Helping Non-Profit Organisations find Volunteers with @TweetPivot

I have been on the look out for ways that TweetPivot could develop its social mission.

Recently @NetSquared tweeted:

How are you recruiting volunteers online? Share your expertise for this month's #Net2ThinkTank! (@ reply us or see: http://bit.ly/9iN6cI )

This got me thinking about how visualising Twitter followers using TweetPivot could be used to identify potential new volunteers for non-profit organisations.

It seems reasonable to me that a good place for an organisation to start looking for volunteers would be amongst its Twitter followers. Tweeps that follow a non-profit organisation on Twitter are likely to have an interest in its cause, indeed some may already be active volunteers. Others may be more passive supporters who could be 'converted' to volunteers, given the right circumstances and approach. For example, the non-profit organisation could use direct messages (DMs) to engage targeted followers individually on Twitter with a personalised approach tailored to their interests. Such approaches take time and care to do well, therefore careful selection of who to target is important to efficiently attract more volunteers. This is where TweetPivot can help.

By using appropriate filters in TweetPivot a non-profit organisation can reduce a follower list to a smaller number of people to target. For example, if you are looking for volunteers for an event in a particular location, then a filter can be used to quickly identify followers in that area. You could then filter out the ones who are not very active on Twitter (e.g. with a small Follower Count) as they are unlikely to respond to your DMs. If you need to reduce the number of 'Tweep targets' further, then you could restrict your list to people with a reasonable Klout score (a measure of Twitter influence).

Once your subset of followers is identified, you can save them to a Twitter list. You can then monitor the tweets of this group and spot openings for a Twitter conversation.

As an example, in response to a tweet looking for volunteers for an event to be held in the UK, we looked at the 2500+ @crisiscamp followers: http://bit.ly/9jrxwI and used location filters to select just followers who are based in the London, then saved them to a Twitter list.

A video of this process can be seen at: http://bit.ly/9nh5P2

If you try this approach, then let us know if you find it useful as a way of finding new volunteers in the comments below or by replying to @tweetpivot.