Working With Volunteers - Good Practice
Mystery shopper 2012: You never get a second chance to make a first impression
The report looks at current practice in volunteer recruitment in Derby and focuses on volunteer enquiry response times; or rather, how long it takes organisations to get back to volunteers, and the type of response.
We ran our first mystery shopper exercise back in 2010 and 207 organisations took part. The headline figures were somewhat concerning; only 90 organisations replied back to our fictitious volunteer. Not within a few days, a week or even a month, ever. Yes, that's right, only 44% of organisations replied to the volunteer at all. The 2010 exercise prompted us to introduce a follow-up system to track our referred volunteers.
Almost two years have passed now and we wanted to run the same exercise to see if things had changed. The 2012 exercise ran throughout February. 199 organisations took part, with 131 organisations taking the time to respond to the fictitious volunteer directly.
While this 66% figure is a considerable improvement from our 2010 exercise, it still means that 68 organisations, at the time of writing, haven't contacted the volunteer. Out of the 66% of organisations who responded to the 2012 referral, 87% of did so within a week. 54 organisations rang the volunteer, 77 emailed.
Most organisations saw value in the exercise with many seeing this as an opportunity to review their practice and compare it against others.
You can access the report here
Calling all Volunteer Managers and Coordinators!
Volunteer Centre Derby would like to come and visit you! The team can help you review your volunteering programme, help you consider other ways of recruitment and support, and pick up on any best practice tips you may have to share with other organisations.
The team has been out to see a number of organisations recently, one being Derwent Stepping Stones. Lucy from Derwent Stepping Stones explains:
"The support we received from Community Action in setting up our volunteer programme up was invaluable. They were able to assist us with template documents to work with, lots of advice on what a good volunteer policy should contain and also shared good practice from other organisations to enable us to create a programme we are very proud of. The ongoing support and information updates we receive from Community Action is fantastic and they actively encourage us to continuously develop our service".
Maggie Attenborrow from Steps for the Future also adds:
"I just want to say a big thank you for the time you gave us when you visited our office. Updating our volunteers site has worked wonders and we now have some excellent volunteers who have come through Community Action.
To arrange for a visit speak to Simon Hancox at Community Action on 01332 227718 or email Simon on simon.hancox@communityactionderby.org.uk
To access a list of useful online resources for Volunteer Managers - click here
Policy and process templates
The following policies and procedures are based on those we have created and used here at Community Action. We have been using these for a number of years now and they are reviewed annually by our staff and volunteer team. The policies are modelled on Investing in Volunteers (IiV) best practice and other volunteer models of excellence.
In no way do we suggest that you have to use these or indeed adopt them exactly as they are. All policies and procedures should be adapted to each individual organisation. This process shouldm involve consultation with staff, volunteers and where appropriate stakeholders. However, we do recognise that many organisations don't have the necessary experience or time to write their own from scratch so we have put ours here for you to take a look at and adapt for your own organisation. For more information email simon.hancox@communityactionderby.org.uk or call Simon on 01332 227718.
