Dear PFLAG Supporter,

We are officially on the road to Pride season! Expect lots of conversations in the weeks to come on how best to maximize your time and energy through your busiest time—and with your largest audiences. To kick things off, we wanted to talk a bit about volunteers and some of the ways you can grow volunteer engagement in service of your chapter.

In this edition of Leadership Learnings you’ll find:

• Volunteer Best Practices
• Business Support at Pride
• Urban & Rural Think Tank Alerts
• In Case You Missed It (ICYMI) Recap
• Regional Roundup: PFLAG Seattle’s Volunteer Program

Volunteer Best Practices

Managing volunteers as a volunteer chapter board is quite the undertaking and often crucial to longevity of your chapter in addition to helping you meet the vast and varied needs within your community. Here are some tips for building strong volunteer engagement and relationships: 

Build and foster authentic relationships. Building any relationship requires a culture of trust, open communication, and transparency with your volunteers. This can help your chapter with networking, community outreach and partnerships, and help to decide some of your programmatic choices within the chapter. 

Make it easy to engage. Having clear pathways for volunteers to choose a role or project that’s needed, understanding of the chapter’s code of conduct for public events, and ensuring mutual accountability will help keep volunteers engaged and supported. In many chapters this looks like having clearly defined volunteer roles and jobs available with estimated time commitment or any key details. Consider things like a training booklet or buddy system to support volunteer training and engagement. For instance, when training volunteers to table, make sure they’re familiar with PFLAG messaging and how to set up and manage the booth, as demonstrated by this example from PFLAG Bellevue/Eastside. PFLAG Geneva/Tri-Cities supports their volunteers by sharing this Volunteer Training information document. 

Be intentionally inclusive. Spend some time brainstorming ideas that suit a wide range of prospective volunteers. Consider including items that can be completed from afar, during someone’s lunch break, or even a one time project. Providing opportunities that are accessible to a variety of audiences. PFLAG Geneva/Tri-Cities does a great job of promoting their volunteer events as easy to attend and inclusive to all! Here’s their Facebook post. 

Celebrate and appreciate. Honoring volunteers through a variety of methods, including public recognition, will help keep people engaged and excited about spending their time with PFLAG. Whether you’re sending thank you cards, featuring a dedicated volunteer in a newsletter, or just saying ‘thanks’—it all helps! 

Seek feedback. Part of keeping volunteers engaged means asking them what went well, what went poorly, and what you could do differently moving forward. Once you receive feedback from a volunteer, consider how you’ll incorporate it and check back in with them after changes are implemented.

Business Support at Pride

Support from local businesses can be a huge asset to you in the lead up to Pride season. Connecting with local businesses, no matter the size, can increase your chapter’s visibility, build reciprocity, create fundraising opportunities, and grow chapter capacity during one of your busiest times of the year.

Who to ask

Sometimes the hardest part of building business partnerships is deciding who to ask. Here are some suggestions.

• Corporations. Businesses that call your area home often are looking to give back to their communities. These could be large corporations, or smaller ones local to your state or town. Larger corporations may have LGBTQ+ specific groups that may want to engage like ERGs (Employee Resource Groups) and BRGs (Business Resource Groups). Consider folks who support other LGBTQ+ events, other like-minded initiatives, or attend events your chapter attends.
• Small businesses. You don’t have to think big: Local coffee shops, bookstores, independent businesses, or restaurants often want to get involved, too. 
• Partner nonprofits. While it may not make sense to support each other financially, other nonprofit organizations may be looking to volunteer with other groups. There may even be specific volunteer-minded organizations in your community to connect with.

What to ask for 

We often don’t know what our community partners can do to support us until we ask. Here are some things to consider asking for:

• Time. Volunteering time is often the easiest thing for a group to say yes to, and can be the most helpful to your chapter. Do you have prep you need to do for Pride or swag you always wanted to offer but didn’t have time to put together? Ask volunteers to help! Need support at your Pride events? Volunteers can help with that too.
• Collaboration. Especially when looking at local small businesses, consider the ways they can give back without a heavy lift on their end, rooted in the work that they do. This could be sharing flyers, participating in supportive business engagement programs, hosting giveback days, or donating space. 
• Financial Support. Don’t be shy about asking for financial support, especially when you’re talking to larger businesses, it’s common practice for businesses to make a donation alongside their volunteer hours. You are helping them accomplish their goals of being seen supporting their community, they can help you accomplish your goals as well.

Building long-lasting relationships

Pride might have a designated month, but for PFLAG, Pride is 24/7/365! The relationships you build during Pride season can and should be fostered year round. Think of Pride season as the kick off to a year of activities.

