Managing Non-Profit Volunteer Recruitment With Pardot

This blog was written before Pardot was renamed to Marketing Cloud Account Engagement. You can read more about the name change and what it means here.

It’s an understatement to say that volunteers are an important pillar of support for non-profit organisations. Whether it’s helping to manage events, delivering goods and services, or working as part of the fundraising team, volunteers can help with so much of the daily running.

When it comes to managing non-profit volunteer recruitment activity, it’s certainly not something that should be taken lightly.

The problem is, volunteer recruitment can be time-consuming and repetitive. Finding available volunteers who are reliable and driven by a passion for the cause isn’t always easy, but there are ways you can automate this process using Pardot.

How to recruit volunteers using Pardot

The process of non-profit volunteer recruitment requires consistent and regular campaigns to reach your intended target audience - and you can do this using Pardot in a number of ways.

Jump to the relevant sections below:

• Target donors and subscribers with recruitment emails
• Run regular volunteer recruitment campaigns
• Automate nurture sequences with Engagement Studio
• Use lead scoring to highlight those most likely to volunteer

Target donors and subscribers with recruitment emails

Firstly, it’s not uncommon for donors who regularly engage with your organisation’s fundraising activities to be interested in becoming a volunteer. With this in mind, it helps to have automated processes to promote your volunteering program to people who are already showing an active interest in your organisation. One way to do this is to include information about volunteering opportunities as part of your donation confirmation emails.

Similarly, you can include volunteer recruitment-focused email sections as part of other regular email communications, such as your newsletter, for example. 

How you choose to frame the messaging is up to you, but having regular and consistent exposure of your volunteer program as part of your email content to those already subscribed, will likely generate results faster than going out to a cold audience.

Run regular volunteer recruitment campaigns

The beauty of Pardot is that it allows marketers to set up a full suite of campaign assets, including landing pages, lead capture forms, emails, and social media posts. Remember that great Pardot campaign reporting requires you to have the right campaign hierarchy and attribution setup. You can visit this blog to read more about that.

Many recruitment campaigns will also include paid advertising, and by using UTM parameters and the Google Analytics connector for Pardot, all potential volunteers you capture through this type of activity can be seen within your account.

Note: If UTM tracking and Pardot forms isn’t something you’re familiar or comfortable with, you can read more about those here but you can also send us a message for personalised support.

When run regularly and with the ideal Pardot implementation, non-profit organisations can execute sophisticated, measurable and insightful campaigns.

Automate nurture sequences with Engagement Studio

Using Engagement Studio, you can take your volunteer recruitment email marketing to the next level with automated nurture sequences.

Create a tailored and segmented sequence of emails designed to engage prospective volunteers and encourage them to research, ask questions about, and ultimately have an interest in volunteering opportunities. 

The beauty of this option is that once you’ve determined your preferred sequence of emails, messaging, and timings, the process is completely automated. 

It’s not just for those already subscribed either, you can capture potential volunteers on your website using Pardot forms, then add them to specific nurture journeys designed to foster their interest in volunteering, and encourage them to get involved.

Use lead scoring to highlight those most likely to volunteer

Once you have active campaigns running to promote your volunteer activities and nurture a database of potential recruits, the challenge becomes identifying those prospective volunteers who are most likely to actually sign up. The easiest way to do this is with Pardot scoring and grading.

Using a well-planned scoring and grading model, you can easily determine how engaged a prospective volunteer is, and make direct contact with those who are most likely to sign up. 

Luckily for you, we’ve written an entire handbook on everything you need to know about scoring and grading in Pardot!

Don’t forget about retaining volunteers too

Now that you’ve put in the hard work to reach, engage, and recruit volunteers, the next thing to consider is how you’re going to maintain a relationship with them and retain them long-term.

Using similar methods to those explained above - such as email nurture journeys - you can build personalised and meaningful relationships with your volunteers that demonstrate how much you value their contribution and the outcomes of the work they do.

Of course, putting in the effort to build and maintain relationships with volunteers gives you more opportunities to grow a bigger pool of advocates for your non-profit organisation. You can use their experiences and engagement to provide valuable feedback about the volunteering process, and your organisation in general, which can form part of your volunteer recruitment messaging.

Pardot is generally thought of as a B2B platform but its powerful features are ideal for some B2C scenarios, just like non-profit volunteer recruitment. If you’d like some help getting your account set up perfectly for this type of activity, feel free to get in touch with the MarCloud team.