AILA Increases Volunteer Interest by 30% and Improves Volunteer Diversity with Lineup

The Customer

The American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA), founded in 1946, provides legal education, professional services, information, and expertise to more than 16,000 attorneys who practice and teach immigration law. Dedicated to justice, fair laws and policies, and the professional development of its members, AILA strives to offer ameaningful membership experience centered around a diversity of perspectives and backgrounds.

To fulfill its commitments, the organization recognized a strongneed for a comprehensive volunteer management system that could help them discover the wide variety of volunteer talent within their membership community — with the goal of including more volunteers in the mission and utilizing each participant much more effectively. They found the answer in Lineup.

The Challenges

Like many organizations, AILA was storing member and volunteer data in different places and manually managing it using spreadsheets. This scattered system made it difficult to fully understand who its members were and match them to the specific needs of the organization, including filling volunteer seats on 15 different committees.

AILA specifically had trouble surfacing the individuals who were newly interested in volunteering, and couldn’t get visibility into the unique backgrounds, skills, and experiences each person brought to the table. Without a reliable source of volunteer information, AILA kept asking the same people to do the same things every year. As a result, the organization was missing out on valuable opportunities to engage new volunteers, diversify participation, and prevent over-utilization.

AILA also recognized it was about more than just matching the right people to the right roles. The entire organization needed to become more equitable and inclusive if it wanted to deliver higher-quality outcomes and remain a trusted resource for the immigration law profession and community.

The Solution

The organization was considering building a volunteer talent database from scratch to address their issues. But Kay Ciesla, AILA's senior director of governance and leadership strategy, had a different idea. She had used Lineup's volunteer management solution in a previous position with a different organization and thought it had exactly what AILA was looking for. When she brought the solution to the attention of AILA leadership, they immediately agreed.

AILA's leaders recognized that the cost of investing in Lineup was less than the time and cost of managing volunteers using their old manual methods — yet they would get so much more out of the platform with its built-in talent database, flexibility and ease of use, and integration capabilities that would allow them to connect it with their existing association management system (AMS).

AILA implemented Lineup in 2021 using a phased approach. The organization began by using the solution for its volunteer selection and committee assignment processes. If that went well, they planned to use it for finding conference speakers and other experts who could write blogs, edit publications, and mentor members.

To date, the organization relies on Lineup to enlist members for governance, operating, and steering committees; task forces; the editorial board; external relations and liaisons; and special interest group (SIG) leadership. Eventually AILA would like to give its 39 regional chapters — all run by volunteers — access to Lineup as well.

The Results

Since implementing Lineup, AILA has been able to:

Find and manage volunteers with greater ease

With Lineup's talent profiles and team database, AILA's staff can build detailed, custom profiles on every volunteer using tags that make it easy to search for and update the key volunteer attributes that are important to the organization. Staff have also reduced the time spent on finding and placing volunteers from weeks down to a couple of hours.

With an API that successfully integrates Lineup with the organization's homegrown AMS, AILA gets the benefit of additional usability and crosssharing of data between the two systems.

Individual comfort level with the technology has also been a non-issue. When working within Lineup, staff can still choose to import and export existing volunteer data into and out of Excel for additional analysis or reporting purposes, giving them flexible and familiar options in how they use the platform. "Whether you're tech averse or tech savvy, Lineup is here for you," Ciesla says.

Not only does Lineup make day-to-day volunteer management tasks quicker and easier, there is a downstream benefit as well in that staff can look ahead and be assured they can find the right person with the right combination of skills, background, and demographics for whatever committee assignment or role they need to fill, as well as engage in leadership development by building a strong bench of future contributors. "We don't have to look for a needle in the haystack anymore," Ciesla says. "With Lineup, we can see we have a haystack full of needles."

Diversify the volunteer talent pool
One of the most useful aspects of Lineup for AILA is that it gives leaders and staff the ability to find people who are newer to the organization or to volunteerism in general, thereby ensuring that many different perspectives, gender identities, ethnicities, geographic locations, and years of experience are well represented in the room.

The volunteer profiles created, stored, and updated in Lineup give staff access to information they had previously been unable — or unlikely — to find on their own. Lineup has worked so well for AILA that in the first year alone they were able to increase the number of first-time volunteers placed on committees by 20% and the overall interest in volunteerism by 30% — and have continued to increase volunteer interest every year since.

"Not only are we a stronger organization because we have all these perspectives, we're also more confident in our work and our output," Ciesla explains. "Lineup allows us to be super thorough in our approach and have more diversity of thought than ever before."

Strengthen relationships with members
AILA also sees extraordinary value in how Lineup benefits members — not just internal staff. Initially, it took some convincing of internal stakeholders to try something new. But soon after implementing Lineup, it became obvious that the benefits of the platform extended far beyond just making someone's job easier.

By saving time, helping staff be more organized, and enabling better volunteer engagement, Lineup plays a key part in crafting a more positive membership experience overall. "When elected leaders and members have a positive experience with us and see that we're thoughtful and organized, that reaches people. It makes them want to be involved and be part of the community," Ciesla explains.