5 More Ad-Hoc Volunteer Ideas You Can Use

Matt Baer offered five short-term, ad-hoc volunteer jobs he’d love to have in response to my meme on volunteerism (read other great responses here).

When you read Matt’s full five you’ll notice that he focused on identifying ones he says are not common and may in fact not even be out there. It was that comment in particular that caught my eye. Our volunteers don’t always want to the same old options. And sometimes they just don’t know what they want. So creating excitement for volunteering in our associations does take both creativity and conversations.

Through conversations with our members, we can learn of their interests which in turn may help us identify exciting new jobs through which we can then draw members into volunteering. This is where the creativity part comes. Once we have a list of interests, we get to brainstorm on new jobs — and new twists to current jobs.

So for example, Matt says he’d love to watch TV pilots for potential new shows. What if in our call for presentations we required video submissions (think informal videos, YouTube, Flip Camera). To view these, you could gather a group of members for viewing and have them rate the content idea and the speaker’s authenticity. This twist on the call for presentations accomplishes a couple of objectives. From a meeting planning perspective, it helps improve content quality when you see that the speaker can speak and truly has content not just a session idea.  It also engages your target audience for the event in the design process which in turn helps build attendance. Lastly, it offers a fun and useful ad-hoc volunteer role.

One way to consider getting this new, exciting list going is asking members to participate in your own meme on volunteering … crowdsourcing your own volunteer jobs list.

Let’s keep the list of fav volunteer jobs building – I’d like to send the tag out to a few other association profs to add their five favorite short-term volunteer jobs: Cynthia D’Amour, Jeff De Cagna, Mickie Rops, Sue Pelletier, and Dana Theus.