Organizing Volunteers 101

How to Coordinate Volunteers at an Event

If you've got a charity event in mind—whether it's a food drive, weekend bag packing event or something else—you'll likely need to recruit and organize volunteers. We've got some simple tips and tools that will help you coordinate volunteers at your charity event.

(If you're hosting a food drive, you might also be interested in our blog that has a food drive organization checklist and plenty of advice.)

How to Recruit Volunteers

The first step of hosting a volunteering event is to recruit volunteers. Though it can seem like a difficult task, these ideas will help you recruit volunteers in your community:

• Contact different groups/organizations you're a part of
• See if you can contact someone in these groups with an e-mailing list to spread the news
• Post flyers in community centers, grocery stores, libraries, places of worship, on Facebook
• Create a Facebook event
• Reach out to places of worship and charitable organizations to see if they'll publicize your event

Tips for Organizing Volunteers

If you're worried about organizing volunteers at your event—don't be! They chose to participate after all and are dedicated to doing good, so they'll be pretty cooperative and helpful. But, if you're still looking for ideas and advice, look no further:

• Think about people who have things in common and group them together
• Provide seating, beverages, food and bathroom breaks
• Put on background music to keep up morale
• Think about people's occupations and how their skills might be useful
• Have one or two people dedicated to fixing problems as they arise
• Give volunteers name tags so they know one another 
• Have a brief meeting before the event to go over details
• In this meeting, have people introduce themselves quickly
• Check on volunteers to see if they need anything every once in a while
• If a volunteer seems to work better alone, give them a one-person task

Tools to Help Coordinate Volunteers 

Technology has made organizing volunteers a lot easier to manage. These websites will help you coordinate your volunteers' schedules and tasks, making your life a lot easier:

• Google Drive

• You can share spreadsheets, information, flyers, videos and more with everyone on your team, and they can share all of this with each other, too
• SignUp
• You can share sign-up sheets, calendars and more online for free using this website, and volunteers will be able to view all of their options before signing up
• When I Work
• This free site allows all of your volunteers to input their schedules and find what time works best for meetings and more
• SurveyMonkey
• You'll be able to send out custom-created surveys and polls via email or web link to your volunteers
• Zoom
• If you need to meet with your volunteer team virtually, try Zoom, a video calling system with many helpful features

We hope that these tips and tools help you coordinate your volunteering events and would like to thank you for getting involved and making a difference! If you have any other suggestions, please comment below! We'd love to share helpful tools with other volunteers and coordinators.