RECRUITMENT

There are a couple of important things to bear in mind to be able to successfully recruit volunteers into your club:

• show enthusiasm towards volunteer contributions;
• try to understand why they volunteer and make sure you try to meet their individual needs;
• show that you believe that what they are doing is valuable and makes a difference.

Know the roles

You need to be aware of the gaps within your club when you set out to recruit e.g. there is little point in aiming a campaign at one audience when their suitability for that role is questionable. Directly targeting a group of people with the necessary skills/experience/interest is the most effective method of recruitment.    

Find the people

To find volunteers for your club you need to successfully market the club to make people want to invest time in it.  People want to feel that they are making a difference, so you need to sell the reasons for this role and what will happen if this vacancy is not filled.  You need to bring the role alive and describe to people what it will involve in terms of time and effort.  It’s important to also mention the difference (the outcome) this role will make to the club/community e.g. enable a new age group team to be formed as a result of one more volunteer.  One of the crucial aspects to sell is what they will get in return for volunteering e.g new friends, a new past-time/hobby, a new skill.

Role descriptions

The important volunteer roles to get started are listed within the first section of this website and include:

• Chair;
• Secretary;
• Treasurer;
• Welfare Officer.

Once you have these people in place you may want to look at better supporting and/or expanding an area of your club e.g. junior section.  To help you achieve this it is worth looking at recruiting a Volunteer Co-ordinator.  This volunteer helps to organise and develop sections within the club e.g. a junior section to make sure it has enough volunteers to run effectively/efficiently.  An example role description for a Volunteer Co-ordinator can be found here.

Once you are established, you may want to consider expanding the volunteer roles within your club.  A Publicity Officer Job Description template is on the right.  For more information about other roles that could benefit your club, click on the 'other roles' page of Running Sports website.

Committees

It’s important that there is a clear structure in place for committees to ensure that volunteers know exactly where they sit within the club structure and what is expected of them.  On the panel on the right is an example Junior Committee -  roles & responsibilities and a pictorial illustration of this.  This can easily be amended to suit your specific club’s needs.