Citizen Works - Tools for Organizing

From the first person who volunteers to help you hand out flyers, to the 1,000 who show up to at your first organized direct action, you and the other members of your group must be vigilant in contacting and activating every single student who indicates a desire to join the group or work for a campaign. If you do not use the volunteers you have, you will not recruit any new ones.

Have regular meetings at a regular location and regular time, each with a specific agenda that ensures that at every meeting something solid is decided and some action is organized. Your group should always be in the process of researching, planning, carrying out, or wrapping up some campaign or event. You cannot recruit people to an inactive organization, and you cannot improve your campus and community just by talking about it.

At your first couple of meetings, you should strive to develop a recruitment strategy and to come to a consensus on what the group's mission is to be. Do not allow yourself to personally define the group.

When you see a new face at a meeting or event, make sure that person is immediately incorporated into whatever is happening. Talk to the new person as soon as you can and introduce her/him to the other people that are there. Make every effort to ensure that new volunteers feel welcomed and have a go-around of introductions at the start of every meeting. And don't forget a sign-up sheet!

Call new volunteers within 24 to 48 hours. If people want more information, get it to them within a similar time frame. Avoid the tendency to be become too dependent on e-mail for outreach. While e-mail is an excellent way to maintain communication between already active group members, it is overused used as an initial outreach tool. The effectiveness of a personal phone call to a potential new member of your organization cannot be overly emphasized.

As soon as your group has two or more members, you should begin distributing responsibility. Everyone, including you, should have certain projects assigned to her, but no one should be overwhelmed. Each person should know her role, should be clear about its beginning and ending, and should know how it fits into the group's larger plans and goals. Find out what each volunteer's personal goals are and how much she can do, and try to assign tasks accordingly. Never allow someone to think that she is not useful or not needed.

A good way of delegating tasks is to form several working groups led by members of your core group (i.e., coordinators). Coordinators will be responsible for running his or her working group and keeping track of all the members that want to help with that group. By creating more leadership roles within the organization, you create more opportunities for leaders to develop--a primary goal of every successful campaign. And remember, organize yourself out of a job - because then you win.

Once you have a small group of enthusiastic and empowered members, you can much more effectively recruit others. What will draw the most attention, and the most people, are the actual campaigns that your group promotes. Your strategy for recruiting will use the same activities as your strategy for organizing and carrying out a campaign: tabling, canvassing, using the media, etc.

You want to immediately establish activities that will bring in people, use people, and not require a great deal of effort to organize.

Expand your outreach! ->