-up which will allow you to first name your call list (it is useful to have a naming convention for these, for example ‘[Date]: [Activity]’ for call lists).

You can give the call list a description if needed, and also choose how long someone should remain off the call list based on the number of hours since the last contact they had. For example, if someone had a call through either SupporterBase or NationBuilder in the previous 24 hours to this call list being created, they wouldn’t be called.

Once you have created and named the call list, you will need to add supporters to the list using the button highlighted below. This will give you a number of options to choose from to select the supporters to fill your call list. The most common are ‘Group’ and ‘RSVP to group events.’ These will select either everyone in your group (who has a valid phone number) or the list of RSVPs to one of your events respectively. There are also other options, including tag filters and advanced filters to further segment your group into call lists.

Once you have your desired contacts in your call list, you can either start making calls by clicking on the green ‘Start Calling This List’ button. Most likely, however, you will have more than one caller and more volunteers to call than you can handle on your own. To help with sharing the load, you can further segment your call list into sublists by pressing the button highlighted below.

This will allow you to subdivide the call list into as many lists to match your volunteer callers, as long as there is a minimum of 5 supporters per list.

Clicking on ‘Show Sublists’ will bring up your newly created sublists and by clicking on the ‘View’ button to the right of each list, you’ll be able to see that sublist and by clicking on the blue ‘Edit’ button, also edit the name.

By setting up sublists with the name of the volunteer who will be assigned that list in advance, it’s easy to return back to the call list and direct your calling volunteers to the list that matches their name. You can also copy and paste the URL for a sublist with your calling volunteers which will take them straight to their list for the calling party.

During the Calling Party

Once your volunteer callers arrive, you’ve run through any calling party training you need, and when they're ready to start making calls, they’ll need to log into SupporterBase. If it’s their first time, they’ll need to confirm their mobile number is entered correctly in their user page (their name above the ‘Help’ menu item on the left hand side)

Once logged in, they can either navigate to their sublist by following the path ‘supporter group → call lists → select call list → select sub list’, or you can share the sublist URL with them for their list. All they need to do then is press the green ‘Start Calling This List’ button and they’ll be connected to the first supporter on their call list.

Logging Contacts

After each call, the volunteer is prompted to log the contact status of the call, including whether they were ‘successfully contacted’, if there are any tags needing to be added, RSVPs, or notes to add to their record. Note: marking a contact as ‘successfully contacted’ will remove them from the call list.

‘No answer’ triage

If someone on a call list doesn’t answer the call, there are a few options. One would be to log the contact and keep moving along the call list. The other option would be to use the time in between calls to send a quick SMS to let them know you called from the campaign.

You can easily send a 1:1 SMS from a call list by clicking the ‘Send SMS’ button which appears on each supporter card. This opens up a SMS pop-up which allows a volunteer caller to quickly copy and paste some SMS copy into the box and send it off before connecting through to their next call.

After the list is complete

When a caller has finished calling through their list they will only have the contacts remaining which were not marked ‘successfully contacted,’ usually those who didn’t answer. If you want to try those contacts who didn’t answer again, you will need to make sure to set the ‘number of hours’ in your initial call list setup to 1 or even 0, allowing for callers to try their list again once they’ve run through it once. This can be edited for each sublist in the same edit menu you used to change the name of each sublist.

After the Calling Party

As part of your calling party you should invite your calling volunteers to the next calling party, you could even RSVP them to the next Calling Party event in SupporterBase before they leave. You can see the results of your Calling Party by navigating back to your group page and clicking on the ‘Analytics’ option.

By clicking on the ‘Calls’ button and scrolling down, you will see a record of all of your call lists including the list name, total call duration, call list members, successful contacts, and contact statistics. This will allow you to get a good idea of how many volunteers were attempted, contacted, and if you are using the ‘successfully contacted’ checkmark to designate RSVP sign-ups, a measurement of how successful your Calling Party was.

Post Calling Party Communications

After the Calling Party you can use the communications tools in SupporterBase to reach out to those who came to your event, and even those who might have sent an RSVP but didn’t attend.

You can do this by navigating to the ‘Email blasts’ section of SupporterBase. Here you will find options to send bulk email to your event attendees to thank them for their attendance, maybe sharing some stats and their impact, and inviting them to a future Calling Party event.