Historic Landscape Project
Recruiting Active Volunteers
These notes are intended to refresh your existing knowledge and offer some new ideas for CGTs concerned about ensuring there are enough active volunteers to achieve your CGTs conservation goals. They are not exhaustive!
Fuller information and guidance can be found in Dyer, F and Jost, U Recruiting Volunteers – attracting the people you needDirectory of Social Change 2002. Additionally, Volunteering England can offer further resources to support your initiative, including a lot of online support at
1. Your Motivation
Think carefully about what it is you want to achieve as a CGT and what role active volunteers can play in achieving this. Define the purpose of your recruitment.
Whilst you might choose to do this as a sub-committee, your purpose should fit with the overall strategy of the CGT and therefore be fully understood and supported by your main committee of Trustees. Tell them about your plans! What you do makes the CGT more successful in its aims and gives your volunteer programme greater credence. The more members that are aware of what it is you want to achieve, the more likely you are that others will offer practical support and ideas.
You might have a number of projects that you want to achieve if only you had more volunteers – perhaps prioritise just one and focus on that. The others will be more achievable building on the success of your first initiative.
Do think about why you want to involve more volunteers to help focus on the benefits that this investment in recruitment can bring – make a list – it could include:
- Fresh ideas and enthusiasm
- Complementary skills and new skills
- New contacts
- New perspectives
- Greater capacity to achieve goals
- Long-term sustainability
2. Your Project
As with any project, you need to think about what resources you will need, including time. Plan it out. Think about how much it will cost and how long it might take. There are still small funding pots available and a well-thought-through plan will give your CGT a better chance of success.
This project planning is an investment. It may be time-consuming for a short while but will pay dividends. Volunteers who shoulder a lot of the work of the organisation now will be better supported by new volunteers participating in the future, and perhaps re-energised by focused achievement.
“There is little point in orchestrating a fabulous recruitment campaign if follow-up is chaotic or ill thought out.” (Dyer and Jost, 2002, p13)
Make sure that you have planned how you will manage the project once you have recruited your volunteers. Don’t get them interested in what you want them to do and then think about how you’re going to do it. It might change as you go along, but that’s ok if you are still heading towards the same focused goal.
3. Recruitment Strategy
3.1 Devise roles – describe what it is you want your volunteers to do. This makes it easier to decide upon your recruitment strategy as well as making it clear for volunteers what it is you would expect from them.
You might decide to make the role time-limited as that might make it more attractive to someone to make a short-term commitment.
A frequent issue cited by groups of volunteers is that there are not enough volunteers to do everything and therefore the volunteers that there are, are too busy to be recruiting. This is a vicious circle! Decide what must go on the back burner whilst recruitment is addressed and follow this through. Be firm! You might decide that there are specific roles for people to volunteer to carry out relating to the recruitment process itself - ask people specifically to undertake these (see later sections on Approach).
You could use the following role description template (taken from Dyer and Jost, 2002, p15) but it need not be long or complex:
Role Title:
Purpose of Role: (why is role important?)
Brief description of main tasks and activities:
Skills, experience and qualities required: (this is the person specification)
Time commitment:
Support offered: (such as expenses, training, support sessions etc)
Other commitments: (e.g. any requirement to attend induction, training, support sessions, meetings etc)
The more flexibility you can build in to the role, the wider your potential field for recruitment, but you don’t want to make it too vague so that noone really knows what it is that you expect of them.
Bear in mind that you can phase in the support and training. Induction and training does not have to be entirely up front. Much can be achieved through mentoring, and you might decide that you want volunteers to attend a certain number of meetings and have ‘taster’ sessions so that they can be sure that they are genuinely interested prior to considerable investment.
3.2 Set Recruitment Goals - set goals for what you want to achieve and when.
•What do you want volunteers to do, specifically?
•How many volunteers do you need – ideally?
•Over what timescale?
Your recruitment goal might look something like this:
We will recruit 10 volunteers, by the end of April, with interest in [historic] landscapes and with enthusiasm, who will between them research 10 sites within an agreed framework, and prepare them for entry on the HER within 1 year.
3.3 Decide where to look – Brainstorm! For 20 minutes with up to half a dozen people, preferably a cross-section of the CGT or people who don’t usually meet together. Set aside prejudice against previous failed approaches, list every idea – it could spark a different perspective from someone else.
Also set aside the ‘Garden History’ label – think more laterally about designed landscapes.
Try thinking of the following in terms of related subject areas:
- Occupations – e.g. planners, architects, environmentalists, craftsmen, art historians, arboriculturalists, local authorities etcetc
- Businesses – e.g. land management, GIS specialists, etc
- Colleges – consider evening classes, degrees, diplomas in all sorts of subjects!
- Hobbies – individuals and groups
- Amenity societies and community groups – common ground of all historic assets, and the environment
- Internet user groups – discussion forums
Carry out web searches – this can help with inspiration and highlight what exists in your county. Prioritise your ideas for targeting people. Pick those ideas that look interesting and exciting, perhaps combining these with some ‘known quantities’.
