A force for good - Part 4

Tip 3: Inspire evangelists.

I felt pretty excited reading this chapter, because "inspiring evangelists" is basically the main focus of Refresh Bolivia's volunteer trips.

Evangelists are defined in the book as people (volunteers, citizens, alumni, employees) who are passionate about your cause and serve as proactive advocates.

There are four main steps to inspiring evangelists:

1. Clearly communicate your mission, vision, and values. Your advocates have to know what it is their getting into.

RB does this exactly through the several hours of volunteer trainings that we hold before each of our volunteer trips.

2. Give volunteers meaningful experiences. Ideally, this should be a hands on experience to connect them to the cause. Throwing a fundraiser to raise money for poverty alleviation is a good experience, but going to an underprivileged community and directly interacting with your constituents is a hands on experience that is much more thought-provoking and inspiring.

This is exactly the point of our yearly volunteer trips. By the end of each trip, volunteers gain a much deeper understanding of our cause, and are inspired to continue learning and working in the field of global health.

3. Cultivate evangelists. These are ideally celebrities or famous people who support your cause, or a large number of normal people who are passionate advocates.

Due to our lacking social media presence, we currently don't have any famous celebrity evangelists. This is definitely something that we need to work on, and I think it will be easier to improve as we focus on developing our social media image.

4. Build a strong community of alumni and previous volunteers. You have to work to preserve this community through conferences, technology, and alumni programs and opportunities.

This is something that we need to work on. We have been talking a lot about starting a newsletter to send to alumni and previous volunteers, but that's not enough. We currently don't even have a comprehensive email list of all our previous trip and board volunteers. This wouldn't be difficult to compile, but the fact that we haven't done it yet shows that it hasn't been a focus for us. It definitely should!! Imagine how our volunteers from 3-5 years ago would feel if they could see how much we've grown! Maybe they are on their way to becoming successful global health professionals and work with us in the future. Maybe they will get rich and fund our projects. There are a lot of reasons to work hard to maintain our alumni network.

Ultimately, RB does a good job of inspiring volunteers through trips, but we need to do a better job of maintaining our alumni network and establishing our online presence.