Points of Coordination

In order to get students to actively participate in the recruitment of partners, it is necessary to make the volunteer activities attractive. Here, I will explain what to convey to students to win their hearts.

Communicating the background and purpose of activities to students

The most important part of effective recruitment is ensuring that students are well informed about the activity. It is important to explain not only the volunteer work itself, but also the circumstances behind it and the purpose of recruiting volunteers.

What kind of activities do you usually do?

What kind of activities are you or your organization doing? By explaining how often, where, how many people, for what purpose, and what is being done, students will be interested in the activity. Even if there is no activity record so far, but you want to plan an activity in the future, you can attract interest by showing the plan and purpose concretely.

What are the attractions of the activity?

Analyze and explain the attractiveness of the activity. For example, "By coming in contact with the natural environment, it is a valuable opportunity to forget the hustle and bustle of the city and feel a strong sense of nature", "By assigning roles to each member, you can feel that each person can contribute to the whole", "By making full use of skills that only a limited number of people can use, such as languages and programming, you can do unique work." and so on. It would be a good idea to look back on the real thrill of the activity based on your own experience.

why do you need volunteers?

What kind of meaning does volunteering have for that activity? By explaining this, students can understand that volunteers are important to the activity.

what can volunteers gain?

What are the outcomes of participating in the activity? Volunteering is often not just a charity work for students, as we'll see later. Even at such times, if students are shown that they gain a return, it will be beneficial for both the volunteer destination and the students, motivating them to participate more actively.

Overall, it can be said that it is important for students to understand the volunteer destination. At the Volunteer Center, we match students based on their interests so that they don't just participate. Therefore, if the volunteer destination is attractive to students, it will be easier for motivated students to gather, which will lead to benefits for both parties.

student characteristics

Next, I will list the characteristics of students at the V-station. Based on these characteristics, I hope to help you with better recruitment.

Not only one motive

Volunteering is often thought of as "charity". Of course, there are those who do volunteer work purely because they want to help people in need. However, not all volunteer participants are purely charitable.
For example, some people participate in activities for fun. While contributing to society, they aim to enjoy themselves.
Others participate as part of social learning. They want to experience aspects of culture and society that they did not know and deepen their understanding of social issues through volunteer activities.
In addition, some attend to make their own careers. When looking for a job, some volunteers participate for reasons that give them an advantage in terms of career, such as adding volunteer experience to their résumé or receiving credits based on their volunteer activity history.
There is no right or wrong, no superiority or inferiority, and each is a form of attitude toward volunteers.

Many people want to make friends

Many people want to make new friends or deepen their friendships through volunteering. For example, some people who belong to V-station participate in the same volunteer activities and aim to get to know others and become friends through their activities.

Also, some people enjoy interacting with people who help them at their volunteer sites. In that case, even if the generations are far apart, they may rather positively accept the difference in values and perceptions caused by generational differences, the so-called generation gap.

Many people want to know more about society

As I mentioned above, there are many people who want to learn more about society through volunteering, rather than simply helping others. This is because learning about aspects of society (local community development, familiar environmental issues, etc.) that cannot be seen through ordinary classes, club activities, and news alone stimulates curiosity. Rather than simply learning about phenomena in society, you can learn more about them in more detail by actually experiencing them through activities.

For example, by creating the items necessary to shape a traditional culture, we can understand not only the outline of that culture, but also the difficulties and room for ingenuity that cannot be seen without participation.