Resources to Build Strong Volunteer Teams
Expert guidance on everything you need to lead volunteers, including resources for recruiting, retaining, and recognizing volunteers who support your mission.
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Upcoming Webinars
Volunteer Recruitment Workshop Series
New Year, new recruitment plan! Join Jennifer Bennett, CVA for an in-depth workshop series to re-envision your volunteer recruitment strategy. Come with a volunteer opportunity in mind and evaluate the existing position description, build a volunteer persona specifically for that role, craft targeted recruitment messaging, use that message to create a volunteer opportunity on Idealist, and finally design a follow up communication strategy to keep interested prospective volunteers engaged. Each session is designed to build off the previous session, so please register and plan to watch the recording if you can't attend live.
Volunteer Recruitment Workshop Series Kick Off
Tuesday January 13th, 2026 | 11:00 a.m. Pacific Time/2:00 p.m. Eastern Time
Join Jennifer Bennett, CVA for a workshop series on recruiting volunteers. This one-hour kick off will outline the current trends and challenges in recruiting volunteers right now and introduce strategies for designing position descriptions, building volunteer personas, creating compelling recruitment messages, and developing follow up communications for prospective volunteers. Sign up for this Kick Off and the 4 individual workshops to re-imagine and redesign your volunteer recruitment strategy!
Volunteer Recruitment Workshop: Position Descriptions
Tuesday January 27th, 2026 | 11:00 a.m. Pacific Time/2:00 p.m. Eastern Time
This workshop will walk you through designing a volunteer position description you can use to create a volunteer persona, recruitment messaging, and follow up communications for prospective volunteers. We'll build on ideas and concepts introduced in the Volunteer Recruitment Workshop Kick Off. Please plan on attending or watching that session before attending this session. Come with a volunteer role or position in mind (and a copy of a position description if you have one) and Jennifer will walk you through updating it to help you recruit the right volunteers for the role.
Volunteer Recruitment Workshop: Volunteer Personas
Tuesday February 3rd, 2026 | 11:00 a.m. Pacific Time/2:00 p.m. Eastern Time
This workshop will walk you through a volunteer persona. A volunteer persona is an outline of an ideal volunteer - who they are, what they want to accomplish, and what matters to them. Once we have a persona (or two) developed for a volunteer role we can use it to create target recruitment messaging and build a follow up communication plan. We'll build on ideas and concepts introduced in the Volunteer Recruitment Workshop Kick Off, and the Position Description Workshop. Please plan on attending or watching those sessions before attending this session. Come with the position description(s) you've developed and you'll use them to build your volunteer persona.
Volunteer Recruitment Workshop: Recruitment Messaging
Tuesday February 10th, 2026 | 11:00 a.m. Pacific Time/2:00 p.m. Eastern Time
This workshop will walk you through developing a targeted, compelling recruitment message for an open volunteer role. Targeted messaging helps you attract the right volunteers to help you meet your mission. In this Workshop we'll use the Volunteer Persona you created to develop that target recruitment messaging and to lay the groundwork for a follow up communication plan. We'll build on ideas and concepts introduced in the Volunteer Recruitment Workshop Kick Off, and the Position Description and Volunteer Personas Workshops. Please plan on attending or watching those sessions before attending this session. Come with the position description(s) and volunteer persona(s) you've developed and you'll use those to build your targeted Recruitment Messaging.
Volunteer Recruitment Workshop: Recruiting on Idealist
Tuesday February 24th, 2026 | 11:00 a.m. Pacific Time/2:00 p.m. Eastern Time
This session will build on the previous workshops to help you take the recruitment messaging you've created from your Persona(s) to help you set up the perfect opportunity on Idealist. Please plan on attending or watching those sessions before attending this session. Come with the recruitment messaging you've developed and you'll use those to build your Volunteer Opportunity on Idealist.
Volunteer Recruitment Workshop: Follow Up Communications
Tuesday March 3rd, 2026 | 11:00 a.m. Pacific Time/2:00 p.m. Eastern Time
This workshop will walk you through developing a follow up communication plan after someone has expressed interest in a volunteer role. We'll discuss messaging, cadence, and explore tools to help automate this communication. This Workshop builds on ideas and concepts introduced in the Volunteer Recruitment Workshop Kick Off, and the Position Description, Volunteer Personas, and Recruitment Messaging Workshops. Please plan on attending or watching those sessions before attending this session. Come with everything you've developed so far and you'll use that work to build your Follow Up Communications plan.
Learn more about and register for the ongoing Volunteering Redefined webinar series here!
Past Webinars
Is Everyone Welcome Toolkit: Encouraging Volunteer Reflection
Take a deeper dive into the Is Everyone Welcome Toolkit and explore a tool specifically designed to help volunteers reflect on their work and experience with your organization. These types of exercise can help support volunteers as they navigate their biases and help them develop greater self-awareness, empathy, and understanding of their impact.
Co-Hosted with the Council for Certification in Volunteer Administration
Ethics and Decision Making When Leading Volunteers
Recording | Slides | Worksheet | Core Values and Principles
We've all been there - you're in a difficult situation with a volunteer and you don't know what to do. Sometimes it's just a situation where you can't make everyone happy, but sometimes you're in an ethical dilemma - torn between two or more of the core values for leading and managing volunteers. How do you know if you're in an ethical dilemma, and what should you do to ensure that you make the right decision?
Join Faiza Venzant, CVA, Executive Director for the Council for Certification in Volunteer Administration and Jennifer Bennett, CVA to learn about those core values and how to incorporate ethical decision making into your work. This highly interactive session will help you think through a real ethical dilemma faced by a leader of volunteers, and practice the steps needed to implement this practice in your own work.
Co-Hosted with the Council for Certification in Volunteer Administration
Volunteering Redefined
Engaging older adult volunteers in student success for 2025
Be a part of a new Learning Community designed specifically for leaders of volunteers engaging older adults in student success.
Is Everyone Welcome Toolkit
Build a more inclusive volunteer program
The Is Everyone Welcome Toolkit? contains best practices for promoting equity in volunteer administration.
The toolkit is an outcome of the Assessing Diversity and Equity in Volunteer Inclusion (ADEVI) project, a partnership between Arizona State University (ASU), and the Council for Certification in Volunteer Administration (CCVA), with support from AmeriCorps.
