Volunteer 4 Long Island, a non-profit, charitable organization, needed volunteers on Thanksgiving morning to assemble packages of food, personal items (toiletries), and clothing for those who are homeless or living in emergency and temporary housing.

I spoke with one of the organization’s founders, Jeanine Cozzetti, to determine their organization’s needs.  They had already done an excellent job working with local organizations to secure donations:

• They had a space for collecting and assembling donations at the church.
• They had well-established relationships with Island Harvest, the local fire department, and college campus youth organizations for collecting food and warm clothing.

We talked about reaching out to corporations for future years and she said that this year they could use more volunteers, so we concentrated on social media volunteer recruitment efforts:

• V4LI already had a facebook group page and a touching YouTube video of their volunteers Feeding the Homeless in 2008.
• Their website was leading to an error screen.  I got to work creating a simple website and in the meantime used the facebook page for the landing page.
• I launched a @Volunteer4LI on Twitter and used We Follow to find Long Island people on Twitter.

I hit the jackpot when I found Long Island Tweet-Up (@LITweetUp).  As soon as I messaged individual twitterers about the event, they began to re-tweet out the details.  Within hours, Volunteer 4 Long Island had dozens more fans on facebook and messages coming in from interested volunteers.  Jeanine was astounded by how effective and quick a few simple tweets could be in recruiting more local volunteers than they even needed.

By recruiting local people on twitter who have demonstrated an interest in their community, Volunteer 4 Long Island was able to efficiently reach their target volunteer audience.  Once volunteers reached the facebook page, they could join the group, making it easy for the organization to message them about future events.  When they joined, they also further spread the word through their facebook profiles.

Building Twitter Lists and Facebook group or fan pages is an effective way to establish and maintain a local community of volunteers for your organization.  Both Twitter and Facebook have applications that enable you to target your message locally and then empower your messengers to share with their friends and followers.

What is your social media charity project volunteer recruitment success story?