It seems as if everyone is on Facebook these days. You’re probably using the site to attract event attendees and engage constituents, but if you want to attract volunteers, you may need to adjust the way you approach it to improve your success rate.

So how do you tap into that audience to find volunteers for your organization?

• Find out if the people you want to reach are even using Facebook. Because the site will attract a younger group -- generally, people under 50 -- consider whether that’s the demographic you want to reach before creating a volunteer-recruitment effort on the site.
• Strategize the types of posts you think will engage volunteers. Avoid direct appeals in favor of photos, video or recaps of past volunteer events. These serve to recognize those people who have already volunteered while showing potential volunteers what they can expect -- and that their efforts will be appreciated. By showing potential volunteers what to expect, you mitigate some of the concerns people might have about walking into an unknown situation.
• Make sure you’re attracting the right people—if there’s a minimum age or some other qualification -- make that clear in your posts. In addition, if your post sends potential volunteers to your website, that site needs to be engaging and helpful.
• Make sure to offer a diversity of volunteer opportunities, and to have rock-solid practices for handling volunteers in place. In short, prepare your organization for volunteers as best you can—and then begin recruiting on Facebook.
• Maintain good general Facebook practices, and make sure all the other groundwork -- from your organization’s main website to volunteer management guidelines and processes to a policy for Facebook commenting -- is in place.

You’re ready to start posting. Once you start, do it often enough to keep people engaged, but not so often that people feel overwhelmed.

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