Volunteers

Not for profits put a lot of effort, and money, into attracting volunteers. This means it’s important to understand what attracts volunteers and to also understand what to expect from different types of volunteers. This organisation ran regular advertising seeking to attract volunteers using keywords that could be grouped under three main themes: helping others, learning new skills, meeting people.

We found that the largest group of volunteers were attracted to keywords relating to learning new skills, followed by meeting people and then helping others. However, when we analysed how long a volunteer was likely to stay based on the keyword theme that attracted them in the first place, we found the results were not only reversed, a volunteer attracted by keywords related to helping others was likely to stay much longer than a volunteer attracted by keywords related to learning new skills.

This information helped the organisation to optimise its advertising spend when attracting new volunteers and is also a classic example of quality over quantity!