Volunteer Scoring System: Increasing Member Volunteerism with Community
So your organization has established a series of volunteer opportunities and members are joining in droves. Now, how does your organization capture the amazing volunteer moments your members complete, and guide them to the next step in their volunteer journey, increasing their engagement?
Creating a complete volunteer picture for every member can help you personalize each member’s experience. It also helps you entice them to get involved again because you know what they’re interested in, and what level of commitment they might be ready for.
That’s where a volunteer point system or scoring system can help – and Higher Logic Thrive has just the tools to make this process easy!
What is a Volunteer Scoring or Point System?
When it comes to supporting volunteer programs, especially within an online community, the best-case scenario is being able to track individuals’ volunteering efforts, their engagement with your volunteer program overall, and the impact on your organization.
But you have a lot of different volunteer tasks – how can you compare them or tally up member involvement? One way is by assigning points to your different volunteer types based on the time commitment and experience level needed to complete the opportunity.
Here’s how it works in Higher Logic Thrive’s Volunteer Manager:
Time-Based Points
Decide point values based on the time it takes to perform the volunteer task. Example: If your shortest opportunity/activity takes 15 minutes to complete, 1 point = 15 minutes; so an hour-long volunteer time-commitment would equal 4 points.
Experience Multiplier
Time-based points are then multiplied by an experience multiplier to scale the difference between a simple, unqualified task and one that requires skills or previous experience.
Volunteer Scoring with Violet the Volunteer Manager
Below, we’ll explore a few examples for how you can apply this scoring system for your members and their activities.
CASE EXAMPLE: Violet recently set up her association’s volunteer program within the online community. It includes a dedicated page for volunteer news, event updates and the latest opportunities open for members to sign up and provide feedback. In an effort to track how activities and volunteers are doing, Violet has put together a few volunteer types with scoring examples she will share with her team.
Violet’s Volunteer Types
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Brian the Blogger
Brian the Blogger
- Member for 5 years
- Part of organization’s young professionals network
- Recent volunteer activity: Published 3 in-depth posts on community site (if he put the same effort into a volunteer blog role the organization offers he could collect: 3 hours + 2 skill multiplier = 24 points)
What’s next? Brian isn’t yet in the association’s community volunteer pool, but Violet noticed how active he is on the community and the quality of his writing. She invites him to opt into the volunteer pool on the online community so he can be notified about upcoming writing opportunities for the organization’s blog. She points out that involvement would qualify him for volunteer points and rewards, like discounts on events.
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Committee Courtney
Committee Courtney
- Member for 10 years
- Beta tester for the organization’s community launch a few years ago
- Joined and now serves as chair on communications committee
- Recent volunteer activity: Volunteered to help publish a white paper for a social media committee (10 hours + 4.0 skill multiplier = 160 points)
What’s next? Courtney signed up for the social media committee’s white paper project through the volunteering system on the community. She was also recommended for a similar project by a community peer, so Violet now has this volunteer history in the system. An upcoming industry conference needs session speakers, so Violet asks a few board members to reach out and suggest Courtney signs up for this more involved volunteer opportunity.
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Bettina the Board Member
Bettina the Board Member
- Member for 20 years
- Served on two committees for industry policy and government relations
- Integral in helping to build up and manage an annual fly-in day for member meetings
- Serves on the board of directors
- Recent volunteer activity: Has served on the board for one year (includes meetings, project reviews and research—100 hours + 5.0 multiplier = 2,000 points)
What’s next? Violet hopes that Bettina will continue to be an organization and community advocate and has reached out to suggest they work together bringing more board activities to the volunteer system, such as setting up the annual fly-in day as a volunteer opportunity for those who wish to help out with planning and logistics. Bettina can bridge the gap between the online community and the other board members by encouraging the board of directors to join volunteer activities through the community, like committee meetings and speaker opportunities.
Putting Points into Action
Work out a system that makes the most sense for your organization. Functions such as time, experience level and dollar rate/value per opportunity can be adjusted to show value levels for different volunteer types and programs. An added bonus: this type of in-depth tracking could also prove ROI produced from your volunteer programs.
You can also think about ways to reward members for the volunteer points they’ve collected, such as discounts on association events, exclusive access to resources, or association-branded merchandise.
Volunteer Management Made Easy
Higher Logic Thrive’s Volunteer Manager tools are a great time-saver for associations running volunteer programs. Automate processes and volunteer communication, create a thriving volunteer community, and easily measure and report on your volunteer programs impact with an intuitive system that makes it simple to find, track, and reward member engagement.
