Volunteer Recruitment and Retention Kit

At the recent Community Engagement Forums, Volunteer Relations Project Officer Kevin White introduced the NSW RFS Volunteer Retention and Recruitment Kit.

As we say goodbye to Kevin, he shares some ideas on managing the challenges of recruitment and retention.

I would like to thank all attendees for their time and support for the upcoming recruitment and retention kit.

In the Forums we spoke about barriers to recruitment and retention, and what we have found that works to overcome them:

Recruitment

• How we ask the community to get involved will depend on the people in the community – know how they like to be contacted and use that medium. If the community is too large for the personal approach, consider using a variety of methods to get the results you need, both passive (signs, posters, letters etc) and active (door to door PIPs, community events etc)
• Review how you have previously asked the community to get involved and ensure you learn from what worked and what didn’t – a small amount of review time will greatly reduce the amount of effort needed as you are only using approaches that work
• Share the load – there are heaps of organisations and groups out there trying to get volunteers, consider discussing with other local brigades and or other volunteer organisations to run a recruitment and showcase day, where everyone can see the different types of roles and benefits
• Don’t re-invent the wheel – the kit contains lots of letters, checklists and templates for you to consider to give your new members and your recruitment process the support they need. Remember that the most successful recruitment approaches balance all of the brigade activities and pick the best windows of time around the calendar that we as a Service are most visible (ie. when doing local hazard reductions, when large events are occurring around the state and being shown on media etc.)

Retention

• Brigade structure (and flexible roles), member welfare, recognition, good communication, community networks, good leadership and keeping it interesting (training and operations) – these are the basic frameworks that can help brigades retain their members. What is your brigade doing in these areas?

By allowing members to give their honest feedback without judgement, and by allowing members to assist in coming up with solutions, brigade leaders stand the best chance of keeping their members motivated.

To keep brigades relevant it is imperative that the brigade devotes some effort to maintaining or building their community networks – in every discussion had around the state during the project, the brigades that stay strong keep themselves active, visible and important in their communities – some through having local community meetings at the shed, some by being the information hub for the community (putting out newsletters and running local community halls), and some by working hard to keep sending out the fire safety knowledge they have learnt over their volunteer careers to their friends and neighbours to help them gain an appreciation of how to keep themselves safer in the event of a major fire impacting on their community.

Once again I thank you for the time, effort and support I have been given during the project and through discussions with you at the Community Engagement Forums.

Cheers for now,

Kevin