Recruiting Volunteer Hosts

How to empower your supporters to volunteer to create events for your organization.

Updated over a week ago

Event campaigns provide you with the option to empower your supporters to volunteer to host an event for your organization. As of September 2020, event campaigns are available for all organizations on Mobilize.

There are four key steps to recruiting hosts:

A) Ask supporters to host

Even before you have an event campaign ready for your supporters, Mobilize can start recruiting potential volunteers to host events for your organization. You can control this by:

  1. Going to the Event Campaigns → Settings page (mobilize.us/dashboard/YOUR_ORG_GOES_HERE/event-campaigns/settings/)

  2. Enabling the “Ask attendees if they are interested in hosting future events” switch

Learn more about Event Campaign Settings.

If activated, Mobilize will recruit hosts for you in multiple ways including:

  1. Create a Host Interest Form for your organization and link to it from the top right corner of your feed

  2. Occasionally ask volunteers if they are interested in hosting via email and SMS when asking them for feedback about an event

Once someone volunteers to host events, we’ll send them an email with your event campaigns (if there are any active right now) and send your organization an email letting you know they volunteered so you can reach out to them directly if you’d like.

On the Event Campaign → Settings page you can also customize:

  1. The blurb that appears at the top of the Host Interest Form and in the confirmation email

  2. What email address the host commit emails are sent to at your organization

If you’d prefer to see everyone who committed in bulk you can download the Volunteer export on the Exports page (mobilize.us/dashboard/YOUR_ORG_GOES_HERE/exports/) and use these fields:

  1. committed_to_host_at - When the volunteer committed to host (if they did)

  2. host_commitment_source - How they committed to host (Email ask, SMS, Host Interest Form, etc…)

  3. [beta] num_events_created - The number of events they’ve hosted

  4. [beta] most_recent_event_created_at - When they most recently made an event

Based on these configurations, Mobilize will start recruiting hosts for you. We recommend setting these up now so that even if you don’t make an event campaign until the distant future, you have a set of people who have volunteered and are ready to go for when you do!

B) Set up event campaigns

Next you’ll want to create an event campaign. An event campaign is a template event for a certain set of events you’d like to encourage people to make, like ‘Local Book Club Discussion’.

1. Create a new event campaign

Go to the Event Campaigns page (mobilize.us/dashboard/YOUR_ORG_GOES_HERE/event-campaigns/) and tap New Event Campaign

2. Set Event Campaign Visibility

The Who can find this event campaign and submit events? setting will affect if supporters can discover the event campaign:

  • Anyone from public: Choose this if you want any supporter to be able to volunteer to host an event for this campaign Mobilize will help surface this campaign to your supporters on the Host Interest form and in other spots

  • Anyone with link: Choose this if you want to only share this event campaign with certain supporters or organizers. Mobilize won’t promote this automatically.

3. Decide who should approve events

The Who can approve events? setting will affect if supporters events need to be approved before they go live. Events submitted by Admins, Organizers, and Trusted Hosts do not need to be approved.

  • Admins only: Choose this if you want your admins to need to approve each event submitted by a supporter (a volunteer host)

  • Admins and moderators: Choose this if you’d also like to enable certain supporters to approve events

  • No approval needed: Choose this if you want supporters to be able to make events without them needing to be approved at all

4. Set good defaults

5. Share your event campaign

After you make the Event Campaign, Mobilize will give you the option to email all the people who have expressed interest in hosting in the past or have already hosted for you. This is a great way for you to quickly reach a set of people who are interested in hosting (and a benefit of starting to see who is interested before even making your first campaign).

In addition to that we encourage you to share your event campaign link far and wide!

C) Give guidance to hosts

For a lot of your volunteer hosts, this will be their first time hosting an event. So we encourage you to provide them with a lot of guidance.

1) Host Toolkit: We recommend making a Host Toolkit. We’ve made some materials with all the information a Volunteer Host would need. Make a copy and add your branding:

2) Training Event. Another thing we recommend is have a regularly scheduled Training Event. If you set your training event on the "Event Campaigns" -> "Settings" page then we'll automatically encourage both potential hosts and new hosts to attend.

Your event must be a shifted event, and we recommend that it's virtual so that people can attend from anywhere. We'll ask people after they commit to host to sign up and if they make an event for the first time and haven't attended training in the past.

We'll also ask volunteer hosts to sign up for training after they make an event if they've never been to training before.

These training asks have increased people attending training by 75%, so we definitely recommend you set the training event if you have one.

3) Reach Out: Additionally, you may want to reach out to hosts after they make their event to answer any questions on their mind. You'll have their phone number and email address.

D) Ask if they want to host again

After the event, we encourage you to check out the feedback the attendees left and reach out to the volunteer host to thank them and see how it went.

If your Event Campaign still has more than a week left and you've allowed hosts to host multiple shifts, then we'll automatically ask the host via SMS the next day if they'd like to add another shift a week later at the same time. And if your Event Campaign runs for long enough, we'll even ask if they want to host it weekly for the next month.

You can also configure a specific Next Event Campaign that we can ask people to host for via SMS. Learn more here.

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We're excited to help you reach your volunteer host goals! If you have any questions, reach out to [email protected]

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