Summary: Emailing people might seem easy for you, but it also makes it easy for people to say no. The easiest way to recruit is also the easiest way to fail.
Do you want to fail at recruiting? If you do, I have the perfect way to fail and to fail super fast. The fastest way to fail at recruiting is mass emailing people. If you are looking for the easiest way to recruit, you will likely stumble into the easiest way to FAIL. And today’s video is urging you to stay away from any type of mass recruiting emails.
Let me tell you a story. I had been at the church for seven or eight years, and I was in the process of duplicating myself in many areas of the ministry. I was pouring into other people and training them how to recruit for their own areas. I, along with two other seasoned leaders, came up with a healthy list of names to pass along to our friend and new ministry associate. We wanted to give him some easy wins and people we felt confident would say yes.
Now, let me tell you, these were quality people and quality names. In other words, we were giving up quality people to allow this new associate to have some easy recruiting wins. He took that entire list of names, put them into an email and proceeded to send a bulk email, recruiting everyone on the list through one email.
Within 36 hours, 100% of those people had emailed back indicating that they would NOT be volunteering this year. Game over. There was no way we can reach back out to these people and ask for a redo. No personalized conversation. No relationship development. No individualized approach based on the person or anything like that. This was an easy button epic fail.
Now, before you start to place this young fellow under the bus I want to tell you that this was MY bad leadership rather than his faux pas. In my busy-ness I did not educate him as to how our team recruited high-end people for high-end volunteer roles. I just made the assumption that he knew what to do. This was simply not the case. This was my fail, not his.
Emailing people might seem easy for you, but it also makes it easy for people to say no. Be sure to check out LeadVolunteers.com as your one-stop-shop to help you recruit, train and retain volunteers.