No matter the size of your campaign, one fact remains: you are going to need and want volunteers to help you get elected.  Volunteers are the heart and soul of your campaign and to neglect this aspect of your run is to do yourself a great disservice.  Furthermore the poor usage of volunteers means that your campaign is not running as well as it should.  But where do you find volunteers and what do you do with them once you have them?

Let us begin at the beginning.  There are two types of volunteers – interns and the general public.  Each offer their own inherent advantages and disadvantages, but this is why management is so important and will be discussed later.

Once you run for office you or your campaign manager (depending on the size of your campaign when you start) need to get the word out quick that you are running and that you need help. When recruiting interns, speak with your party leaders to see if there are grants and colleges available to secure a paid intern for you at no cost to you.  If these do exist, submit the necessary paperwork to the grant and/or college so that your name is at the top of the list when students want to get involved. If you are unable to provide for a paid intern, still talk to local schools and your party to see if there are interested people who want to intern for you for free.

Finding volunteers, on the other hand, is much more of an organic process. Campaigns tend not to “seek out” volunteers, rather volunteers tend to approach the campaign on their own terms. Because this is much more organic, you must be ready to get contact information at any time.  For this reason you should always have volunteer sign-up sheets around you at all times. Sign up sheets should include the persons name, address, phone number, email, and check boxes asking what they may be interested in helping out with such as going door to door, making phone calls, helping with mailers, and distributing lawn signs; always be sure to include an “other” option.

You now have interns and volunteers! Great! Now what do you do with them? Remember that the role of each is different and, more specifically, that the role of the intern is to learn how campaigns work.  For this reason interns should be given more variety in what they do and greater access to the campaign compaired to a regular volunteer. Regardless, both interns and volunteers bring unique skill sets that you should take advantage of. This means getting to know your volunteers.

Some volunteers are great at talking to people – these people should be the ones that should go door to door and man tables at events.  Some people want to be helpful but are either too old or to busy to go out to events, they should make phone calls and stuff envelopes for you; still others may have a knack for numbers and data – these people should handle data input and management.

Again, you should know your volunteers to make sure that they don’t just think they are good with the public or putting in data.  One of the worst things that can happen is you have a volunteer unknowingly give out a bad message or distort data.

Finally, keep track of how often you have contacted volunteers and how often they have come out to help.  Everyone is different, but no one wants to be harassed about volunteering.  Play it by ear and contact volunteers only when you think it is appropriate.  Also, don’t forget that there may be times when you want to big pushes – plan how often you will take advantage of your volunteer list so that you get the maximum effect.

Interns are a different story, but that is another post…

Tags: Volunteers

This entry was posted by Curtis Haring on Saturday, July 4th, 2009 at 8:54 pm and is filed under Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.