Exploring the Volunteer Lifecycle: Preparing for a New Fiscal Year
Volunteering is a transformative human experience that can profoundly impact both the individual volunteer and the community they serve. In this series, Lineup will walk through the essential stages of a dynamic and effective volunteer lifecycle.
Each volunteer in your organization walks a different path that leads them to you. Understanding this is critical in retaining your current volunteer pool and in recruiting and engaging new ones. This all starts as your organization plans to kick off a new fiscal year.
Let’s explore how to maximize your efforts during this critical time – and how Lineup Teams can help.
Build a Strong Foundation with Recruitment
Recruitment is the cornerstone of a thriving volunteer program. A new fiscal year offers an opportunity to attract passionate individuals aligned with your organization’s mission and ensure you have the resources needed to achieve your goals.
Fresh volunteers bring energy, diverse skills, and new perspectives. Prioritizing recruitment early aligns volunteer onboarding with annual planning and allows you to maximize impact. A strong volunteer base also strengthens community engagement and supports the long-term sustainability of your organization.
Preparing for a new fiscal year with a data-driven recruitment plan helps you to build a pipeline of supporters ready to contribute.
How Lineup Teams Can Help
Create custom applications and calls for volunteer interest tailored to organizational priorities and fiscal year goals.
Design targeted campaigns with an intuitive platform that resonates with prospective volunteers.
Use analytics to identify which outreach strategies are most effective. For example, tracking engagement metrics allows you to refine messaging or focus on platforms where potential volunteers are most active.
Showcase Meaningful Roles
Once potential volunteers are engaged, they need clear, accessible ways to explore opportunities. For a new fiscal year, update your list of available opportunities to accurately reflect current priorities. Transparent role descriptions and current listings attract committed volunteers by aligning their skills and interests with your needs.
It’s especially important to use a streamlined platform that allows volunteers to view opportunities and sign up all in one place. This clarity supports efficient recruitment, fosters trust, and sets the stage for a productive year.
By keeping opportunities fresh and relevant, organizations ensure volunteers feel connected to meaningful work from the outset.
How Lineup Teams Can Help
Our Opportunity Boards feature offers a centralized hub to showcase available roles tailored to diverse skills and interests.
Categorize roles by time commitment, skill level, or project type, making it easier for volunteers to find a good fit.
Capture Volunteer Intent
Gathering information about what volunteers are interested in is a critical touchpoint in the volunteer lifecycle. It serves as the bridge between curiosity and commitment. As you prepare for a new fiscal year, refining interest forms to align with your organizational goals can enhance volunteer matching.
For example, if the new year brings a need to form a specialized task force to explore an emerging industry trend, tailoring your volunteer interest forms to highlight the opportunity—and to gather information on relevant skills and abilities—can help you identify individuals who are not only qualified but deeply invested in the topic.
A focused approach ensures that no potential volunteer falls through the cracks and sets the stage for meaningful engagement.
How Lineup Teams Can Help
Use customizable interest forms to gather essential information about potential volunteers, such as skills, abilities, and availability.
Identify the motivational factors of volunteers to ensure alignment with opportunities that match their interests and aspirations.
Store and organize volunteer data to quickly identify candidates for specific roles.
Be Strategic with Active and Potential Pools
In your volunteer management system, you have two groups: active volunteers (those currently engaged in roles) and potential volunteers (those who have expressed interest but have not been vetted or assigned). Planning for the start of a new fiscal year is the perfect time to evaluate how you distinguish between the two and how you are managing each group.
It takes volunteers from both pools to ensure your organization has a steady flow of support the entire year. You need to maintain engagement with your active volunteers while continuing to build your pipeline and nurture those in your potential pool to convert interest into action.
An analysis of your volunteer pools at this time can also offer helpful insights. For example, reviewing your active pool might reveal gaps in skills or capacity, which could be filled by someone in your potential pool or require you to launch targeted recruitment efforts.
How Lineup Teams Can Help
Maintain engagement and foster a sense of community with scheduling and communication features.
Send personalized messages, such as invitations to upcoming training sessions or events, with automated follow-up tools.
Analyze and create tailored reports on all volunteers in your system to ensure qualifications, motivations, and availability are aligned to service opportunities.
Set Your Organization Up for Success with Lineup Teams
A new fiscal year is an opportunity to strengthen your volunteer program. Our people-first approach helps you build a diverse volunteer community that is ready to make an impact with a platform that’s easy to use.
When the journey from recruitment to retention is a seamless process, you can spend more time focusing on what matters most: your mission.
Schedule a free demo of Lineup Teams to learn more.
