By Helen Walker, CEO at Carers UK
Like many charities, our volunteers make a vital contribution, and we couldn’t do without them. Over 500 people volunteer with us, and as their numbers grow, looking after our volunteer programme requires time and investment. I’m very proud that we’ve recently been awarded the UK-wide quality mark for organisations involving volunteers, Investing in Volunteers (IiV), which we pursued as part of our 60th Anniversary. I want to share what we learnt along the way during this process, including changes we made to better attract and support volunteers.
What value is there to an accreditation?
The value of volunteering activity in England is now estimated to be £24.69 billion. This figure can be seen in a new government report, published in July, which also says that the cost of replacing these volunteers with paid staff would be £16.43 billion. Accreditation helps to attract volunteers; it shows new and existing volunteers that we can meet recognised standards, but this was only part of the reason we decided to go ahead with an accreditation process.
As the UK’s only national membership charity for carers, we work closely with carers to enact change. This collaborative approach informs much of our vision and values as a charity. Therefore, when picking the theme ‘Equality: today and tomorrow’ for our 60th anniversary, we knew that our volunteers – most of whom are unpaid carers themselves – should be a key part of this. Developing our approach through an accreditation process felt important to ensure that our volunteers, who bring vital skills and lived experiences, had the best possible opportunity to shape our organisation.
How we developed our volunteering programme
Inclusive and accessible volunteer roles
As mentioned, most of our volunteers are unpaid carers themselves, volunteering with us in a range of community, online, workplace and office roles. When you’re caring for someone, time is precious, therefore it’s essential to offer a range of flexible roles to prospective volunteers.
The IiV accreditation process showed us several ways we could improve volunteering recruitment and as a result we have:
- Strengthened plans for recruiting from under-represented communities.
- Revised our volunteer handbook to make it clear that we can make reasonable adjustments for disabled volunteers.
- Added an anonymous diversity monitoring form. Previously, we’d only captured diversity data through biennial surveys.
One way we’ve been able to increase the diversity of our volunteers has been through attending university volunteer fairs. These have enabled us to recruit younger volunteers, many of whom have been from minority ethnic communities. Some have been very effective in skills-based volunteering roles at our London office.
Recognition
Many of our volunteers have supported Carers UK for years. We regularly thank them, but the IiV accreditation made us think again about whether we do enough to acknowledge their efforts and we have introduced other ways to do this. For example, we have partnered with Room to Reward, a charity which offers free short breaks to volunteers in vacant UK hotel rooms. Our volunteers really appreciate these short stays, particularly as they have often meant much-needed breaks from their caring responsibilities.
Creating long-term volunteers
A thorough induction is essential, and since completing the IiV accreditation we’ve introduced a bi-monthly induction session on Zoom to enable new volunteers to meet our team, learn about the wider work of the charity and ask any questions they have about their roles. Returning to our 60th anniversary theme ‘Equality: today and tomorrow’, unpaid carers often face disadvantages within education and employment. We want to make sure that every volunteer experience is a valuable one personally and professionally. Once volunteers are on board, they can access e-newsletters, volunteer support meetings and socials. They also receive invitations to speak at Carers UK events, take part in focus groups and media interviews.
Demonstrating impact
For many charities, demonstrating the impact of a volunteering programme will always be challenging. We’ve learned to take a light touch approach to measuring impact and this was supported by the IiV assessment. Volunteer carers have often told us that, because they are time poor, they would rather spend the little time that they have making a difference rather than completing forms. We’ve learned to use proxy data (e.g. growth in membership or helpline enquiries) to demonstrate how effective our volunteers have been in raising awareness of the services and support we offer, as well as using powerful volunteer stories. We now include a ‘ten questions with a volunteer’ feature in our monthly newsletters. In other roles which provide direct support to carers such as Forum Moderators it’s been much easier to gather data on their activities and the difference they are making for carers.
Strengthening corporate partnerships through volunteering
We work with a range of corporate partners. Many employees of these companies have become Workplace Champion volunteers to raise awareness of caring and signpost colleagues to support provided internally and by Carers UK. We have developed a Team Community Connector role in which two or more teams will undertake a fun and (mildly!) competitive activity to distribute Carers UK resources to community locations around their offices. These team volunteering activities have helped build commitment and understanding within our corporate partners.
Challenges and the future
Making changes can be disruptive and in a busy year marking our 60th anniversary, staff have pulled out all the stops to accomplish our accreditation but we’re confident this is already making a difference. Above all, volunteering must be embedded in an organisation’s vision, values and culture to get the best out of people and give them opportunities to shape the future. At Carers UK, we have ambitions to continue to grow our programme and improve engagement, keeping our instinct to listen to what works for our volunteers at its heart.
To find out more visit www.carersuk.org/volunteering