Intended audience: DataKind Volunteers
One of the most challenging responsibilities of Chapter Leaders is sustaining experienced volunteers between projects and supporting individual volunteers in their volunteer experience across projects. You can always connect with your DataKind staff support person for guidance and assistance with volunteer recruitment.
Recruiting New Volunteers
The volunteer application report (accessible only to chapter leaders) is the best place to start any search for new volunteers - the perfect person may have already applied on the website and be waiting for a project!
However, if you need to recruit new volunteers for a specific project, you may find the following resources and templates useful:
- Volunteer Application
- DA/PM Job description template + Project description templates
- Candidate Rubric Template \& Sample
When providing information about the project during volunteer recruitment, make sure to use the material in the Project External Messaging Template for the project, which you can find in the Design Stage folder for the project.
Best Practices for Managing Volunteers During a Project
- Set clear expectations: Ensure that each volunteer understands their role within the project, as well as what is expected of them in terms of time commitment, tasks, and responsibilities.
- Provide ongoing support and flexibility: Once onboarding is complete, make sure volunteers know you are still available to answer questions and provide support whenever necessary. Recognize that volunteers have other commitments outside of the project and be flexible with scheduling and deadlines whenever possible.
- Recognize contributions and successes: Take the time to acknowledge and appreciate volunteers’ hard work, be it through verbal praise in a meeting, a shoutout in Slack, or a private note of thanks. Additionally, when the team reaches a milestone, take time to celebrate their achievement.
- Foster open communication and two-way feedback: Create an environment where volunteers feel comfortable expressing their ideas, concerns, and feedback. Encourage open communication through regular check-ins, team meetings, and providing feedback - both positive and negative - to volunteers when applicable. Regularly solicit volunteer feedback about their experiences (and be sure to actually use their feedback to make adjustments as needed!).
- Build community: Help volunteers feel like they are part of a team by taking time for team-building activities during onboarding, setting aside the first few minutes of check-ins for personal catching up, and sharing the occasional fun gif or conversation prompt in Slack. Strengthening bonds between team members can help increase their overall satisfaction with the project.
- Lead by example: Demonstrate your commitment to the team by showing enthusiasm, dedication, and a willingness to pitch in wherever needed.
Best Practices for Managing a Pool of Veteran Volunteers
When a great volunteer finishes a project, ask them what they want to do next. Most often, Data Ambassadors (DAs) want a break after a project (being a DA on a project takes a lot of time!), but they do hope to re-engage and continue volunteering in the long run. One of our greatest missed opportunities comes when - 6 months later, once we have a new project scoped and are looking for a DA to take it on - we forget to reach out to the rock star experienced DA, who might be ready again for a new project! Mitigate this by keeping track of volunteers “on deck”. For now, this can be done using your preferred task management software for managing Chapter Leader activities (e.g. Asana, Trello, Google sheets, running notes document, etc.).
Another useful part of managing a pool of volunteers for new projects is keeping volunteers engaged between projects. Post relevant content and project updates on your chapter’s channel in the DataKind Community Slack, so that volunteers feel like they can still engage in the DataKind community when they are not on projects. Encourage them to come to events to stay up-to-date on DataKind and engaged in the community, even when they are not actively working on a project.
Finally, projects being aligned with volunteers’ interests and skills helps with volunteer engagement. Find out what your volunteers are most interested in, such as sector-specific work (e.g., healthcare, education, financial inclusion, etc) or type of data science. Write these interests down in your volunteer tracking space! That way, when a new project opportunity comes up, you can reference the list with volunteers “on deck” that includes their interests to find the perfect volunteer for the opportunity, with the right technical skills and passion to provide huge value to the project partner.
Contributer(s): Shanna Lee, Rachel Wells
Contact us
If you would like to learn more about us, partner with us, or get in touch, email us at community@datakind.org
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