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Toolkit 4 Supporting Your Volunteers

This toolkit is for organisations who:

  • Have recruited their volunteers
  • Are confident that they are following the best practice guidelines outlined in Toolkit 1, Toolkit 2 and Toolkit 3.

In this toolkit, we will cover:

  1. Helping Your Volunteers to Thrive
  2. Managing Your Volunteers
  3. Regular Feedback
  4. Ongoing Training
  5. Valuing and Retaining Volunteers
  6. Problems or Complaints
  7. Ending Volunteering on a Good Note

 

1. Helping Your Volunteers to Thrive

Your organisation needs to think carefully about how it will support, manage and value your volunteers so they can thrive in their roles. Not only is it important for them to enjoy their volunteering experience but it will also ensure that your organisation retains its volunteers.  The rest of this toolkit contains lots of useful information and tips to achieve this.

 

2. Supporting Your Volunteers

It is important to provide an appropriate level of support for your volunteers. This will depend on the type of role and what skills or previous experience your volunteers have. You should ensure that everyone in the organisation, including the volunteers, knows who is responsible for this support. If your volunteers are volunteering in the community or remotely from home, they should have the resources and guidance they need. If volunteers are carrying out emotionally draining roles, they should have someone who is suitably trained to talk to.

 Useful Tools

  • Briefings: Start of shift and end of shift briefings are helpful for project-based volunteering and allows volunteers to ask questions and to clarify anything that isn’t clear.
  • Reporting System: Ask volunteers to log their hours and tasks completed at the end of their session on a reporting system. This could be an online form, spreadsheet or a logbook. This has the added benefit of allowing volunteers to voice any concerns.
  • Emergency concerns including safeguarding: Your organisation should make it clear who your volunteers should contact if they have any urgent concerns or issues to feedback to you. Depending on the role, this may involve having someone available to receive concerns in the evenings and at weekends.

 

3. Regular Feedback

Your organisation should offer the opportunity for your volunteers to provide feedback on a regular basis. This allows you to get to know your volunteers better and to find out what could be improved about their role. Positive feedback is useful for your organisation’s funding bids as it can be used for evidence of the value that volunteers bring to your organisation.

You can collect this feedback via:

  • Surveys (online or paper)
  • One-to-one review sessions
  • Group review sessions.

Questions you could ask your volunteers include:

  • What do you like best about the role?
  • Is there anything that could be improved?
  • Is there any training or extra support that you need?

As well as receiving feedback from the volunteers, one-to-one sessions are a valuable opportunity for an organisation to feedback information to a volunteer about how they are carrying out their role.

 

4. Ongoing Training

Ongoing training will help ensure that your volunteers are well-prepared and confident in their volunteering roles. It will also make your volunteers feel valued. Make sure that your training is inclusive.

The amount and type of training you offer will depend on:

  • Your resources such as time, materials and budget
  • How much time your volunteers have available
  • How your volunteers prefer to learn – include materials for a range of learning styles.

For training in Hampshire with the local CVS network, please see:

Events – Hampshire CVS Network

Rushmoor Voluntary Services offers First Aid and MiDAS training:

RVS Training Opportunities – Rushmoor Voluntary Services

 

There is a range of free training available online. For example:

 

For more information please see Training and development for volunteers | NCVO – this has an excellent section on how to ensure that your training is inclusive and accessible.

 

5. Valuing and Retaining Volunteers

If you have followed the advice in our Toolkits, then you should be well on the way to retaining your volunteers through your organised and welcoming approach to your volunteers. Other useful things to consider include:

  • Respect the time that your volunteers give to your organisation
  • Engage with your volunteers and get to know them
  • Your volunteers should have a voice in your organisation – listen to their thoughts, ideas and suggestions
  • Include volunteers in meetings where possible
  • Use Volunteers’ Week in June to thank your volunteers and celebrate the contribution that they make to your organisation
  • Use Trustees’ Week in November to thank your Trustees
  • Link into other action days that are related to your organisation.

Other ideas for thanking your volunteers can be found here:

Thanking volunteers | NCVO

 

6. Problems or Complaints

If a volunteer has a complaint or a problem related to their volunteering it is important to take fast, fair action to solve any issues. This reduces the risk that volunteers will leave your organisation and reduces the risk to your organisation’s reputation. As well as your complaints procedure, you should have a problem-solving process in place so that it is clear to volunteers and staff what they should do if a problem arises. It is important to start by speaking to the volunteer(s) and establishing the facts before putting together a plan of action in place to overcome the problem.

Remember that problems can be an opportunity to learn and think about how to do things better.

NCVO provide an excellent information sheet about solving volunteer problems:

Solving volunteer problems | NCVO

 

7. Ending Volunteering on a Good Note

There are many reasons why volunteers stop volunteering, for example they may have found a new job or be moving away from the area.

When a volunteer decides to leave, it is important to

  • Ask the volunteer for their feedback, both positive and negative (see the feedback section above for some ideas of how to do this)
  • Thank the volunteer and recognise the contribution they’ve made to your organisation
  • Offer to write a reference for the volunteer
  • Plan a handover so that your volunteer can pass on their ongoing activities to others
  • Ask the volunteer to return any equipment or building passes
  • Remove their access to any computer systems

Sometimes volunteers leave for a negative reason such as feeling unappreciated or struggling with the role. Your organisation can reduce the chance of this happening by providing a solid recruitment process and on-going support for your volunteers. You should collect feedback which could form part of a ‘lessons learnt’ process.

Sometimes your organisation may need to end a volunteering role, for example if funding stops for the service the volunteer is supporting. You should ensure that it is easy for them to stay involved in your organisation if they would like to. This could be an alternative volunteering role or signing up to a mailing list so they can keep up to date with what you are doing.

If a volunteer doesn’t turn up when expected, you should contact them. If you can’t get hold of them and think they may be at risk, then you should follow your organisation’s safeguarding procedure.

In rare cases, you may have to dismiss a volunteer, for example if there is a breach of conduct. This should always be a last resort if other solutions to a problem haven’t helped. In such cases, you should ensure that you have followed your problem-solving policy and then schedule a time to meet with them. Explain to them why you are asking them to leave and thank them for their contribution. It is good to follow up the meeting in writing.

 

Checklist

Your organisation can ensure that your volunteers thrive by providing:

  1. Suitable supervision
  2. Regular Feedback
  3. Ongoing training
  4. Opportunities to thank your volunteers
  5. A process for problem-solving
  6. A structure for ending volunteering on a good note.

This is our last tool kit but we encourage you to look at the   Supporting Young Volunteers and Investing in Volunteers circles in this section.