Ed Paxton, volunteering manager at Letchworth Garden City Heritage Foundation discusses the ways they overcome the difficulties in a growing volunteer team.
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When it comes to managing both small and growing volunteer teams at a charitable organisation, a lack of structure and established practices can quickly snowball into bigger issues. Without a clear structure for growth, volunteers can fall into silos, where keeping tabs on important touchpoints, communication and managing recruitment can become difficult.

At the Foundation, our vision is to make Letchworth a great place for everyone who lives and works here. We use income from our residential and commercial property portfolio, all of which is in Letchworth, to fund the charitable activities that we deliver. Our volunteering programme is still relatively new to the Foundation however we have around 80 registered volunteers who generously give their time to help support our community venues and services.

Being relatively new into the post of volunteering manager at the Foundation, I have gained an understanding of how as the programme began to grow, we started to find it difficult to oversee activities, easily recruit volunteers and manage compliance. We embarked on a digital transformation around a year ago to help tackle some of these issues. This gave us the opportunity to operate in a more collaborative way and in turn, save time and streamline the volunteer journey, while securely and compliantly managing data to, ultimately, create a smoother experience for our current and future volunteers.

Identifying priorities

When looking at ways to streamline our internal processes, we started by identifying what our desired outcomes were. These included creating a volunteer management solution that was intuitive and easy to navigate. We also wanted a system that would take the hard work out of managing volunteering activities and to be able to regularly report on these.

As a charitable organisation, we had to consider costs which certainly made driving value with the chosen vendor a priority. We selected the specialised volunteer management system (VMS) from Access Assemble, and this had transformative impact on the volunteering programme.

Despite 40% of UK organisations reporting a decrease in the intensity of volunteering over the past couple of years, we saw a different story and were able to double our volunteer team. We believe this was down to the speeding up of the onboarding process, supportive volunteer managers who recognised what our volunteers wanted from joining us and how we adapted to suit them and their preferences.

Tracking our progress

Following the introduction of new processes, we noticed a significant change across many areas including recruitment, scheduling and reporting.

Previously, our volunteer recruitment process involved applying via email, which seemed simple at the time. However, as numbers grew, we were struggling to keep on top of manually replying, tracking application statuses and remaining compliant with data. Now, thanks to Access Assemble, we can clearly outline opportunities in our own tone of voice and allow volunteers to apply through our website, making it easier for us to keep tabs on the application and our communications.

We also introduced a ‘light touch’ version of our volunteer recruitment process for low commitment roles that did not require an interview, such as environmental tasks to protect green spaces or one-off event volunteers. By customising applications and reducing the stages to complete for these roles, we were able to attract more volunteers, in particular those who wanted flexibility and weren’t able to commit as much time as others.

The Foundation has multiple spaces which were managed manually, so creating rotas was not only becoming more time consuming as our volunteer teams grew, but it also allowed a lot of room for error. For this reason, a good scheduling function was important to us and our VMS has enabled us to streamline our scheduling procedures.

Access Assemble has meant that our schedules are now automated and they’re clear and easy to change and track. We no longer worry about rotas being inaccurate, we can easily keep an eye on the hours our volunteers have contributed and therefore provide additional help when needed.

Community impact

As a charitable organisation, we are focused on delivering a number of outcomes for the local community, that will ultimately improve the quality of people’s lives. With the appropriate systems in place, we can create a clear picture on how our volunteers’ hard work is having an impact on the town, vital storytelling which can create a virtuous circle and potentially attract further recruits.

Ensuring that each of our volunteer’s experiences are positive contributes towards the overall impact we hope we have on the community. By making all internal systems as easy as possible to learn and follow, our teams - both staff and volunteers - have been able to spend their time focusing on the delivery of our charitable activities and services.

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