Volunteer Recruitment in the Digital Age with Geng Wang

Volunteer recruitment is the #1 challenge volunteer managers report facing.

In this episode, I speak with Geng Wang, CEO and Founder of Civic Champs, a volunteer management and engagement platform. 

We discuss: 

• How volunteering has changed since the pandemic
• The latest volunteer recruitment trends
• Tips to recruit and retain the best volunteers 
• How to leverage social media for recruiting volunteers

About Geng Wang

Geng Wang is the CEO of Civic Champs, a volunteer management and engagement platform.

As CEO, Geng leads our team of passionate change leaders to deliver software for nonprofit organizations that empowers them and their volunteers to more easily serve their communities. Prior to Civic Champs, Geng co-founded and sold two companies, RentJungle.com (an apartment search engine), and Community Elf (a social media management firm).  Geng is also a former McKinsey & Company consultant and is a graduate of Michigan State University and Harvard Business School.

Connect with Geng Wang on LinkedIn

Take my free masterclass: 3 Must-Have Elements of Social Media Content that Converts

Transcript

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You. This show is sponsored by Bloomerang, a solution that helps nonprofits like Shower up, which is a nonprofit providing mobile showers and personal care for those experiencing homelessness to efficiently manage their volunteers and donors in one place. And thanks to Bloomerang, Shower up increased their volunteer signups by 60% and first time donors by making it easy to give right on their site. Showerup's executive director, Paul Schmidt said Bloomering is an ideal marriage of volunteer and donor management. The deeper we get into it, the more we love it. And if you want to see how. Showerup easily manages their volunteers and donors. With Bloomerang, just go to Bloomerang. That's jcsocialmarketing.com blomerang. Or visit the link in the show notes to learn more. All right, let's get to the show. Hello and welcome to Nonprofit Nation. I'm your host, Julia Campbell, and I'm going to sit down with nonprofit industry experts, fundraisers, marketers, and everyone in between to get real and discuss what it takes to build that movement that you've been dreaming of. I created the nonprofit nation podcast to share practical wisdom and strategies to help you confidently find your voice, definitively grow your audience, and effectively build your movement. If you're a nonprofit newbie or an experienced professional who's looking to get more visibility, reach more people, and create even more impact, then you're in the right place. Let's get started. Hello. Hi, everyone. Welcome back to Nonprofit Nation. Or welcome if it's your very first time listening. I am so excited to be here with you today. This is Julia Campbell, your host. The topic of discussion that we're going to cover today, volunteer recruitment in the digital age. And volunteer recruitment is the number one challenge that volunteer managers report facing, where to recruit, how to recruit, who to recruit, and how to keep volunteers engaged, especially in the digital age when there are so many different things competing for our attention. So in this episode, I speak with Gun Wong, the CEO and founder of Cynicchamps, a volunteer management and engagement platform. And Gung leads the team of passionate change leaders to deliver software for nonprofit organizations that empower them and their volunteers to more easily serve their communities. Gung is a former McKinsey and company consultant and a graduate of Michigan State University and Harvard Business School. Welcome to the podcast Gun. Finally, we have you. Yeah, no, super, super excited to be here. Thank you for having me. Yes, I was so thrilled to have you speak at the nonprofit social media summit on social media strategies for recruiting and engaging volunteers. But I want you to tell my listeners, if they were not at the summit, if they missed it. A little bit about your origin story and a little bit about the company you founded. Civic chance. Sure. Yeah. Origin story. So civic chance, we launched in 2019. It's my third tech startup. And this time I wanted to do something that had a bit more social impact. And there's lots of ways you could do that. But I've always been drawn to volunteering and we actually had a really quirky idea originally, which is I wanted to create a mobile game, like a fun thing to do, but you didn't have to feel guilty about because you're actually doing good. Angry birds. Yeah, right. Exactly. That's right. Imagine angry birds are real and then. Not feeling guilty about playing it. That's right. Yeah. So a Pokemon go for volunteering. And you can imagine taking on missions where you go out and you take photos of streetlights and fire hydrants or whatever, and you create this digital map for your city, right? So now if there's a water main break, they know exactly where to go. Or for your conservationists, you're taking pictures of animals and birds so they can start studying migration patterns and