Bringing a Sales Mindset to a 60-Year-Old Charity
How Ahead of Sales helped Re-Engage rebuild its volunteer recruitment and grow applications by around 200%
Tom Oakes, Head of Growth, Re-Engage
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3-Year Ongoing Relationship
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c. 200% rise in volunteer applications
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6000 older people supported
About Re-Engage
Re-Engage has spent six decades reducing loneliness for people over 75, bringing volunteers together with older people through face-to-face tea parties, activity groups and telephone befriending. Today it supports around 6,000 older people with the help of around 7,500 volunteers. In 2023, with a new remit to grow nationally, it needed its volunteer recruitment function to start working like a commercial operation rather than a goodwill exercise.
What was the Problem?The Problem
Re-Engage had all the heart you could ask for and very little commercial discipline. Roles were conflated, there was no pipeline, no customer profiling, no funnel. Volunteer recruitment was treated as something that ought to happen simply because Re-Engage is a good cause.
The wider context made that assumption dangerous. Since COVID, volunteer applications across the sector had fallen. People had grown warier about giving up their time, and every charity was fighting to cut through. Re-Engage could not afford to wait for volunteers to arrive; it needed to go and win them.
The Approach
Ahead of Sales came in as fractional sales director, taking operational charge of the engagement function rather than delivering a course and stepping back.
Putting a Real System in Place
Established proper CRM management in Microsoft Dynamics so relationships could be tracked through to application rather than left to chance.
Profiling who they were actually trying to reach
Re-Engage recruits into three distinct roles, each needing its own profile and message. Group leaders, volunteers and drivers were each given targeted messaging built around what volunteering would give them specifically.
Flipping the message
Re-Engage had been telling people what the charity needed from them. Ahead of Sales flipped it entirely so every message led with what the volunteer would gain. The transaction here was time, not money, and people give their time for very different reasons.
Why a team of non-sellers embraced it
Ahead of Sales led with purpose and psychology rather than technique. For people driven by mission, reframing selling as the thing that protects that mission rather than compromising it changed everything. These were thoughtful people; they genuinely enjoyed applying their minds to the psychology of why one person decides to give their time to another.
Tom Oakes, Head of Growth, Re-Engage
The Outcomes
Volunteer applications rose by around 200% over the engagement, allowing Re-Engage to extend its services to more older people across more regions of the UK.
Just as telling is what happened after the formal engagement ended. Managers within the department began building their own presentations for team away days, expanding on the techniques and sharing them with the wider team entirely off their own initiative. The approach became part of the culture rather than a project that came and went.
Hear from Tom Directly
Tom Oakes, Head of Growth at Re-Engage, shares the full story of how the engagement worked, what changed, and why the relationship has lasted four years.
From 6 months to 4 years
What started as a six-month fractional engagement has grown into a relationship spanning three to four years. Roughly every year, Re-Engage brings Ahead of Sales back to train its newer members of staff and refresh the skills of the people already developed in the first engagement.
The approach is no longer just something the original team learned; it has become the standard every new cohort is brought up to, with Ahead of Sales as the constant thread running through it. People keep working with people they trust.
Three things this engagement proved
Sales psychology travels
The principles that win customers work just as well when the transaction is time rather than money, as long as the message is built around what the other person gains.
Lead with purpose, not technique
The fastest way to lose a values-driven team is to lead with sales technique. The fastest way to win them is to lead with psychology and let them apply their own intelligence to it.
Change only counts if it outlasts you
Three to four years on, Re-Engage still calls Ahead of Sales back and still uses the approach day to day. That is the only measure that matters.
Ready? 🌈
Does your team need to think more like a sales function?
Whether you lead a charity, a service business or a team that has never seen itself as a sales operation, Ahead of Sales can help. The same psychology and process that rebuilt Re-Engage’s volunteer recruitment works wherever people need to say yes.