Local versus national volunteering campaigns. What works?

A well crafted local campaign can be the most powerful way to harness the support of volunteers. National volunteering campaigns risk having too broad a campaign message and can fail to give people enough reasons to volunteer.

Ingredients of a local campaign

• Establish the need. Be very specific and explain what the local problem is, who it involves and exactly where it is.
• Motivate people to volunteer by showing what a difference volunteers can have in improving the local problem.
• Give potential volunteers a strong, inspiring case study. The real life story of a local volunteer and what they achieved for the local community and your organisation.
• Make it easy for local people to volunteer locally. (ie. don't advertise local opportunities and then have interested callers contact a national head office. Keep all contact local if you can).
• Advertise local volunteer opportunities as though they were local job vacancies. Be very specific about the volunteering roles you have available. See how CSV use the job pages to recruit volunteers.

The British Heart Foundation has found that localised volunteer recruitment is more successful for them than national campaigns. They get the volunteers exactly where they need them and more people seem to respond to local requests for volunteers than their general asks. See how they used local campaigns to recruit volunteers for their national network of shops.

The Samaritans and Girlguiding UK have also found that although national PR work increase their organisation profile, localised volunteering campaigns are more effective for recruiting the volunteers they need, where they need them. Both organisations have found that local newspaper and television coverage have inspired local people to get involved. Hearing Dogs for Deaf People has also had some success with their regional volunteer campaign.

Victim Support Greater Manchester focused their advertising campaign on particular bus routes in target areas of the city. 

To find out what local media outlets there are in your area, have a look at these free online directories, MediaUK and Hold The Front Page. More on this in the article Building your contacts book.

Can a national volunteering campaign work?

Yes. But it's not easy. For a national campaign to work your organisation needs to have established a high profile and needs the public to already have a good understanding of what role volunteers play in your organisation. You need people to understand what they're being asked to do for you.

A good example of this is the National Blood Service's "Give Blood" campaign which has maintained a high profile over 10 years with their now easily recognised campaigns. They continue to recruit 250,000 new volunteers to give blood each year.

Special Constables were also successful with their national campaign in 2004. They challenged audiences, "Could you?" and the message had broad appeal. 

In 2005 during the Year of the Volunteer, the Billion Minutes campaign was launched to encourage people across the country to volunteer. The campaign was not as successful as hoped. The main reasons were that people were not motivated by the time message. In fact it highlighted one of the barriers people have to volunteering (not having enough time to do it). It was too general a message and didn't explain what people could do or why they should do it. Read more about Billion Minutes.

TimeBank ran a national cinema campaign encouraging people to volunteer in 2000.

What about recruiting from rural areas?

A very targeted local campaign works best for reaching volunteers in rural areas. To reach rural communities, you'll need to make use of more informal local media. For example:

• adverts in the local church or school newsletters
• messages on online farmers networks
• posters in local shop windows
• leaflets on-board the mobile library service

Be very clear about why you are targeting their particular communities. For example your campaign might read, "We need five people from your village to help save the woodland walk at XXXX. Help save our local wildlife and keep this piece of woodland open to all. Can you spare a couple of hours at the weekend to help us? Have you got any gardening/ farming equipment you could bring along?"

See how Home-Start recruited volunteers from rural Norfolk using direct mail.  

Next article in this section... Why use the media?