Recruiting and Retaining Diverse Volunteers During and after a Pandemic: How to recruit online volunteers

Abstract

This project provides five analyses and the creation of a task force to help ensure Farmlink’s future in volunteer recruitment. First, through surveying current volunteers, this project obtains information on the demographic characteristics of Farmlink’s volunteers to identify underrepresented demographic groups; it also assesses the proportion of volunteers currently taking a gap year or taking classes pass fail, to assess how changes in school responsibilities might affect future volunteer commitment. Second, this project performs a literature search of previous studies on volunteer retention to identify the factors that motivate volunteers. Third, this project asks volunteers who work directly on volunteer recruitment to analyze the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities for growth, and potential threats (SWOT analysis) to Farmlink’s success to further recruitment and retention of volunteers. Fourth, this project performs a landscape analysis comparing Farmlink to six other similar nonprofits. Fifth, this project interviews volunteer recruiters from each of the earlier identified organizations to collect volunteer recruitment strategies. Finally, a volunteer task force was created to implement the findings of the above analyses with a focus on how volunteers may be compensated for their work via universities and government funding, or via school credit.