Volunteer Match & Other Recruiting Opportunities

There really are few, if any, genuine recruiting opportunities. The Volunteer Match website is one of them. It has proven to be a very valuable asset during our tennure here at RSVP. We highly recommend that you become fluent in Volunteer Match and use it at every opportunity.

Our best success with Volunteer Match has been under the category of the "Virtual Volunteer" (VV) opportunities. It will take quite awhile to explain the VV's. Likewise, it will take quite a discourse to explain the whys and wherefores of other recruiting opportunities or the lack thereof.

Meanwhile, let's focus on Volunteer Match. Click here to go to their website:

http://volunteermatch.org/

This is one of the most amazing websites you will ever encounter. It is actually a giant interactive database. You can do incredible things with Volunteer Match. I could easily write pages and pages about this website. Suffice to say that it would take a full-fledged manual to help you learn the finer points of Volunteer Match. Your immediate challenge will simply to be able to get volunteer opportunities listings up and running on this website.

I have changed the email access and password to facilitate your ease of access to this tremendous resource. Program Assistant Debby Dyslin has this information. If she has left EICAP's employ since I have written this post, she will have passed along the logon and password to the EICAP Information Systems Manager.

Here are some tips that I have learned from extensive successful usage of Volunteer Match:

1) Don't be afraid of a long, wordy Volunteer Task Description (VTD). We have a separate blog post on the VTD and we suggest you study VTD's in great detail.

2) Write in an informal and conversational tone. Write as if you are talking directly to a real person and write as if you are describing what they would do if they stepped forward to volunteer for this position.

3) Keep the "skills" portion of the listing very informal. Don't get all hung up on something that reads like a job description for a nuclear engineer. People hate that type of writing. Write as if you are telling one of your friends about the position. Be informal and, most of all, build flexibility into your Volunteer Match listings. Don't box them in. Let them feel free to inquire about the listing without any fear of rejection, commitment or, heaven forbid--guilt.

Bear in mind that you can edit your listings any time you wish. So, don't hold off on listing stuff--throw some listings out there and see what happens. The easiest way to tell people about your listings is to refer them to the http://eicap.org/rsvp website. The Volunteer Match listings are scripted to appear via a link on this page. Whatever you list will be available via that link.

You can also make them appear in a blog or on a webpage. Complete instructions are given on the Volunteer Match website.

Here's a tip I learned the hard way--if you want a listing to disappear, simply change its ending date. DO NOT use the delete function as your listing will then be gone forever and you can't get it back. It's really gone. However, if you simply change the date to a day that's already passed, your listing will disappear from the "active" scripting and yet it will still be available should you decide to reuse it later.

I wish I had the time to help you get up to speed on Volunteer Match. However, it's going to be your challenge to sit down and learn it step-by-step the hard way. Good luck!

(We hope to get back to this post to add more insights on other recruiting opportunities.)