what's going on in our ecology. And so that was the idea. And we talked to a lot of nonprofits, right? We said, hey, do you want to do a campaign with us? What's something interesting for you all? And by the way, we're going to have to recruit these gamers or volunteers. And so how do you all do it, right. As a pros, what do you do to manage, recruit and engage your volunteers? And that's when we decided to pivot because unfortunately, I think the sector has been underserved by technology. Right? Underinvested, underserved. And we thought we could make a difference. And we said, hey, instead of doing all this pen and paper of manual hour tracking, paper waivers, we can digitize all that, all the other industries, right. You think of, we have digital solutions for all of this. Fundraising, marketing. Exactly. I think that's fantastic. Tell me more about that digital paper trail. So it's like a one stop organizational system to keep track of your volunteers and for them to keep track of their hours. And so if you imagine the volunteer lifecycle, it starts from an application, oftentimes you can digitize that piece of it. It might have waivers and other questionnaire requirements that you assign, and we can keep track of it. We can auto request waivers again when they expire. Then you say, hey, now you're approved, but now you have a calendar. You want to get signed up, you get calendar, invitations, you get reminders, specific instructions for that day. You have communications you want to communicate with your volunteers, texting and email. And we can allow you to do it through the mobile app so that even if you're on the go, you could just select all, every volunteer that's supposed to show up for the day, shoot them something really quick that says, we have a thunderstorm rolling in and we're going to come back 2 hours later. Right. And all of that. Then when you show up, you have your hour tracking, and we can digitize that piece of it. So we have this cool geofencing technology, right. If you're with the app, it says, hey, julia, are you here to volunteer today for Habitat for Humanity? Oh, cool. I sure am. Super easy. It's intuitive, it's smart in a way. That's what we're trying to bring to the sector. That point that you just made actually segues really nicely into the next question that I have. How has the volunteer management field changed in the past few years, and what are some trends you are seeing that we need to understand? Yeah, I think everything's changed, right. With COVID really meant that a lot of programs had to, unfortunately stop, right, in terms of volunteering. And so what you're saying is post Covid programs having to rebuild, right. Because a lot of their former volunteers, maybe they have moved, maybe they're no longer able to volunteer. Maybe their life situations have changed, right. They have kids or they're retired, et cetera. And so that's been really tough for a lot of organizations. Now, the good news is we've seen a good rebound, right? And so total overall number of volunteers is roughly back to where it used to be. But what you're seeing is that the intensity of that volunteering hasn't quite caught up. And so the number of hours per volunteer is still roughly, let's call it 10 hours per year lower than what it used to be. And so a lot of folks are still capacity constrained or they don't have enough volunteers to do all the stuff that they need to. That said, if you're looking at Google Trends, you're seeing that interest in volunteering continues to rise. So that's some really positive news. And if you're using technology, I don't know what the stats are for folks that aren't using technology, but when you look at civic champs customers, for example, we've seen a 33% increase into that intensity over the past year or the past three quarters. Right. So if you look at Q one to Q three of 2023 versus 2022, you're seeing folks increase their commitment to volunteering by 33%, which is fantastic. And what are some changes, what are some different ways people are volunteering? I think when people hear volunteer, they probably think it has to be in person. Are you seeing more virtual volunteering, or is it staying the same? No, I think you're absolutely right. So you're getting more virtual volunteering than before the pandemic. I think a lot of folks just got used to just like working from home. Right. People enjoy being able to engage in different ways, especially if you look at mentorship programs in particular. A lot of them now are able to do it remotely. Over Zoom provides a lot of flexibility, and you're actually, in many ways, able to more easily schedule time with mentors who might otherwise be quite busy. But now they can say, hey, if I don't need to travel 30 minutes and another 30 minutes to come back home, I can spend 2 hours with my mentee instead of 1 hour. So that's some of the positive pieces, I think, that you're seeing. Now I want to shift into volunteer recruitments because volunteer recruitment is the named number one challenge that volunteer managers report facing. I actually did volunteer management along