Participation in this year’s Big Help Out volunteering event is down by just under 10% on 2023’s inaugural event.

Latest figures from organisers reveal that 6.5m took part in this year’s event, around 700,000 fewer people than in 2023 when 7.2m took part.

The 2023 event was staged to mark King Charles III’s Coronation and has since become an annual event to create a long-term legacy.

This year’s Big Help Out took place from Friday 7 to Sunday 9 June to coincide with the end of the Volunteers’ Week. Organisers included a weekday to give schools and workplaces a chance to get involved.

Before the event, which involves thousands of charities and is run by a cross-sector coalition Together, 6.8m people had said they might take part.

“At the beginning of this our internal planning found that between two and three million people taking part would be a good second year without the surround sound of the coronation,” said a Together spokesman.

“Doing it outside Coronation year, where you have got the King and the Queen and all of their resources promoting it, was obviously always going to create a difficult second album.

“The fact that we have ended up with 6.5m is much better than we expected.”

Almost 6.5 million people across the UK took part in #TheBigHelpOut weekend.💚✋

Incredible to see volunteers supporting thousands of charities, and finding new ways to #LendAHand.

To everyone who joined in – you've made a huge positive impact.

Thank you & keep volunteering! pic.twitter.com/kxEH12Hnlt

— The Big Help Out (@TheBigHelpOut24) June 20, 2024

Big Help Out has been developed amid a long-term slump in volunteering.

Three in five charities are finding volunteer recruitment difficult, according to figures published last month as part of Nottingham Trent University’s VCSE Data and Insights National Observatory and Pro Bono Economics.

Last year a Charities Aid Foundation survey found that only 7% of the public had volunteered over the previous four weeks. This was down on 9% who had volunteered in 2019, before the Covid pandemic.

A lack of flexible and suitable roles are among barriers to volunteering, the NCVO has warned.

The Together spokesman added areas for expansion for the next Big Help Out include more business and school engagement.

“If we end up with one in ten people in the country taking part in this on an annual basis that is bigger than any other volunteer initiative in the country outside of the volunteering effort that happened outside of the pandemic. That’s an incredible reach and engagement,” he said.

“We do want to keep growing it and what we also want to do is deepen it in terms of providing people with an entry point, a touch point, which we then hope will turn into longer term volunteering.”

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