Example of Volunteer Centers using Yelp.com and Facebook

I had to share two examples of Volunteer Centers using & appearing in Web 2.0 sites. The first is of an unclaimed Volunteer Center listing on Yelp.com: If you work at the Arlington County Volunteer Center, you might want to visit the link and click on "edit business info" to claim the page.

The second example is of a Volunteer Center with a Facebook profile page. Great job the United Way of the Greater Seacoast!

Keep up the good work folks!

Who is going to be the first to join or create a volunteer Meetup.com group near you? Here are some waiting for good volunteering suggestions:

• The Chicago Volunteer Meetup Group
• Random Acts of Kindness and Nonprofit Meetup Group in Dallas, TX
• DC Volunteers -460 members at last count!
• The New York Volunteer Meetup - last count 287 members!
• Saint Louis Volunteer Group -301 members

See if there is a Volunteer Meetup near you, join and provide opportunities for the group, or create one of your own and help the members plan volunteer activities!

Free Online Marketing Classes

Come one, come all, and learn how to adjust your web content and online opportunities to attract more volunteers!

Online Marketing 101: Can Volunteers Searching on the Internet Find You?

Learn how to drive volunteers to your website and online opportunities.

Unless you work on optimizing your Volunteer Center’s website and marketing it to search engines (Google, Yahoo, Ask.com or MSN/Live), volunteers searching the web WILL NOT FIND YOU. The steps are easy,
and you’ll leave with steps and templates to get started.

You can register for the training that works best for your schedule at the following link: https://pointsoflight.webex.com/meet/kwatier

Online Marketing 201: Benchmarking your Site, Registering with Local Search and Using Web 2.0 Communities

Have you attended the basic Search Engine Marketing Training and you're ready for more? You will learn about how you measure how effective your website is at attracting traffic (based on how well your competitors are doing), and then dive into how to register for local search engines and how you can use online communities like Facebook, Gather.com,and Craigslist.org to promote your volunteer opportunities.

You can register for the training that works best for your schedule at the following link: https://pointsoflight.webex.com/meet/kwatier

Recruiting Volunteers by Using Facebook

Considering my post yesterday was about you can use Gather.com to recruit older NPR type folks, I figured I would follow up with a post about how to use Facebook to promote your volunteer opportunities to a younger crowd.

So here we go.
1. Create Personal Facebook account
2. Join your regional/city network
3. Create an event (on the left navigation). Make sure to pick which network to broadcast it to.
4. You can either use Facebook's guest list feature, or put the 1-800-Volunteer.org URL address for the volunteer opportunity in the "Description" field to track folks who have signed up.

Very simple. You've just reached out to a portion of the 34 million users that use Facebook.