It’s Volunteers’ Week in the UK, and the Family History Federation has marked the occasion with a special edition of its Really Useful Bulletin: eighteen upbeat testimonials and a roundup of volunteer openings across member societies. Scroll through the listings, and the picture is alarming. Among 21 of the Federation’s 162 member societies profiled, four are hunting for a chair, four for a treasurer, five for a secretary, three for a membership secretary, and five more for help with social media or communications.
This is not unique to genealogy. It’s a feature of volunteer-run organizations everywhere, and it always has been. So what actually works? I put the question to AI, which summarised the research neatly: successful recruitment shifts away from mass appeals toward targeted, bite-sized, and relationship-driven invitations. Which will ring true to anyone who’s watched a newsletter plea vanish without a single reply.
Break the big roles into smaller ones. “Treasurer” frightens people. It conjures full financial responsibility, legal exposure, and hours of continuing commitment. But most treasurer roles are really a cluster of smaller tasks — processing payments, reconciling a spreadsheet, filing an annual return — that different people could share or rotate. The Webmaster role can almost always be split into a content updater, a social media poster, and someone handling back-end admin. Co-chairs and job-sharing work for the same reason: they halve the perceived burden and eliminate the fear of being stranded alone in a demanding post.
A try-before-you-commit offer also lowers the barrier to entry. Invite prospective volunteers to shadow a current officer for a couple of months or to attend two or three committee meetings, with no obligation to continue. Many people who would never respond to a general appeal will say yes to something that feels bounded and reversible. That’s no guarantee they’ll continue, but as in baseball, a .300 batting average is excellent
Ask specific people directly. General appeals are easy to ignore. Readers assume someone else will step up. A warm, personal conversation from a board member is far more effective, especially when the ask is tailored: “We noticed how well you organized the seminar last autumn — would you be willing to help coordinate registrations for the next one?”
When members join or renew, include a short optional checklist of their professional backgrounds: accounting, IT, project management, copyediting, design. Not a generic “tick here to volunteer” box, but a skills inventory. It lets you make private, targeted approaches later, which feel flattering rather than desperate.
Make the personal rewards concrete. Altruism gets people through the door, but it rarely keeps them. What does it is the realization that volunteering delivers tangible benefits: friendships with people who share an obsession, the mental engagement of learning new tools, the satisfaction of being genuinely useful to a community you care about. For genealogical societies, there is a specific and powerful hook: indexing records, proofreading transcriptions, or running a helpdesk keeps volunteers in direct contact with archival material, and regularly produces breakthroughs in their own personal research.
Make geography irrelevant. Many capable potential volunteers live nowhere near the physical headquarters. Committee meetings on Zoom, clearly advertised as such, open the field enormously. Roles like journal editor, database manager, or webmaster have no geographic requirement, but many societies still advertise them as though they do.
Asynchronous tasks are equally worth promoting: transcription, indexing, proofreading, work that can be done at midnight in a different time zone or fitted around a full-time job or caring responsibilities. It won’t fill the chair vacancy, but it builds a pool of engaged people from which future officers tend to emerge.
The gap between knowing these and applying them systematically and year-round, rather than just during Volunteers’ Week or in the run-up to the AGM, is where societies often stall.