Attracting new volunteers

• Have a think about the tasks that you need help with and the skills that are needed for this task. You’ll have lots more success if you advertise for help with a specific task rather than for a role. For example, if you need more adult help in the Beaver section, you might advertise for someone to organise craft activities and who is great at playing games rather than simply for a ‘Beaver leader’. 
• Make the adverts fun! The 'How we talk' guide will be a huge help when you’re writing your adverts.   
• Start with a catchy title and include photos and images relevant to the task to grab people’s attention.  
• Summarise what’s involved with details of when, where and how often they will be needed.  
• Include contact details so they can get in touch. 
• You’ll find loads of vacancy card examples on the brand centre. When creating your cards, select one of the templates from the ‘card starting point’ drop down option in the top left of the screen, this will populate the relevant text which you can then edit. 

If you need more volunteers a vacancy board is a great way to let adults know how they can help out.  

Your vacancy board could be a physical or online display advertising how you need support, whether that be a specific role or a smaller task. The vacancy board is made up of changeable cards which can be alternated or replaced depending on your volunteering needs.  

Make sure someone in the team is responsible for updating the vacancy board so that it doesn’t get forgotten and stays relevant. 

Be ready to respond quickly to enquiries.  

To set up a physical vacancy board: 

• Create your vacancy board on the brand centre
• Be creative about where you put your vacancy board - it needs to be somewhere where it can’t be missed. 
• If you don’t have your own meeting place you could use an “A” board which can be folded up and put away after each meeting. 
• Keep it looking fresh- update with new and change the position of your vacancy cards, especially if the board is somewhere that will be seen regularly by the same people. 
• Move the vacancy board around – look for opportunities to display it at other community spaces and local businesses to help attract a wider audience. 

The ideal place to host your digital vacancy board would be your Scout website. If you don’t have your own you could team up with District or County to host it on a wider scale.   

One option is to upload a vacancy card created on the brand centre, to do this, customise your card, update to show your required text and then right click ‘save as an image’. Another option is to copy and paste the text from the brand centre and upload that directly to your website, there are lots of formats you can choose to display your text.  

Now you have a great online vacancy board, look for as many places online to share it including Scouts, local and personal social media and volunteering sites such as doit.life and Reach Volunteering.

If not already registered, sign up. Any existing do-it.org account will transfer to doit.life automatically.

If your Group/District/County is already set up as an organisation the existing administrator can add you as a secondary administrator. If not, you can set up your own organisation.

At this stage you’ll need to know who will be following up enquiries and the email address that enquiries will be forwarded to.   

Next, add your volunteer vacancies. These are called ‘opportunities’ on the platform.   

Complete all the fields with clear details on what to expect and a focus on the offer and benefits to volunteers. The 'How we talk' guide gives great suggestions on this. 

Remember your advert must make sense to people outside of Scouting. Potential volunteers may not know what a GSL or BSL is, but will understand what a 'volunteer support manager' or 'activity leader' might do. 

Now that your advert is live, make sure you promote it. Share the advert with your group leaders, trustees and parents and ask them to promote it. Utilise social media such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram. Group, District and County websites are a great place to promote your opportunities too.  

Once a potential volunteers has seen your opportunity and registered interest, make sure you get back to them as quickly as possible, to keep their interest. And take a look at our first impressions ideas for giving a warm Scouts welcome