Organisations
Involving Volunteers
Before Engaging Volunteers – What Should You Have In Place?
Our website aims to provide helpful information each step of the way. We recommend VolunteerWiki – The go-to place for volunteer involving organisations for useful resources and templates on all aspects of volunteer management, but please do contact us directly if you would like more specific information.
Is Your Organisation Ready To Involve Volunteers?
To ensure a positive experience for both Volunteer Involving Organisations & volunteers, it is important that the following considerations are made prior to engaging volunteers:
- Does your organisation have a Volunteer Policy?
- Does your organisation’s insurance cover volunteers?
- What will volunteers do with/for your organisation? Do you have a role description?
- Have you made relevant health & safety considerations & do you have risk assessments in place for involving volunteers & the roles they will undertake?
- Are you ready? If a potential volunteer said they were keen right now, what’s next? Do you have a recruitment process?
- Volunteer Agreement. Volunteer Agreement (doc).docx – Google Drive or 10-Volunteer-Agreement.docx (live.com)
- Once you are ready to involve volunteers, you can register to advertise opportunities with us! Find the relevant forms here.
Supporting & Sustaining Volunteers
Once in place it is important that volunteers remain supported (we encourage regular S&S), valued, and appreciated.
- Supporting volunteers can be a mix of formal and informal (often influenced by the type of role volunteers do) and is an excellent way to ensure volunteers are integrated, valued and appreciated and the services they help you deliver and effective and efficient.
- It is advisable to have a format for one-to-one Support and Supervision sessions, which can be linked to Volunteer Role Descriptions, Volunteer Agreements & volunteers personal development goals for discussion forms.
- We strongly encourage reimbursing volunteer expenses, as we don’t want costs of getting to and from, or during volunteering being a barrier to anyone volunteering.
- Whether your service is enhanced by volunteers or would not exist without them; it is important that all volunteers are appreciated and valued. Consider was your organisation can appreciate, recognise and value volunteers – from saying ‘thank you’ through to celebration events and everything in between.
- Nominate for the annual Midlothian Volunteer Awards
- Young volunteers? Encourage them to register for Saltire Awards
When Volunteers Move On
It is important to know why people volunteer with your organisation, so you can support them to achieve their goals. Some volunteers will move on; it could be that the time is right for them to leave, or that changes in their lives make it more difficult for them to stay. There are lots of reasons why volunteers leave but finding out their reasons can greatly impact on your service’s success.
- Carry out an exit interview/ questionnaire where possible.
- Measuring the impact of volunteering both ON volunteers and OF volunteers has numerous mutual benefits to volunteers and volunteer involving organisations.