Engage Your Teen Volunteers This Summer
While summer travel and shifting family routines often cause a seasonal dip in regular volunteer turnout, this break presents a prime opportunity to engage a highly motivated yet frequently overlooked demographic: high school students. Studies show that up to 93% of teens want to volunteer — often driven by school requirements, honors programs, and the desire to build strong college and job applications — but a lack of accessible information frequently prevents them from getting involved. By bridging this gap and clearly posting your summer service projects on a robust, mobile-friendly Event Listing Page, you can eliminate the friction of signing up and instantly connect with this eager audience. To help you capitalize on this momentum, today we are sharing three effective ways to engage your teen volunteers this summer.
1. Create Teen Volunteer Positions
While teens can do many of the same volunteer projects as adults, make it clear you have specific jobs for teenagers in your community. This helps them feel confident they are in the right spot, and it also allows you to capitalize on activities they are especially great at doing. Many organizations have a teen volunteer page or list of teen opportunities. CERVIS makes it easy to create a registration page on your website specifically listing teen volunteer positions and even allows you to limit sign ups to only that age group.
Some ideas for teen positions:
Manual labor (e.g. mowing lawns, gardening, painting walls)
Social media specific roles (e.g. teen IG takeovers, photography, content creation)
Larger projects that friends or youth groups can do together (e.g. stuffing envelopes, sorting donations, putting together meal boxes)
Having a designated teen volunteer program, or even simply creating teen volunteer positions, can easily guide teenagers to opportunities that are a great fit for them.
2. Market to Teens
While you likely already have avenues in place for reaching new volunteers, take the time to specifically target and market to teens. Mission and purpose are big motivators for the younger generation, so make sure you share your cause’s story in a way that is relatable to teenagers, and direct them to easy-to-achieve next steps. Having an uncomplicated way to view teen volunteer opportunities and sign up instantly online is also important when trying to reach teenagers. At CERVIS, we are able to seamlessly integrate with your website, allowing you to tag all “teen” events and link directly to them. This allows teenagers to see all their options and sign up for the best fit, all in one place.
Some other ideas for marketing to teens:
Reach out to schools and youth groups in your community, and ask if you can get placed on a volunteer list.
Ask schools and youth groups if you can speak to teens and invite them to join the work you are doing.
Share teen volunteer opportunities on your social media, inviting people to tag those who may be interested.
Highlight teens who are already working with your organization.
When you take the time to speak directly to teenagers in your community, they are more likely to catch your vision and be excited to serve with you.
3. Easily Share Volunteer Records with Your Teens
Teens are looking for more than just busy work; in fact, over 80% of student volunteers utilize their service hours to meet graduation requirements, build academic transcripts, or enhance college applications. Instead of forcing them to jump through hoops for documentation, a robust volunteer management database like CERVIS allows volunteers to effortlessly print their own volunteer history reports directly from their profiles. Branded with your logo and featuring an anti-alteration verification link, these reports save you administrative headaches while giving schools the exact proof they require. To make the process completely hassle-free, we even provide a quick video tutorial on our YouTube page that shows volunteers how to generate this report. In addition, our phenomenal Customer Support Team is ready to help if needed. By making tracking and reporting seamless, you ensure teen volunteers have a professional experience that keeps them coming back—and telling their friends.
Engaging teens during the summer is an investment in your organization's future. Research indicates that youth who volunteer are twice as likely to continue serving their communities into adulthood. By utilizing a powerful volunteer management platform to deliver an organized, professional experience now, you are building a dedicated base of supporters who will remain with your mission for years to come.
To learn more about how CERVIS can help you reach teen volunteers, click here for a free demo.
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