with fundraising and marketing at a domestic violence program I worked at in Virginia many years ago, and I absolutely remember that recruitment was definitely my number one challenge. Also management and engagement. But how can we supercharge our volunteer recruitment? Yeah, there's lots of levers to pull, so to speak. Right. We were talking about social media, leveraging that potentially to either create communities where it makes it easy for people to bring in friends into that community, maybe using more LinkedIn or places like Nextdoor that are very community focused already where there might be an interest to support your cause. But also, I think increasing the flexibility of what we allow our volunteers to do is quite important. And again, this is impacted by the pandemic. We hear and talk about the great resignation quite a bit, but people have changed how they engage with organizations, and they're looking for more flexibility. And I think it's equally important to now maybe over communicate your mission as well to your volunteers. Right. As a personal example, when I was growing up, I volunteered at the nursing home. I was a teen angel, so to speak. And then one of the activities, like, you're passing out water, maybe you're playing piano for the residents, et cetera. But never in that program did they say, hey, it's not so much about you passing out the water. It's not like they're thirsty per se. Right. It's about that small human interaction that you're able to provide. These folks who don't have very much human interaction throughout their day, unfortunately. But I never knew that. And so actually I stopped volunteering because I'm not making an impact and I became a CNA instead. So I was like, I'm going to do more direct benefit, but I think that's important. Right. A lot of times when we're in the sector, we forget that not everyone understands our mission, and we just need to just put it out there again and again. And you can talk about other things, but maybe tie it back to the mission. Right? Always tie it back. No, 100%. I think that's a huge missing piece in not only volunteer recruitment, but also engagement, but also donor recruitment, donor engagement, and just in general, in marketing and conveying the mission, we always assume that people just get it. They just understand our why. They know why a food pantry is important, they know why a library is important, they know why a school is important. But really, people are not immersed in it like we are, and they can't see the impact and we need to show them. Oh, I love that. Do you feel that younger demographics are different than older demographics in terms of what they look for in a volunteer experience? I think, yes. What I don't know is how different that is compared in the past. Right. I think maybe, I don't know if it's always been different or if it's newly different, so to speak. Right. But the younger volunteers, often there's going to be more motivation if there's learning opportunities compared to older volunteers, some of them will gravitate to different causes as well. So you look at, for example, climate change and environmental causes tend to be even more popular around younger volunteers, potentially. Right. But I think the big thing is, just given the life stage that they're in, I think the motivations are a little bit different. Yeah, I think so, too. I've always heard that younger people, they want to feel more of that connection. If the number of years the organization has been around and the prestige and whoever the board chair is doesn't matter necessarily so much to younger generations. But that's a generalization. But that's just what I've heard. In your presentation at the summit, you gave some pretty specific examples of how to use social media. Like right now, you just mentioned LinkedIn and Nextdoor. Can you talk a little bit more about how we could use maybe those two platforms, like some tips for positioning ourselves in the best way to recruit volunteers. Yeah. I think one of the interesting things about LinkedIn is that it's a professional network, and volunteering is actually part of that professional portfolio of work that you do. Right. And LinkedIn has a new section around volunteering. It's also geared towards this thing that everyone's looking for, which is recruiting. Right. And so much of the features, whether you're recruiting for a new employee or recruiting for a volunteer, actually isn't all that different. Right. And I would say leverage those features. Right. There's no reason you couldn't post a quote unquote job. They allow you to post a free job, but you could be looking for volunteers. Right. And I think people should do that. The other thing you could do with LinkedIn is you have LinkedIn events as an example, and that shows up on people's feeds. They can register. Right. They can click through. And so if you have a volunteering event, this could be another avenue to get folks involved. The other thing is because LinkedIn is a professional venue, and volunteering is kind of part of your resume, if you will. Volunteers, I think, are