• Say thank you. The number one recommendation for all volunteer engagement is appreciation. Make sure to say thank you to everyone who helped out during Pride season. Think about the different places and ways you can say thank you.
• Re-engage volunteers. Make sure to collect contact information for your volunteer partners, especially if they’re coming from an outside source. Treat Pride volunteering as a first stop for folks volunteering through their workplace or organization. Next stops could include volunteering to table or set up swag year round, becoming one of the chapter facilitators, joining a committee if your chapter has one, or even joining the board! While not everyone may want to work with you again, there will certainly be folks inspired by your mission to give more.
• Don’t forget next year. Reach out early to previous year partners to see if they want to engage again. It can be easy to treat partnerships with local businesses as one and done, but consistently communicating helps keep the relationship thriving. 

BONUS. How can you support your partners? Ask them! Is there an event coming up they’d like you to attend? A training you can offer? A way to show appreciation on social media? Volunteer opportunities the chapter can contribute to? Reciprocity is key to building and sustaining relationships with other organizations in your community.

Urban and Rural Think Tank Alerts

Urban Think Tank

Board recruitment and retention is a core piece of successful PFLAG chapter operations. This process can be challenging but there are many paths to a successful outcome. Register to share your challenges, and the solutions you may have found. PFLAG National also wants to hear what resources you need from us to support your board development goals. Your input will help share new board recruitment resources. Whether this is a struggle or a success story for your chapter, come prepared to share, support other urban chapter leaders, and help shape resource generation. Join us on Wednesday April 30th at 4pm-5:30pm PTT/7pm-8:30pm ET.

Rural Think Tank

Rural PFLAG chapters often struggle to know how to keep their board, members, and community safe in the face of hostile sentiments. May's Rural Think Tank topic is safety and security. It will feature a presentation and facilitated discussion on safety tips and tricks. Have you wondered how best to keep your chapter meetings safe? Have you implemented strategies to enhance security? Join the Rural Think Tank on Tuesday May 6th at 5pm-6:30pm PT/8pm-9:30pm ET to discuss and learn.

In Case You Missed It (ICYMI)

•  
• Learning With Love: The 2025 PFLAG National Convention Call for workshop proposals. PFLAG National is accepting workshop applications and the deadline to submit is Wednesday, April 30th. Learn more and submit your proposal at pflagnation.al/2025ConventionRFP. 
• Pride Packs 2025. Don’t forget to visit the PFLAG Chapter Leader-Only Swag Shop at chapterswag.pflag.org to order your Pride swag. You’ll get a larger discount than in our public-facing shop, plus every chapter gets $200 to spend on the items of their choice; use your chapter ID without dashes as the code at checkout. Then, you’ll get an additional 50% off further orders between now and June 30, 2025. Check out this email for more details. Note: We are restocking flags, pens, and our four most-popular t-shirt designs; we’ll keep you updated when they are available.

Regional Roundup

Chapters across the country have created some great ways to build out volunteer programs! For example, PFLAG Seattle took the following steps:

1. Set a recurring volunteer meeting: A monthly volunteer meeting was set up to allow a space for people to join, learn of upcoming volunteer opportunities, and express their unique volunteer ideas. The first few months were sparsely attended but, over time, the attendance grew. As the meeting evolved, it also provided a forum for the chapter to kick-off its advocacy efforts with a brainstorming session among volunteers.
2. Ensure timely, personalized follow-up: The chapter has a web form to allow people to sign up as a volunteer. A follow-up email is sent to every new volunteer within a few days of their registration. That email details the most common ways to volunteer and asks for a 1:1 meeting (in person or on Zoom) to discuss the person's volunteer interests. The 1:1 meeting allows individual interests to be considered and often leads to introductions to other PFLAG members or ways to encourage community. 
3. Establish tracking to drive engagement: The Seattle chapter uses Salesforce software as a contact management database. This allows each volunteer to be recorded, communications captured, and volunteer opportunities tracked. 
4. Focus on volunteer engagement soon after sign-up: Extra effort is made to try to get a volunteer to engage quickly after sign-up. As an example, after the election the chapter saw an increase in volunteers. In order to capture that interest, the chapter began promoting the tabling opportunities to these new volunteers and also engaged them in the brainstorming of the chapter's new advocacy efforts. 

If you have any questions about PFLAG Seattle’s Volunteer Program, please contact the chapter’s volunteer coordinator Janet Smith at jsmith@pflagseattle.org.

Stay safe,

Ruadhan Ward (They / Them)

Having trouble viewing this email? View it in your web browser