• Start recruiting program participants from within your organization. You likely already engage many individuals who will benefit from the type of assistance your new program will provide. When you meet these individuals’ needs, expand your recruiting efforts to external organizations.
  • If utilizing a new system to receive participant referrals from community organizations, test the system before ‘going live’ to ensure all glitches are resolved and no individual is lost in the system.
  • Develop a list of inclusion and exclusion criteria for care recipients and family caregivers to participate in your program. Provide this list to all individuals who will be referring community members to your program. This will help ensure consistency across all referral sources in determining who to refer to your program. Examples of inclusion criteria for a transportation and/or volunteer chaperone program might include that the recipients must be ambulatory and able to transfer themselves to and from a vehicle. The recipients must be alert and oriented. The recipient must be able to provide the contact information for a primary caregiver in case of emergency. One example of exclusion criteria for a transportation and/or volunteer chaperone program may be that the recipient requires transportation of a full-sized wheelchair or a scooter.
  • Recruiting both participants and volunteers is necessary for a successful model. Plan more time than expected for recruitment. Do not expect that recruiting for a new program will be as easy as recruiting for a program that has been around for some time.
  • Before engaging new participants make sure you have an established group of volunteers, and that the organization is prepared to handle an influx of both participants and volunteers. Keep the number of participants at a level your volunteers can effectively respond to.
  • You may wish to avoid onboarding more care recipients than your volunteers have the capacity to support. It can be frustrating for both parties. In the same way, avoid onboarding more volunteers than you can match. The volunteers may lose interest while waiting to step into their role and look elsewhere to volunteer.
  • When recruiting new program participants fully explaining the program and the volunteer and participant role is valuable. It is important that the participant buys into the program and having a volunteer and that it is not the desire of someone else.
  • Knowing your community well helps in identifying appropriate outreach methods for participant and family caregiver recruitment. In some communities going door to door, talking to people, providing culturally sensitive flyers is a better outreach method than use of social media while the opposite is true for other communities.
  • Women are more inclined to attend older adult socialization events than men. Consider creating more opportunities that interest men specifically to bring them to your events.