Animal Welfare Professionals

Hey everyone,

I am  looking for some creative and low maintenance ways to share volunteer opportunities with our group. Right now, we were emailing everyone who's ever submitted a volunteer application every couple of weeks with a list of upcoming needs. We also post in a private Facebook group but that only includes our most active core volunteers.

The problem?The email engagement is terrible  barely anyone opens or replies  and in the end, it is  the same few reliable folks picking up the tasks anyway. Rather than spending more time trying to overhaul our newsletter, I m thinking it might be smarter to try a new approach altogether.

Personally, I think a more open or public facing Facebook group would work better since members would get notifications when new posts go up. But there is the obvious limitation: not everyone uses Facebook, and we don't currently know what platforms our volunteers do use. I plan to send out a quick survey to ask, but I'm not holding my breath for a big response there either.

For context, we don't have a dedicated volunteer coordinator, so anything we implement needs to be low effort, inexpensive  and we don't need it to track hours - just something that gets the word out effectively.

Are there any tools or platforms you have  used that make it easy to share volunteer opportunities and get a decent response rate without requiring a ton of oversight?

Thanks in advance for any ideas.