Board and volunteer recruitment and retention are essential to any nonprofit organization. Board members and volunteers can make or break a nonprofit organization. The goal is for these individuals to make – NOT break. In a five-part series, I am honored to share with you my top five tips for recruiting and retaining high-performing board members and volunteers.
My fourth tip is to provide administrative support for your volunteers.
Following are key points to keep in mind:
- Board members and volunteers should not be expected to get bogged down with administrative duties.
- Employees of the organization should be handling most, if not all, of the administrative duties.
- Your board members and volunteers have professional, family and community duties. Therefore, make it easy for them to be effective board members and volunteers.
- When you need something from them, please ask for it and provide a deadline.
- Your board members and volunteer should not have to type meeting agendas or minutes. Again, employees should handle those types of duties.
- If you are asking your board members and volunteers to handle administrative duties, then they cannot handle the mission-critical projects for your organization.
For my nonprofit board, we do the following:
- Develop meeting agendas and minutes
- Print meeting packets for our board members and volunteers
- Draft letters for our board members and volunteers
- Send reminders about meetings
- Update the online portal on a regular basis
I recommend that you:
- Create an online portal for your board members and volunteers
- Require them to access it with a username and password
- Include the following information on the portal:
- Meeting dates, times and locations
- Capability for them to RSVP for meetings
- Board meeting agendas
- Board meeting minutes
- Policies and procedures
- Financial and investment reports
- PowerPoint presentations
- Articles about nonprofit boards
- Articles about fundraising
- Note that portals provide one-stop shopping for board members and volunteers and save everyone time. Instead of your board members and volunteers having to search through many emails to find information about your nonprofit organization, they can access the portal and find what they need quickly and easily.
What recommendations do you have?
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