often open to sharing their volunteering experiences and whatnot. If they see that as part of their sort of resume and then they can post about it on LinkedIn, I think on Nextdoor. I feel like Nextdoor is just an underutilized platform. Yeah, I don't use Nextdoor. Who uses Nextdoor? And what is it best used next know of it? But to me, I was thinking it was more hyper local. It is. I might have a misperception of it. Because it's hyper local. It works for volunteering. It works for volunteering, exactly. Because volunteering, yes, there are some virtual. Yes, there's some things, but predominantly you're recruiting people to be in your community that want to be there. And Nextor actually is very good for that because if you're on Facebook or Instagram, you're shouting to everybody in the world, but here they're going to tailor it to just your geographic location. And so you're recruiting people that, you know, actually live in your region. And I don't have the proof, so to speak, but Nextdoor has a little bit of a reputation for whiny, complainy homeowners. Yeah, I can imagine Facebook also, and. They want to change that perception. Actually, if you look at the tagline or slogan for next door, it's actually very positive. It's about, like, community and bring happiness. And so volunteering, though, is a fundamentally very positive thing that we do in our community. So I think they're actually my senses. They're looking for that content, and so they're going to be promoting it a bit more. Hey there. I'm interrupting this episode to share an absolutely free training that I created that's getting nonprofits of all sizes big results. Sure, you've been spending hours on social media, but what can you actually show for it? With all this posting and instagramming and TikToking, does it really translate into action? In my free training, I'll show you exactly how to take people from passive fans to passionate supporters, and I'll give you specific steps to create social media content that actually converts. Head on over to nonprofitsconvert.com. Again, that's nonprofitsconvert.com. And start building a thriving social media community for your nonprofit. Right now, without a big team, lots of tech overwhelm or getting stuck on the question, what do I do next? Let me show you how it's done. I can't wait to see what you create. How can we best keep volunteers engaged and participating long term, even after this initial recruitment? Yeah, I think that there's a couple of thoughts that come to mind. I think the first is getting feedback. Right? I'm not sure how many folks consistently do this right. I think once in a while we'll. Ask for, hey, how was your thing? Like a weird time, but having a process and a program that collects feedback collects sentiment. Did you have a good time? Yes or no? Why? Why not? And it could be optional, but you're going to be able to a, if anyone has a poor experience, you can intervene, right? And when you do, at a minimum, they're less likely to share their negative experience with others, which would decrease the chance that people volunteer with you. But you can also collect testimonials, essentially, but also identify your champion. And these are the people that you can then say, hey, maybe they can bring a friend next time. Maybe there's people that they know because they're a great volunteer. They had a good time. From a development standpoint, obviously, they're also more likely to give, potentially financially. And then the other piece, tying it back to our conversation on Covid, is really around flexibility and saying, you can be a volunteer with us. We love the consistent volunteers. But here's a couple other ways you could stay engaged, especially if life happens. If you're a volunteer and then you have a kid, right? Your availability really changes. And it would be really a shame if you just said you can't be a volunteer anymore, but maybe there's something else that's a little lighter weight that they could still engage with and stay involved. Right. We're talking about younger volunteers. A lot of high schoolers volunteer, but then they go to college, but some of them come back. Right. And so in that four year period, is there ways that you can still keep them engaged in some way? And I also think the use of storytelling, I know you shared examples on social media sharing volunteer spotlights and different ways that for volunteers that want to be spot spotlighted. But I know every time I remember when I do social media audits, if people have volunteers and they don't share spotlights and then they start sharing them, usually they'll get a question from the community that says, I didn't even know you accepted volunteers. I didn't know I could volunteer. And then, of course that hurts you because you have been promoting it for so long, but no one read your promotions. But they read the story of the volunteer that was changed with this experience and it just reached them and they saw themselves in that story. Yeah. And that really resonated with me. Do you have any other examples of volunteered appreciation, especially