Information
Summary: Examines the value of volunteering in project implementation and community engagement, highlighting effective volunteer management strategies, including recruitment, training, and motivation, to maximize volunteer contributions to project success.
Learning Objectives:
Volunteering takes place in the form of active participation of the target groups and the 3rd parties in the project processes. Volunteers are a useful human resource, especially for nonprofits. Volunteers can take part in volunteering activities for reasons such as personal satisfaction, career, gaining experience, benefiting from abroad opportunities, necessity arising from the education curriculum and so on.
If your project is based on volunteerism or includes activities that involve the participation of volunteers, you should also describe how this process will be carried out. Volunteers should be seen as a temporary human resource and the duties, authorities and responsibilities to be assigned should be distributed to this extent. A person's voluntary service and work for an institution or project should not be seen as completely free of charge. Travel and food expenses of these people should be covered and, if possible, some pocket money should be given. For this reason, it is recommended to allocate daily in the project budget for volunteers.
In order for the volunteers to take part in the project, the necessary information must be announced. Digital portals used by project announcements and non-profit organizations can be used for these announcements. In addition, advertisements can be placed on social media groups. In the advertisements, it would be useful to mention your project, activities and work that will take place in the volunteer position, the place and duration of the volunteering, the contribution it will make to the participants (certificate, reference, etc.), and participation fees that will be provided to them, if any. Collecting the participants' information on a standard form and creating a database will be useful in the follow-up of the applications and the recruitment process of the volunteer.
Necessary training should be given to the volunteer about the job (s)he will do after the selection process. Therefore, if your project is going to be about volunteering, it is important that you specify the training to be given to these people. Volunteers will be able to use these trainings on their resumes, so stating these trainings in the advertisement can be used to attract volunteers.
In order for the volunteers to take the work process seriously, you can prepare and sign contracts. This will also increase job engagement. As a matter of fact, since the concept of volunteering is not fully understood in Balkan countries, Türkiye and some other countries, people who work voluntarily will think that they can leave their jobs whenever they want. In such case, your project activities will be interrupted. In order to prevent this, you need to generate incentives specific to your project and activity and increase the commitment of the volunteer. For example, if you need to find local, volunteer participants for a youth project that you will carry out in the country, it can be an important incentive to state that these volunteers will have priority in taking part in projects abroad.
It is also important to follow the activities of your volunteers. You can carry out this follow-up activities with the Project staff (not with the volunteers). Such an assignment would be ideal for controlling and monitoring volunteers and would allow unexpected events to be prevented early on.
