Understand and Respond to Volunteer Needs Quickly with These Tips

Finding skilled, committed volunteers is one of the top challenges facing nonprofits today. According to a recent survey, 42% of nonprofit professionals struggle to attract volunteers with the right skills, and 40% have trouble finding those who are truly mission-aligned.

Ensuring that your nonprofit presents an inviting destination for volunteers, and then provides them with a great experience, is beyond essential. And fulfilling your volunteering needs begins with fully understanding and accommodating their needs.

LinkedIn offers a suite of tools that can help organizations not only recruit more effectively, but better understand, engage, and retain the right volunteer talent over time. Here’s how your nonprofit can use LinkedIn to identify volunteer needs, promote opportunities, and continuously refine your outreach and engagement strategies.

1. Define and understand volunteer needs with LinkedIn tools

Start by clarifying what you need. Use internal conversations and past volunteer experiences to build ideal volunteer personas: What skills, motivations, and characteristics define your best volunteers?

Then use LinkedIn search and Recruiter to:

• Identify common traits among existing or high-performing volunteers.

• Explore job titles, skills, and industries that align with your open roles.

• Use filters (e.g., location, education, interests) to build lists of high-potential candidates.

Pro tip: Save candidate profiles and use LinkedIn's "Find more people like this" feature to scale your search.

2. Share volunteer-focused brand messaging

Your nonprofit’s employer brand plays a key role in attracting volunteers and paid employees alike. This is an opportunity to portray a strong and fulfilling culture that speaks directly to the needs and wants of potential team members.

Work to develop a volunteer value proposition (VVP) that will guide your messaging in a way that centers on the benefits and impacts of volunteering with your nonprofit. Your VVP can convey things like the opportunities and resources you offer volunteers, the value of hands-on experience on a resume, and the networking upside of meeting other like-minded people.

Once you’ve built out your VVP, share this message across:

• Your LinkedIn Page (in your About section and regular posts)

• A LinkedIn Career Page (if applicable), especially in the "Life" tab

• Individual team members' LinkedIn profiles

Volunteer-focused content can take shape in the form of testimonials, spotlights, event highlights, impact recaps, and "Why volunteer with us" content that blends mission, skill-building, and community.

When crafting your VVP messaging and deciding what to prioritize, consider the circumstances and challenges faced by those in your specific region or volunteer pool. As highlighted in Open Access Government’s recent analysis on the U.S. decline of volunteering, and how to counteract it:

"Volunteer opportunities must reflect people’s lived realities. Nonprofits and governments in low-income communities must think carefully about removing barriers to volunteering – such as time, transportation, or mistrust. Flexible roles, community-driven programming, and inclusive outreach are essential for rebuilding volunteer engagement. Communities need durable, resilient systems supported by appropriate government policies to withstand economic and cultural shocks."

3. Use LinkedIn analytics to monitor engagement

There’s no better way to understand volunteer needs and preferences than by simply listening to the people whom you aim to attract. LinkedIn’s insight-rich platform provides ample opportunity to absorb information directly from the source, and incorporate it into your volunteer outreach and engagement strategies.

LinkedIn Page analytics can provide you with a world of helpful info about who is engaging with your content and how. Dig in to understand:

• Who’s engaging with your posts.

• Follower demographics and interests.

• Top-performing content by format and topic.

Over time, this data can help you optimize messaging for different audience segments, refine your ideal volunteer profiles, and identify new opportunities to break through with a resonant message.

4. Recruit directly with precision

Once you have a clear understanding of your organization's volunteer needs, and a detailed picture of what your volunteers need to thrive, it’s time to use LinkedIn for identifying and sparking conversations with volunteer candidates. This is what makes the platform so valuable for your recruitment efforts — you can use LinkedIn not only to understand those needs, but to act upon them.

When you're ready to fill a role, LinkedIn makes it easy to:

• Post volunteer opportunities via the Volunteer Marketplace (integrated with VolunteerMatch).

• Use the “Open to Volunteer” feature to find members interested in volunteering opportunities.

• Write clear, enticing descriptions that show impact and commitment.

• Reach out directly using InMail (via LinkedIn Recruiter) or personal messages.

Pro tip: Search for users who follow your Page to find people who already care about your mission.

5. Keep volunteers coming back

The needs of volunteers evolve over time, so it’s important to maintain a dynamic view of their challenges and how you can support them. This underscores the mission-critical nature of relationship-building and persistent engagement.

According to research published in the Journal of Marketing, “akin to consumers, volunteers have relationships with nonprofit brands [...] these relationships have recently become more diverse as individuals increasingly look for more ephemeral and distant forms of involvement.”

The article also notes that many volunteer relationships fall into the “NGNF” (neither growing nor fading) bucket — characterized by “nonescalating, episodic engagement” — and they argue that nonprofits can benefit from embracing this new reality rather than constantly striving for relationship growth.

Blending together an approach that keeps your nonprofit brand on the radar of NGNF volunteers, while also encouraging growth and new activations, holds the key to a volunteer management style befitting a wide range of individuals and motivations. 

Here’s how LinkedIn can help you stay engaged on all fronts:

• Tag volunteers in appreciation posts and prompt them to share.

• Start conversations in the comments and through direct messages.

• Highlight volunteers in ongoing content to build community pride.

Pro tip: Consider offering LinkedIn Learning access for long-term volunteers as a benefit and retention incentive.

Develop a strategy to meet the needs of volunteers, and your cause

Recruiting great volunteers doesn’t stop with a job post. It’s an ongoing process of learning what your volunteers care about, speaking their language, and building lasting relationships. With the right strategy and tools, LinkedIn can help your nonprofit meet volunteer needs more effectively than ever.

Explore more ways to grow your volunteer program with online tactics and techniques.