like on digital channels that you've seen? Oh, for sure. One quick thought on I think the other thing you could do with those stories is openly address why people might not volunteer with you. I thought it was going to take 20 hours of my time. Exactly. I love that. So it's just preemptively addressing those potential objections. And I tout on the appreciation side, one of the tools I love is called kudo board. Yes, kudo board. We talked about that at the summit. Awesome. I'll mention them again. But it's a really nice way, especially for maybe some of your volunteers that have really contributed quite a bit over time. It's basically a group digital thank you card. Or you could do it for a birthday or whatever it is. Right? But you put pictures on there, you could put quotes on there, you could put little gifs on there. And then when someone receives it, they could see, hey, it's not just one person and there's some signatures, but really there's memories attached. Right? There's these picture and they're like, oh, yeah, that was right, we did that. And I got this award, or I did this event. I think that's a really powerful thing. And now you can print them, they'll print it for you and you can give it as a. So that is one way I've seen digital appreciation done well. Oh, I love Kudoborg. Yeah, we talked about that. I'll put that in the show notes. So what do we tend to get wrong in terms of volunteer management? What are some pitfalls to avoid or management or recruitment? That's a tough one. Explicit. Being inflexible with how we think about who is or is not a volunteer. And making assumptions. Yeah. And also, I don't want to say, like, holding on to the ones you have for dear life. Right. But that's a quote that I got from Rob Jackson from across the pond. But I thought that was a really good way to think about it, which is we can have a relationship with our volunteers that isn't constrained to a very specific model that we have. Right. I think that's something that I think about sometimes outside of that flexibility, I. Think sometimes. When it comes to recruiting. Right. I think, again, it's this language that we use and how we speak. Talking about our mission is part of it. But also, instead of using what words we like to describe our opportunities or our organization, try to understand how do our volunteers actually think and describe us, especially the good ones. Not one of the good ones, but the ones that are happy and like volunteering with you. They might actually think and use, and they might be motivated by things that are totally different from what you are thinking. But if you understand that, then you can play it back on all your recruitment channels. Right. And use the words that they use, which will resonate so much more with them. Yeah, no, I think that's so important. I always say that about donors, too. Use the words that your donors would use and if you don't know, then ask them. Talk to them. We can't assume that our donors are caring about the exact same things that we are or that they can't recite our mission statement from front to back. But they have a feeling and they have an understanding and they have that emotional connection that's built up over time. But I love that. Think of the words that they're using and speak it in their language. So another question that I have, because I think that people struggle, especially in the digital age, especially with something like volunteer recruitment management. What are some metrics of success that you recommend tracking. If you don't track hours? You should probably start with that. That's like the baseline. But the other thing that's nice about hours is so many grants and things anyway, and you can get dollars from said hours. That's true. I think the other thing we talked about, which is what's the intensity of volunteering that you're getting and is that what you want? Right? Or is that sort of the target that you're looking for as an organization and then starting to think about which cohorts of volunteers are really driving that outcome that you're looking for, and then you can recruit more of that cohort. Instead of using the spray and pray method of come one, come all, you could be really targeted. And again, coming back to that language, you can tailor language to that audience, and it's going to really resonate. I always like to say, from a strategy standpoint, whether that's overall strategy, communication strategy. If you don't actively choose what you want to be bad at, you'll never be good at anything. Whoa. Wow. Okay. If you don't actively choose, maybe what you're okay with being bad at. I don't know what you're okay at being bad at. What I'm okay at being bad at. Yeah, I like that better, though. If you don't actively choose what you want to be bad at, what was the second piece? You'll never choose what, you'll never be. Great at anything that you want to because we can't do it. All right, so you have to say, you know what? I'm not going to do this. And the other thing that happens is if you don't choose someone else, or something else will choose for you. Right. And