The beginning of each term is a prime time for student groups – including your student government – to recruit new members to participate in your campaigns. With more people involved, your student government can bring more ideas to the table, generate more public support for your campaigns, be more visible and build a bigger buzz on campus, and develop more leaders to take on more responsibility – all of which means you’re able to win more victories on the issues that affect students. Student governments should strive to have a large base of volunteers who are involved in projects, even if they’re not elected members. Here are some basic principles for recruitment.
  • Cast a wide net. You never know who will want to get involved and you need as many people as possible – so ask everyone.
  • Recruit people into action. Recruit people to join an activity, rather than coming to a meeting. New volunteers can help collect petition signatures, put up posters, run an outreach table, etc.
  • Make it easy. It should be easy for anyone to get involved, even if they’ve never been active on campus before – so have simple things new people can do and give first-time volunteers any quick training they need to succeed.
  • Make it fun. Volunteers will come help out again if they have fun the first time. Include snacks, music, t-shirts, props, costumes, or maybe even a little friendly competition (who can register the most voters in an hour?).
  • Create a sense of urgency. You’re working on urgent, important issues, so make sure to convey that to people. For everyone who signs a petition, ask them if they can sign up to volunteer. For everyone who signs up to volunteer, call them that same day to follow up. For everyone who comes out and volunteers, invite them to come back and volunteer again the next day. And so on.
  • Ask people to take on more. Always ask people right away to take on more responsibility. For example, if someone volunteers at a table for the first time, you can invite them to manage a tabling shift the next day.
  • Remember the rule of halves. If you want 25 people to volunteer at an event, you need 50 people to say “yes” that they’ll volunteer. If you need 50 people to say “yes,”,you need to call 100 people. If you need to call 100 people, you need a list of 200 potential volunteers with phone numbers. (Yes – all just to get 25 volunteers at an event!)
Recruitment is as simple as two steps: 1) First, build a list. 2) Second, call the list. Step 1: Building the list. In order to get a ton of people involved in your campaigns, you need a list of hundreds or thousands of students who are interested in getting involved. Here are some good ways to build a list.
  • Class announcements – These are a great way to build the visibility of your organization, talk to a ton of students at once about your campaigns, and give them the opportunity to sign up to volunteer.
  • Tabling – This is a great way to recruit volunteers while also getting campaign work done at the same time – for example, you can table to collect petition signatures on your campaign AND to sign up volunteers.
Step 2: Calling the list. Emails are a good way to contact people, but people are more likely to agree to volunteer if you talk to them on the phone (face-to-face is even better!). You should call potential volunteers, find out why they’re interested in your campaign, and personally invite them to volunteer.
  • Organize a phonebank – These are the best way to call a ton of people, and way more fun than calling by yourself. Get together a bunch of people, order some pizza and play some music, and call through your whole list of volunteers together.