NCVO’s Civil Society Almanac 2022: What Does It Tell Us?
NCVO recently published their annual piece of research on the third sector. The Civil Society Almanac is a ground-breaking data resource on voluntary organisations of all types and sizes, from income & assets to the demographics of our sector’s valued volunteers.
So, what are the key findings?
It found a slight increase in the number of voluntary organisations in the UK, most of these are micro or small. However, this data is from 2019/20, so it is unclear how the COVID-19 pandemic might have affected these numbers.
Despite a clear drop in formal volunteering, in 2020/21 over half of the population volunteered informally at least once a year. This is likely an indication of the fantastic way people mobilised to help one another during the pandemic. Around a third of the population also reported volunteering informally at least once a month.
We can see that while most people have volunteered at some point, they’re not always consistently involved. This could be due to a range of factors – most likely time – so how do we counteract this?
Micro-volunteering can be a great place to start. Letting volunteers know they can do small tasks to help with no long-term commitment can actually be a way to get them involved regularly. Volunteering opportunities with a long-term label can be quite daunting if a person doesn’t know how long they can give their time for. Letting people volunteer at their own pace is ideal.
Get the full picture and read NCVO’s Civil Society Almanac 2022 here.
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