3.4 Timing – think about what will be preoccupying people when they consider your volunteering opportunity. Christmas and summer holidays can be lean times for some initiatives, but students might be planning to get summer holiday experience during the spring semester. You might want to set up a campaign in the lead-up to an event, visit to an archive, a project meeting or group training opportunity.
4. The Approach
The following survey results are worth bearing in mind when thinking about how to approach recruitment and accommodate volunteers.
Looking at what motivates people to be involved in certain activities can give an
indication of why some people participate more than others do.
Four explanations as to why people volunteer:
• Socio-economic factors: people with higher education and income volunteer
more than those with fewer resources.
• Opportunity or access: this is connected to people’s social networks; people
who volunteer often do so because they have been asked.
• Historical and cultural factors at the wider societal level: for example, the
bias in the UK for volunteering to take place within the realm of social welfare and
the way in which people from certain cultures or religions are routinely involved in
activities which might be seen as volunteering (e.g. Chinese and African-Caribbean
communities caring for members of their family and neighbours).
• Individual motivation: some people have personalities which are more helpful
and generous than others.
The key drivers for volunteering which were outlined by the Cabinet Office’s Helping
Out survey were:
• “to improve things and help people” (53%)
• time available
• to gain life experience
• a personal attachment to the organisation
• in order to widen social networks (a common reason for younger people)
The Young Foundation Why do some people get involved? August 2010
Barriers to formal volunteering
Work commitments59%
Doing other things in their spare time 31%
Looking after children or the home29%
Lack of awareness – not heard about volunteering opportunities15%
People would be more likely to volunteer if…
They were asked directly42%
Friends and family got involved as well35%
They had someone who was already involved who could help them 23%
It benefited their career or job prospects20%
They could participate in formal voluntary activities from home20%
(DCLG 2005 Citizenship Survey: Active communities topic report covering England only)
4.1 Direct Approaches
Direct personal approaches apparently work. In theory, every member of your CGT can ask people to volunteer if they know what it is they are asking people to do, and are confident in recommending the experience to others.
A direct approach requires a response – it is proactive and relatively immediate. Advertisements require the potential volunteer to react. They might never get around to it. People like to be asked; some people think that they are being too arrogant if they offer themselves so a direct approach bypasses this.
4.2 Creating Your Advertisement
If you decide to go for advertising, either a direct advert or on the back of an article or journal publication, there are some basic rules for creating your advert. Start from the premise that you don’t say ‘We are desperate for volunteers – we need you – would you like to volunteer?’ Your plea won’t stand out from all the others; the answer is likely to be “No!’; very busy people make great volunteers – there is an element of truth that if you want something done, ask a busy person – but they might not necessarily respond to desperate pleas.
Consider advertising tips from the commercial world by following the AIDA acronym when composing the text for your advert:
Awareness
Interest
Desire
Action
Awareness – make your potential volunteer aware of the work of your CGT – what does it aim to do? Why does it matter? Why is it important?
Interest – spark their interest – how does your CGT achieve what it does? How does it go about it?
Desire – what can your CGT offer that will make it interesting or worthwhile for them to volunteer? What’s in it for them? Find out what motivates your existing volunteers
Action – tell them what they need to do next – make it short, easily achieved, and lead to something. Be ready with the next step – delay could lose you your hard-won volunteer.
If you use images, use those that include all sorts of different people. It isn’t because it’s ‘PC’ – if you use images that reinforce stereotypes of the ‘kind of people that volunteer’ you will continue to recruit similar people. If you want a range of ages, gender, backgrounds and skills, you need to demonstrate this. People need to be able to ‘see’ themselves within the image and think positively about how they would feel being part of it. This might seem like a Catch 22 situation but there are plenty of events that CGTs attend that have a wide audience so, with permission, you could borrow an image for the purpose of your campaign.
5. “But we tried that before….”
Think about what has worked well previously and what has not.
Where things have not worked well before, do not dismiss this as a fundamentally flawed idea – think about why it failed. Think about how your flexible and focused approach to volunteer recruitment could now make it work. BE CONTINUALLY CURIOUS – question what happened. Honestly evaluate.
If your recruitment was successful but your retention was not, think about what sort of experience your volunteers receive. Will your volunteers talk excitedly or enthusiastically about the experience they have working with your CGT? Are they made to feel welcome or is there a bit of a clique? Cliques need new blood and a diversity of new recruits. If new volunteers come along to meetings, are these upbeat, inclusive and forward-looking? Existing members need to be aware of the need to support positive messages. Consider adapting time, style, location of meetings and prepare existing volunteers for necessary change.
Sustain your recruitment. Plan for little and often (with an on-going clear purpose in mind) or programme it for a specific time-limited project initiative. Be creative. Enjoy it!
Good luck!
With full acknowledgement of drawing on and applying information from the excellent publication:
Dyer, F and Jost, U Recruiting Volunteers – attracting the people you need Directory of Social Change 2002.
Historic Landscape Project
Written January 2011, reformatted January 2017
HLP Handout Recruiting Active Volunteers
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