Giving Compass' Take:

• Nonprofit organizations can leverage text messaging to communicate effectively with volunteers.

• In what other ways can organizations communicate with volunteers effectively? 

• Here are some tips on how to get better engagement out of volunteers. 

Regardless of the size of your volunteer engagement program, you need to be in touch regularly with your volunteers to ensure your organization’s goals are being met. While most volunteer managers use emails, phone calls and social media to stay in touch with their volunteers, texting may actually be the most effective communication tool. In fact, text message open rates are as high as 98% while email open rates, for comparison, are typically 20%.

You can use text messages to connect with your volunteers in three different ways:

  1. Peer to peer texting (p2p): The most personal form of texting, peer to peer texting facilitates one-on-one conversations between your staff and your volunteers.
  2. Broadcast texting: This form of SMS lets you send a common message to all your volunteers at once.
  3. Opt-in text messaging: Where interested volunteers can opt into one of your campaigns by texting a pre-determined keyword to your number.

In this article, we’ll look at the different instances where you can leverage texting to get your message out to your volunteers.

Although a key component to an organization’s success, volunteer recruitment remains one of the biggest pain points for nonprofits. Texting can help simplify the process. Here’s how:

Add a simple message to your website, social media profiles and email newsletters instructing people to text a pre-determined keyword to your number if they’re interested in taking action.

As the heart of your organization, volunteers are very familiar with your organization’s strengths and weaknesses. Because of this, collecting constructive volunteer feedback is crucial to improve and maintain a successful volunteer engagement program. Did you know you can text volunteers short surveys to solicit their feedback?

Read the full article about how to use texting to communicate with volunteers by Shaunak Wanikar at VolunteerMatch.