How to Recruit, Train, and Retain Volunteers

Regardless of how much they raise or how many staffers they have on their payroll, without volunteers, no campaign can do it all. You won’t knock enough doors, call enough voters, send out enough texts, direct meet and greet and fundraiser guests to the right location, sign wave on Election Day, or complete the myriad other tasks to build a winning campaign.  

But how exactly do campaigns recruit, train, and retain volunteers? How do we get people to devote hours of their evenings and weekends to our causes? For free.

Here are a few tried-and-true tricks:

4 Ways to Manage Your Volunteers

Start with what you have

Your campaign list, email list, donor list, and/or rolodex are usually the best starting point. Folks who would donate their money are often also willing to donate their time. Also, ask your fundraising team to make a volunteer recruitment ask during call time for folks that can’t donate. Also, you want to add a volunteer sign-up form to your website and push it out through your social media and email programs as much as possible. 

Relational organizing

This is just a fancy term for word of mouth and genuine relationships. A good chunk of volunteers turn up because their friend told them about the dedicated city council candidate they went canvassing for last weekend. Or how much fun they had chatting with their neighbors during last night’s phone bank. 

Usually these volunteers come in pairs or groups of three or more and show up because other volunteers had a good experience. If they have a good time too, they will return and they might even bring some more friends, growing your volunteer base.  

Find your allies. 

Are you a mayoral candidate running to protect your city’s public schools from state and federal cuts? Ask for permission to post flyers in a college common area. 

Is your candidate or organization pursuing criminal justice reform? Offer campaign internships to re-entry programs or nonprofits supporting justice-involved families. You want to ensure the campaign experience is enriching for your interns, so be prepared to provide training on cutting turf, updating scripts, pulling lists, and more.

If you haven’t already, ask your endorsers if their staff or volunteers would be willing to support the campaign. Unions, in particular, have long been the backbone of progressive campaigning and remain a solid source of volunteer labor.

Get creative. 

You’d be surprised where you can find folks aligned with your mission. Contact any political, social studies, history, or other humanities professors you may know and ask if they’ll offer course hours or extra credit in exchange for volunteer time.

You could also contact local workforce development programs presenting the campaign as a way to build hands-on campaigning experience. Again, ensure you have the capacity to train these folks. 

While these folks may not volunteer for ideological reasons, they can still be a solid consistent way to reach your voters.

Oh, and one last not-so-little thing — keep folks engaged. The key to an effective, sustaining volunteer corps is retention. No-shows, burnout and low volunteer morale can completely derail field goals. 

6 Tips for Volunteer Retainment

Here are a few more tips to keep your most dedicated volunteers on board:

1. Make it fun! Most volunteers have work and family commitments outside of your campaign and like most of us, they are exhausted. Yet, they are sacrificing their evenings and weekends to support your campaign. Run fun team-building activities during breaks, and they’ll actually want to return. Here are a few ideas:

1. Dance party breaks 

2. Basketball games

3. Trivia

4. Karaoke 

2. Bring food. Free food never fails. If you can, order cookies, pizza, sodas and water, potato chips, or other snacks for volunteers to share during breaks. It will keep them energized and motivated as well as making them more likely to tell their friends about your next phone bank or canvass. 

3. Take breaks. Burnout culture is way too prevalent in politics and, unfortunately, can cause volunteer churn. Ensure shifts are no longer than 3 hours each with at least two 15-minute breaks included. Also, ensure any super volunteers, volunteer organizers, or campaign managers are aware of these expectations. 

4. Schedule once, confirm 2-3 times. A quick “Hey! Are we still on for door knocking for Zohran this Saturday? 2pm at Sunset Park?” over text could prevent dozens of no-shows. Yes, it may be annoying, but it's critical to having people actually show up. People are busy and sometimes they forget they made a commitment. Volunteers have full time jobs, family obligations, and other priorities in their lives. It's not their job to know how important this campaign is, it's your job to remind them.

5. Protect your volunteers. In a similar vein, you want to keep your volunteers safe. Use the buddy system when canvassing and ensure volunteers know never to enter into peoples homes, especially alone. When phonebanking or texting, let volunteers know that they can immediately end hostile or threatening conversations.

6. Say thank you. You can never thank your volunteers too much. If scheduling constraints and logistics allow, have the candidate personally thank volunteers for their commitment, maybe even staying behind after the shift for some heartfelt one-on-one thank yous and handshakes. If not, have the campaign manager thank them.  

Building a consistent, loyal volunteer base isn’t easy, and takes a lot of work. But with these 6 steps, you can start build your dream team and land BIG wins for your cause, campaign, or favorite candidate at the polls. Have fun!

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