## Introduction
This book is for anyone who wants to write a persuasive volunteer recruitment appeal. It’s for people who want to persuade potential volunteers to join their team, and it’s for those who already have volunteers and want to keep them coming back for more.
In this book, you’ll find:
– Tips to help you write an effective appeal
– A step-by-step guide on how to write your own volunteer recruitment appeals
You’ll also learn about the psychology of persuasion and how to use it to your advantage when writing an appeal. You’ll learn how to make your appeal as persuasive as possible, and you’ll be able to use the techniques in this book to persuade people to join your team, whether you’re recruiting new volunteers or persuading existing volunteers to stay with you for another year. You can use this book as a guide to writing your own recruitment appeals, or you can use it as a starting point for creating your own appeals. Either way, this book will give you the knowledge and skills you need to write effective recruitment appeals that will persuade your target audience to do what you want them to do – whether that’s to join you as a volunteer or to stay on as a member of your team for a few more months or even a few years!
If you’re new to the world of volunteer recruitment, you may be wondering why you should bother writing a recruitment appeal in the first place. After all, there are plenty of other things you could be doing with your time, right?
Well, yes and no. There are lots of reasons why you may want to write an appeal, but the main reason is that it’s one of the most effective ways to persuade someone to do something. In fact, research has shown that the more persuasive an appeal is, the more likely it is to persuade your audience to take the action you’re asking them to take. So, if you want to get the most out of your volunteer recruitment efforts, writing a persuasive appeal is the best way to do it. And that’s what this book is all about – persuading you to join a team, persuade your current volunteers to come back next year, or persuade your team to raise more money for a good cause. In other words, it’s about getting people to do things that they wouldn’t normally do, and that’s why it’s so important that you write your appeal in a way that will be persuasive to the people you’re trying to persuade.
Chapter 1
## Know your audience
Before you start writing your appeal, you first need to know who you’re writing it for. You need to understand who your audience is, what motivates them, and what they’re likely to want from you. This chapter will help you to do all of these things, and by the end of the chapter you’ll have a good idea of who your ideal volunteer is, why they might want to volunteer with you, and how you can persuade them to come on board.
Figure 1.1 This figure shows the different types of people you may need to persuade in your recruitment appeal, and the different approaches you can take to persuade each type of person to join or stay with your team.
Key words:persuade, motivate
The first step in writing an effective recruitment appeal is to know your audience. In this chapter, we’ll look at the different kinds of people who may be interested in volunteering with you. We’ll also look at some of the things that motivate people to volunteer, so that you can make sure you’re appealing to the right kind of person, and not just anyone who happens to apply to your team or to be a volunteer on one of your projects. Finally, we will look at a few different ways that you might persuade people, and we’ll show you how each of these approaches can be used to persuade different people in different ways to do different things. By the time you’ve finished reading the chapter, you should have a much better idea of the kind of people your appeal needs to persuade, and of the kinds of things you can do to persuade these people to take part in your team’s activities.