Author: Alex Evans Page 18 of 21

How Can You Really Engage The Youth of Today?

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On 8th July 2020

In News & Views, Volunteer Management

Can you afford to miss out on the enthusiasm and energy of the youth today? Although, this isn’t a one-way street, many teenagers and younger adults need volunteering experience to help them with future employment to broaden their social networks and develop key life skills. Volunteering in youth boosts academic achievements, health and well-being and teens who participate in an organization that strives to make a difference are more likely to say they will attend higher education. 

Despite the many benefits volunteering can clearly have on our young people, organisations still struggle to engage this audience. But hopefully, after reading this you might be able to capture some of that enthusiasm and energy for your organisation!

Be a Known Presence

Visibility for any organisation is always going to be a contributing factor for success, no matter how big or small your organisation is. So, getting on the radar of teens and young adults can help increase your reputation and volunteer numbers. Here are a few ways you can do this…

  • Attending or hosting events in further and higher education facilities will certainly heighten your visibility and will help get you talking to this youth demographic. Many universities have events and partnerships with 3rd sector and community businesses. For example, some universities will have connections with their city councils to help find students volunteering roles. 
  • Connect with social media managers at colleges and universities, as most universities have a large social following of past and present students, any posts on their socials are sure to get a loud response.
  • Getting current young volunteers to post their experiences with the organisation to help increase awareness. Using personalised hashtags (#) with your organisation’s name will help increase your popularity amongst the youth. 
  • Be prepared, post your opportunities well in advance. Post on to local volunteering sites, and with colleges and universities. Try to find where your audience’s presence is.
  • Be sure to state teenagers and young adults are welcome, they tend to like that!

Speak The Language of The Enigma

Don’t worry, we’re not going to be teaching you youth slang, ‘WYD’ and ‘LOL’ are firmly not on today’s agenda. However, social media is a major form of entertainment for young and old with ‘almost 4.57 billion active users globally in April 2020′. That’s ‘9 out of 10 teenagers aged 13-17 [who] use social media platforms’.

Social media is a huge way to keep in contact with this generation, here’s how…

  • Most young people, including myself, would much prefer to do everything via our phones, book a table, book tickets and sign up for volunteering roles. Giving teens this opportunity will increase your amount of volunteers. 
  • Reaching out on social media is one of the best ways to interact with teens. With Facebook being the highest used platform with 77.3% of 15 – 25-year-olds using it, to Twitter being the least-used platform with 48.6% using it. Create your social media pages on the most popular sites so you can reach out to the youth of today. 
  • Know your audience. Create events and opportunities specifically designed for teens and young adults. Having a role which is attractive to the younger crowd will give you that boost in numbers you need.

Stay Engaging

Getting the youth market to fixate on something is tricky. Most young people tend to lose interest when something becomes well… boring. So engaging is essential and can help retain younger volunteers and recruit new ones. Take a look below at ways you can do this.

  • Give young people a voice. Allow younger volunteers to be a part of the team when planning. This will help give your organisation a better insight into the mindset of your younger volunteers.
  • Teens and young adults tend to prefer working more creatively, so motivate them, let them develop new ideas and be supportive of the things they want to try. Always encourage, be open and create an environment where their ideas are respected.
  • Make events and opportunities fun! It’s simple. You could include music, time to socialise, creative activities and the chance to work with friends. Use your existing youth volunteers and imagination to help make your event or opportunity more fun.
  • Sell your opportunity or event as interesting and exciting. Gloss it up a little, identify key roles and outline the responsibilities that the volunteers will have and how it may help that volunteer develop that all-important experience they desire. 

Pulling Down The Barriers

Finding time to get to know your volunteers can be tricky especially when you have a million and one other things to do. getting to know your younger volunteers might seem a bit tricky, working out how you can relate, but here are some simple ideas you could try.

Youth volunteers
  • Get to know your volunteers. You can do this by saving 10 minutes to talk to one or two volunteers. Get to know what they like and don’t like, what interests them, and why they are there. 
  • Communication is key. Be available and be welcoming.
  • Update and make yourself a known social presence. Create a mailing list of youth volunteers who might want to be emailed, and send out a weekly email or blog sharing stories of success and great efforts. 

How TeamKinetic Can Help You!

So, I can only assume you are wondering how on earth you will be able to do all of this and still manage ALL other volunteers. Well, TeamKinetic is here to help. With TeamKinetic you will be able to manage all of your volunteers in one convenient space, giving you more time to focus on promoting to new volunteers. 

