Many development professionals work in small shops. Fortunately, you can increase your capacity by asking volunteers to take on leadership roles in your fundraising initiatives. The benefit? According to Penelope Burke, author of Donor Centered Fundraising, volunteers can have a powerful influence on donor retention and orchestrate significantly higher gifts. In a 2009 study she conducted, Burke found that 43% of donors said they would give to an organization if asked by someone they knew personally or by a leadership volunteer. Even more impressive, over 84% of donors said they’d give again if certain criteria were met, one being a personal thank you note from a leadership volunteer.

Here are some ways you can utilize volunteers in your fundraising campaigns and promote their involvement:

• Invite volunteers to serve on your campaign’s leadership committee. Note that a request from the head of your organization or a respected member of your community increases the likelihood that your volunteers will say yes! (Be sure you clearly define expectations and the time commitment involved.)
• Create campaign-specific letterhead that includes the names of your leadership volunteers, showing donors that your volunteers are invested in the success of your campaign.
• Upon receipt of a gift, ask volunteer leaders to make a thank you call within 24 hours.
• Ask a volunteer to host a reception for prospects in their home or office.
• Profile a leadership volunteer in your organization’s newsletter or magazine.
• Invite volunteers to send a hand-written note to first-time donors.
• Ask volunteers to be a table or team captain for your next event. (Volunteers can extend invitations to others within their circles of influence, thereby increasing your reach.)
• Invite leadership volunteers to participate in a prospect rating session—they should be able to provide valuable first-hand knowledge about your prospects.
• Include volunteers in your personal solicitation visits. Donors are influenced by volunteer commitment to your mission.
• Hold an appeal kick-off event, inviting the previous year’s donors, and introduce the members of your volunteer leadership committee. Creating opportunities for your donors to meet and interact with your volunteer leaders will increase donor interest in giving.

Volunteer leadership is integral in any successful fundraising campaign. When planning your next event or appeal, consider how the use of volunteers can expand your reach and increase your fundraising efforts. You’ll be glad you did!

As mentioned earlier, our integration with Wufoo Forms is quite a time saver. Today, we’ll take a look at how you can set up Wufoo and LGL to collect volunteer hours online, and have them automatically saved into your LGL database.

Step 1: Build your form in Wufoo

Assuming that you already have a Wufoo account, you can set up your form like this:

If you don’t have a Wufoo account, or if you have questions about how the integration works in general, see our full Wufoo Integration Guide for more information.

Step 2: Connect the form to LGL

From the Settings > Integration Settings page, you can add new Wufoo forms. In this case, we’ll select the “Volunteer Hours” form:

To ensure that all the data is transferred appropriately, we can map the fields from the form, like so:

As a final part of the setup, we want to “Enable” the connection between Wufoo and LGL for this form. To do this, we check off the “Enabled” checkbox, and then set the Queue to “Volunteering”.

Step 3: Review the volunteering queue

With all of this set up, now we can start collecting information from our volunteers. They can do this online at any time, and you can either embed the form in your website or point them to a version hosted by Wufoo. Once the submissions start rolling in, you will want to review and approve them individually.

To get to the volunteering queue, first click on the Activity tab and then on the Volunteering option, from which point you can select the Volunteering queue view from the View: menu:

If there is no match found for the constituent based on the record matching preferences you’ve defined (name and email by default), it is a good practice to manually look for and set the constituent for each record. To set the constituent, click on the icon next to the LGL Constituent field, search for the constituent by name, and select the matching constituent record you want to use for this record, as appropriate:

Once you have set the constituent, you can save the record by clicking the Save button, and the volunteering hours will be automatically posted to the constituent’s record:

Or, if you don’t want to save the volunteering submission because it is not valid or for some other reason, you can click the Reject button to remove it from the active queue.