MIT Alumni Volunteers
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Engaging Your Volunteers
Notes on Building an Effective Engagement Model
Everyone comes to volunteering by a unique path. Some have knowledge and experience they want to utilize or share. Some are feeding their interests and gravitating toward things they want to learn. Some are motivated by the relationships they can build or the types of people they will get to work with.
Your engagement model needs to reflect and satisfy this wide spectrum of unique motivations.
Understand and assess volunteer interests and passions.
Do they care most about mentoring or advising students, climate issues, or staying connected to their classmates? What gets them excited about volunteering? What do they want their role to achieve or help achieve? Whatever it may be, a volunteer effort powered by passion will make the most impact. You can then use these insights to connect with each volunteer more effectively.
Inspire volunteers through a high-level vision or mission.
One of the most essential elements of successful engagement is a compelling mission. This can be MIT’s mission or the MIT Alumni Association's mission at the top level or a more specific vision put forth by a volunteer group. To recruit committed and driven volunteers, you must be going somewhere and believe in where you’re going. This moves beyond individual passions and changes a group into a team in which volunteers are working together but are engaged individually.
Be specific and transparent.
Determine a place and a finite well-defined task for each volunteer. Make it easy for them to get started while at the same time not feel like they are making a commitment of unknown size.
Maximize strengths and champion diversity.
Leverage any background knowledge or expertise that volunteers may have. Be ready to consider every skill set and talent, there may be those that do not initially seem relevant that could end up adding a lot of value. This empowers each volunteer to feel valued and teaches group members about each other. If the plan toward achieving the mission is built based on the skills of the volunteers instead of a plan that they are just joining, appreciation and effectiveness will be much higher.
Build a culture of inclusion.
Create a volunteer culture where all contributions positive and negative are valuable to overall organizational success. A safe environment of open communication is essential for brainstorming and real problem solving. An idea one person has can often be built on by others or taken in a new direction. This type of idea-volleying can generate some of the best solutions and powerful concepts and action plans.