{"id":811,"date":"2015-02-17T13:46:36","date_gmt":"2015-02-17T21:46:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/?p=811"},"modified":"2021-07-25T16:11:02","modified_gmt":"2021-07-25T23:11:02","slug":"marketinghelp","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/2015\/02\/marketinghelp\/","title":{"rendered":"Marketing staff: either help promote volunteer engagement or GET OUT OF THE WAY"},"content":{"rendered":"<a href=\"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/06\/coyote1.gif\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-832\" src=\"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/06\/coyote1.gif\" alt=\"logo\" width=\"138\" height=\"157\" \/><\/a>My blog today is actually for public relations and marketing staff at nonprofits, rather than those managers of volunteer programs. And my message is this: <strong>either help promote your organization\u2019s volunteer engagement OR GET OUT OF THE WAY.<\/strong>\n\nI talk to people managing their organization\u2019s volunteer engagement activities &#8211; recruiting volunteers, supporting those volunteers, creating the majority of opportunities for those volunteers, helping other staff engage with those volunteers in their work, etc. &#8211; and among the many complaints I hear about challenges to their success is this one: <strong>the public relations and marketing staff won\u2019t support me.<\/strong>\n\n<strong>Those leading volunteer engagement at your organization need a variety of support from marketing and public relations staff:<\/strong>\n<ul>\n \t<li>in using the organization\u2019s Facebook page, blog, web site and other online activities to recruit volunteers and tout the accomplishments of such<\/li>\n \t<li>in reaching out to the media about what volunteers are doing<\/li>\n \t<li>in connecting media to those working with volunteers at the organization when the media says they want to do a story about volunteerism<\/li>\n \t<li>in understanding when volunteers are doing something particularly special or innovative, or staff working with such are, such that it would be worthy of external attention (or internal attention, for that matter)<\/li>\n \t<li>in including information about the organization\u2019s volunteer engagement in all traditional publications, including paper newsletters and annual reports<\/li>\n \t<li>in talking about volunteer engagement as more than just <a href=\"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/2014\/12\/16\/cncs\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">the monetary value of volunteer hours<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\nYet, I hear from staff again and again that the outreach staff won\u2019t create a link on the home page to information on volunteering (though they will regarding donating money, no problem!), that they won\u2019t include any volunteer-related messages on Facebook, that they won\u2019t use any photos from a recent volunteer engagement event in outreach materials, and that they will include information about volunteerism in the annual report only regarding <a href=\"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/2014\/12\/16\/cncs\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">the monetary value of the volunteer time given<\/a>.\n\nPublic relations and marketing staff: if you are not going to create a detailed strategy for supporting your organization\u2019s engagement of volunteers through all of your various outreach methods, then let the manager of that engagement do it him or herself, and stay out of the way as they execute that strategy. If you aren\u2019t going to include information about volunteer recruitment and accomplishment in social media channels as often as you do about fundraising campaigns, then say nothing as staff in charge of managing volunteers at your organization create their own blogs, web sites, Facebook pages, Twitter accounts and Instagram or Flickr accounts to share the information they want out.\n\nWhat would be FAR better than forcing managers of volunteers to do marketing and public relations on their own? If you, public relations and marketing staff, sat down with the staff that work with volunteers at your organization and said, \u201cHow can I support you? Tell me what you\u2019re doing. Let\u2019s meet once a month and talk about it.\u201d What you might find is that, instead of additional work, you get much-needed information to raise your organization&#8217;s\u00a0profile online and in the media. Maybe volunteers are taking amazing photos of your organization\u2019s work that you could use in a variety of ways. Perhaps there is a really marvelous story waiting for you to discover: maybe your organization is <a href=\"http:\/\/virtualvolunteering.wikispaces.com\/examples\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">engaging in virtual volunteering<\/a>\u00a0in some really innovative ways, or is involving someone as an online volunteer who could never do so onsite. Maybe some hot current trend, like <a href=\"http:\/\/www.coyotecommunications.com\/volunteer\/microvolunteering.shtml\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">micro volunteering<\/a>, is happening at your organization but you don&#8217;t even know it. Maybe volunteer engagement has helped your organization <a href=\"http:\/\/www.coyotecommunications.com\/volunteer\/value.shtml\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">engage with communities or demographics you never would have reached otherwise<\/a>. An organization that involves volunteers can be seen as more transparent and open to the community than one that doesn\u2019t &#8211; are you leveraging that image properly in your outreach work?\n\nNo more excuses, public relations and marketing staff: support your staff that recruit and engage with volunteers &#8211; or get out of the way and let them do their own publicity themselves.\n\nThis message brought to you by: Grumpy Jayne.\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignleft\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"50\" height=\"50\" class=\"wp-image-4685\" src=\"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/donate_icon_small.jpg\" alt=\"\" \/><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n \n\nIf you have benefited from this blog or other parts of\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.coyotebroad.com\/\">my web site<\/a>\u00a0and would like to\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.coyotebroad.com\/me\/payme.shtml\">support<\/a>\u00a0the time that went into\u00a0researching information, developing material, preparing articles, updating pages, etc. (I receive no funding for this work),\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.coyotebroad.com\/me\/payme.shtml\"><strong>here is how you can help<\/strong><\/a>.\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My blog today is actually for public relations and marketing staff at nonprofits, rather than those managers of volunteer programs. And my message is this: either help promote your organization\u2019s volunteer engagement OR GET OUT OF THE WAY. I talk to people managing their organization\u2019s volunteer engagement activities &#8211; recruiting volunteers, supporting those volunteers, creating [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[20],"tags":[4,64,195,294,991,9,990,346,992,943,650,993],"class_list":["post-811","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-community-volunteer-engagement","tag-blogging","tag-blogs","tag-facebook","tag-marketing","tag-mission-based","tag-nonprofits","tag-not-for-profits","tag-outreach","tag-pr","tag-public-relations","tag-social-media","tag-volunteer-recruitment"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3fFJB-d5","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/811","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=811"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/811\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6450,"href":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/811\/revisions\/6450"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=811"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=811"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coyotecommunications.com\/coyoteblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=811"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}