Volunteer Recruitment Campaign Strategy — Disaster Response & Community Care Roles

We are looking to develop a comprehensive volunteer recruitment initiative for three critical roles within the American Red Cross East Texas Region — Disaster Action Team (DAT) Members, Client Care Case Workers, and Mass Care Sheltering Volunteers. These positions are essential to our ability to respond to disasters such as home fires, floods, and severe weather events across our five-city service area covering Tyler, Longview, Texarkana, Paris, and Corsicana, Texas.

What we need is help developing real-world recruitment initiatives and strategies for finding and engaging the right audiences in person and in the community. Our primary target audiences are not college students — they are working adults, veterans, retired first responders, faith-based community members, civic organization members such as fraternal orders and service clubs, and community-minded individuals who are already embedded in their local communities and looking for meaningful ways to give back.

We are hoping a skilled volunteer can help us with the following:

- Identify and map the best in-person audiences and community spaces where we are most likely to find mission-aligned volunteers for disaster response and community care roles
- Develop recruitment initiatives and engagement strategies that go beyond digital outreach and connect us directly with these audiences at community events, places of worship, civic organizations, and neighborhood gatherings
- Create a practical outreach playbook our small team can execute across five cities with a limited budget including talking points, event tabling strategies, and community partnership approaches
- Help us develop compelling messaging that speaks directly to the motivations of adults who want to serve their community in times of crisis
- Provide guidance on how to build sustainable pipelines from community organizations, veteran groups, and faith-based networks into our volunteer roles

The end goal is a ready-to-use recruitment initiative our team can begin implementing immediately that moves beyond online posting and puts us directly in front of the right people in the communities we serve.

Right now, our East Texas Region faces a significant volunteer capacity gap in three of our most critical roles. Our Disaster Action Team responds within hours when families lose everything to a fire or flood. Our Client Care Case Workers walk alongside those families through the recovery process, connecting them to resources and helping them rebuild. Our Mass Care Sheltering Volunteers open and operate emergency shelters when entire communities are displaced. Without enough people in these roles, we cannot respond quickly enough or serve enough families in their most vulnerable moments.

East Texas is a large and geographically diverse region. The five cities we serve — Tyler, Longview, Texarkana, Paris, and Corsicana — each have unique communities and unique needs. What we are missing is not awareness of the Red Cross name. What we are missing is a targeted strategy for finding the right people in each of those communities and giving them a compelling reason to step up and serve.

A skilled volunteer who helps us build that strategy will directly impact how many families we can serve the next time a disaster strikes in East Texas. Every new DAT volunteer we recruit means a faster response to a family standing outside their burning home in the middle of the night. Every sheltering volunteer we bring on means more capacity to house and care for displaced community members during the next major weather event. Every client care volunteer means one more family that gets the support they need to recover with dignity.

This project is not about growing a number on a spreadsheet. It is about making sure that when disaster hits East Texas — and it will — we have enough trained and committed volunteers ready to show up. The work a skilled volunteer does through this partnership will have a ripple effect felt across five communities and hundreds of families for years to come.

We have strong internal support and a solid foundation in place to make this partnership a success from day one.

Our Executive Director and regional leadership are fully aligned on the need to strengthen our volunteer recruitment efforts for disaster response roles across East Texas. Volunteer recruitment is a standing priority in our FY27 strategic plan and the outcomes of this project will be implemented directly into our regional recruitment strategy and presented to leadership during our monthly meetings.