so in this case, you can be strategic and think about, what is it I want to be great at? And thus, what am I okay not being good at? I love that saying yes means saying no to something else. I have to remind myself of that pretty much every minute because it's so hard. I know a lot of volunteer managers also have so many different things on their plate. Like, it's rare for me to work with a 100% that's their only job. It's usually marketing is in there somewhere, maybe fundraising, maybe some programs. And I think that's the challenge, is when you do want to be really great at something, but the organization is throwing all these different things at you. So advocate for yourself, people advocate for your work and for the importance of your work. So I guess my last question would be, is where should small nonprofits start if maybe they've never really started a volunteer recruitment program, they've never really posted about it on social media. What's really the first thing they should do? I think what's funny is small nonprofits are often all volunteer run, right? Or they're primarily volunteer run. Yeah, it's definitely volunteer driven, for sure. I think they actually understand in many ways how to recruit and engage volunteers quite well. But again, I think this whole thing where, hey, I'm going to have a dedicated person, I'm going to have a dedicated program and this program is going to do this very specific thing. And that's how we're going to. Volunteers can help in a number of ways. Right. Self easy ones would be like a photographer, right. You have an event to get someone to volunteer, to take pictures. Right. That's relatively easy. You can have people that if you think about your mission, right. Do you want them to advocate something at city council? Do you want them to advocate something in your community that's a volunteer, that's a volunteering opportunity? Certainly say, hey, we just need people. To sign this petition. We need you to post, we need you to show up at this thing. It's very easy. All you got to do is just go there and show your support. But I think for smaller orgs, I would start small. Right. As a startup, what we always think about is who is my ideal customer profile, right. And there's so much literature that says you got to find that little cohort and get them really excited and make your product the best it can be for that cohort. And so they're like raving about you, they're championing you. And I think that's the same when it comes to volunteer programs, which is, hey, can you identify 1234 or five people who are really passionate about something that they're volunteering for and start with that and then say, make sure that experience is really great, and then you could build off of that and say, hey, either we're going to have something a little ancillary or we're going to increase the size of that co chord. They're going to recruit people into that program. So that's how I, for smaller worries, what I would recommend, I think that. Also goes back to, you've got to figure out what you want to be bad at. You have to figure out who you are not for before you can really attract who you are for. Because we can't possibly be for everyone. Not everyone is going to want to volunteer. Not everyone is going to want to be. But what I think is interesting is we need to focus on the people that connect with our mission first and then find the people that want to volunteer. Because if we just find a bunch of people that want to volunteer, it's like finding a bunch of people with money. That doesn't mean they're going to give us that money if they don't connect with our mission. So it's all about the connection to the mission first. I think that's absolutely, that's so true. I love it. Tell everyone where where people can find out about you, connect with you gung, and learn more about civic. Champ sure. Our website is just civicchamps.com. C-I-V-I civic and then champs. C-H-A-M-P-S reading off my t shirt. Yes, we will read the shirt. Read the shirt. And then yeah, and then if folks want to reach out, I'm on LinkedIn. Gung is Geng, last name W-A-N-G. Always happy to connect with folks who are in the space. Always happy to chat. If there's anything I could provide about you. Yay. I really appreciate you being on here. I'm sure a lot of people are going to reach out and just thanks so much for sharing your expertise and giving us these great tips. Absolutely. Thanks for having me. Hey there. I wanted to say thank you for tuning into my show and for listening all the way to the end. If you really enjoyed today's conversation, make. Sure to subscribe to the show in. Your favorite podcast app and you'll get new episodes downloaded as soon as they come out. I would love if you left me a rating or review because this tells other people that my podcast is worth listening to, and then me and my guests can reach even more earbuds and create even more impact. So that's pretty much it. I'll be back soon with a brand new episode, but until then, you can find me on Instagram at Julia Campbell 77. Keep changing the world, you nonprofit unicorn.