The most important aspect of your Day of Giving is making sure that your outreach goes far and wide. It’s impossible to think that your advancement team can do it all on their own. This is why creating a strong volunteer program is critical to the success of your giving day.

What better way to increase engagement and reduce fundraising costs than to have volunteers solicit their peers with a personal appeal? Integrating a volunteer fundraising program for your school is a great way to beef up your strategy if you have not considered it yet. Or perhaps you already have a volunteer program and you would like some tips on how to make it stronger. Regardless of where you are at, the following building blocks will help you step up your volunteer game for your giving day.

Impact of a Well-Organized Volunteer Team on Your Giving Day

Volunteers play a very important role in your giving day’s success. If they are alumni well-connected with their classmates, they can help the progress of challenges. View this Catholic School’s challenge page, where challenges helped push the goal of 100 supporters to 251 supporters.

Volunteers are also the drivers for your leaderboards. By giving them visibility into who has not donated yet during your day of giving, they are able to strategize around who they should reach out to and remind to give. Using software that can give your volunteers visibility during your giving day will save you time so that you can focus on the big picture for the day.

Who are your volunteers?

If you are starting a volunteer program from scratch, identify your community cheerleaders, alumni, and donors that are the most active in your community. The goal is to partner with people who will rally on your giving day and will give 100% of their time to your school. Ideally, you will want to find alumni ranging over as many class years as you can. Your volunteers should have the following characteristics:

• Connected with their classmates or donor group that supports your school
• Influential and not afraid to solicit major gifts
• Not afraid to get on the phone and ask for donations
• Get people excited to give back to their school community

This is easier said than done. You can identify these traits by sending a volunteer questionnaire if they are interested in helping out during your giving day. Your questionnaire should be as detailed as possible for you to determine if they are a good fit for your day of giving. You may not have the luxury of turning anyone away, but you can at least identify their strengths and weaknesses.

Training your volunteers

You should spend time creating a training program for your volunteers. The best way to accomplish this is by creating a training video. You can do this easily by using Loom, an easy to use video recording program. Your training program should include the following elements:

• Expectations for the volunteers during your giving day
• How to effectively ask for a donation
• How often to reach out
• How to ask for challenges

You can also hold an in-person training session for local volunteers if that’s possible. The goal is to make sure all your volunteers are on the same page and know their role on your giving day.

Part of your training program should include resources. Create a welcome packet or volunteer guide to provide to new volunteers. This is a good way to reinforce expectations and guidelines for your volunteers as well as let them know about current initiatives that may be of interest to potential donors. A typical outline for these documents include:

• Impact of volunteer fundraising for your organization
• Scripts for contacting prospects
• Who to reach out to with questions
• An update on what is happening in your school
• A clear message about why you are having a giving day

Your goal is to give your volunteers as much information as possible to relay to potential donors and answer their questions.

Lead volunteers

Once you have your list of volunteers, try to identify natural leaders amongst your group. It can be challenging to have successful volunteers and even after training, some volunteers may need additional coaching. This is why lead volunteers are so important in helping volunteers that are less seasoned.

Lead volunteers are able to provide personal support directly to your volunteers, allowing you to focus on more strategic parts of the overall giving day. If you already have a program started, consider asking your highest performing volunteers to step into the role of a lead volunteer.

Assign someone on your advancement staff to be in charge of the volunteers. If your Catholic school has a smaller staff, look for someone outside of your staff who has managed volunteer programs in the past. Perhaps someone on your board can lead your volunteers. Whoever that person is, make sure they have a clear roadmap for the volunteers to follow during your giving day.

Say thank you!

Once your giving day is over, you will probably realize that you would not have had as much success without the help of your volunteers. Recognizing your volunteers is a great way to promote a culture of enthusiastic volunteers who stay with your school year after year. If you are having a special event at your school, you can invite them and honor them with a gift. You can also send VIP access to a game on campus. It doesn’t take much to make them feel special and give them recognition for all their hard work.

If you have not considered the impact your volunteers can make on your giving day yet, perhaps right now is a good time to start or improve your volunteer program.