You can also:

  • Create and manage opportunities
  • Send bulk emails to certain groups
  • Gain unlimited volunteer registration (no cap)
  • Internal email communications
  • Volunteer opportunity feedback
  • DBS checks
  • Reward and recognise your volunteers

The software gives your volunteers the chance to sign up online to volunteer roles, log their own hours and leave feedback. They can also then post via socials the volunteering they have done which will attract more volunteers. 

You can find TeamKinetic on social media and listen to our podcast:

Twitter       Facebook       LinkedIn       YouTube       Instagram       Podcast

 

Have you enjoyed using TeamKinetic? If you could leave us a review on Capterra, we’d really appreciate it! We’ll even send you a little thank you.

A Year Well Spent

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On 3rd July 2020

In News & Views

I’m writing this blog with three days left working at TeamKinetic. It’s been a year full of learning, personal growth, and questionable tea bag choices (Yorkshire is best, obviously). When I got the call back in March last year telling me that I’d gotten the job I was nervous but excited. I had no idea what to expect, but stepping into the office for the first time in July, my nerves were calmed by the friendly faces of the team! 

New Challenges = New Memories

Going from university, which is heavily theory based, into a full-time job was a challenge but I loved it! Now I sit here, exactly a year after my first day, it’s clear to me that anyone at university should strongly consider taking a placement year. The experience I’ve gained over the past 52 weeks is incredible. From volunteering at the LFC Foundation to visiting Nightstop Greater Manchester, I’ve also been introduced to a first-hand view of the tireless hard work that goes on in the third sector. 

I think my best experience while working at TeamKinetic was attending AVM’s National Conference in London. I got to talk to current and potential customers about what TeamKinetic has to offer – something that was a totally new experience for me. As someone who’s only been to London to watch Sheffield United lose at Wembley, it was nice to have a more positive memory to associate with the city!

Honourable mentions:

  • Those days when Steve would bring his VR headset into the office for us all to have a play with at lunch.

Here’s Milo having a fight with an invisible man… I think he’s winning. 

The ‘Team’ Behind TeamKinetic

A personal highlight has been working alongside Chris, Steve, and Rolf. Thanks for making work so enjoyable and supporting me and my professional growth this past year. Contributing towards the growth of TeamKinetic for the past year has been an absolute pleasure.

Also spending my placement year alongside someone else from the university made settling in that much easier, so I want to say a big thank you to Milo too. 

I’d like to wish the best of luck to Sammy and Chloe who will be taking over from myself and Milo, you can find out more about them by reading their introduction blogs below! 

Introducing TeamKinetic: Sammy Reid – Dropping the Poms

Introducing TeamKinetic: Chloe – All about creativity

If you’re ever in need of volunteer management software, I can’t recommend better people to get it from! 

Introducing TeamKinetic: Sammy Reid – Dropping the Poms

By

On 19th June 2020

In News & Views

Sammy Cheerleading (Middle)

Starting off in life my ultimate dream was to become a dancer. Training 6 days a week, performing once a week and competing twice a month was all I ever knew. The styles of dance I enjoyed ranged from ballet to tap to the latest cheerleading. Each has taught me different life skills and lessons along the way. Dancing has also helped me to grow as an individual, giving me experiences I would never take back, however, I soon came to realise my aching knees weren’t going to take it much longer and decided to drastically change my career path, cue the degree in events.

The Buzz Of Marketing

When starting my Events Management degree marketing was not something I considered as a career. Not until I studied a unit titled marketing an event did I realise this was my passion. From creating a website for a new, trendy (fake) festival to even turning a yellow Corsa into a giant bee to market a real-life event. Each of these projects pushed me creatively in ways I didn’t know possible!

Marketing is the art of revealing peoples emotions through just something as simple as a poster or video. It has amazed me as to how something so simple can impact 1000’s of people. This has inspired me to follow the marketing path as a career and to continue my learning within this industry.

Bee themed car for a marketing campaign.

Volunteer Times

Volunteering was not something I was very aware of, it wasn’t until University when my first volunteering role showed me just how important volunteers can be.

Some of my first roles were for small charities who rely on volunteers to survive. Having that experience changed my perception of volunteering and how much these organisations value their volunteers. Not only this but from working on sporting events and major festivals I have had unbelievable experiences. Being able to see bands and artists for free or watching the Rugby League Grand Final. These opportunities have allowed me to meet like-minded people and have some of the most amazing moments in my life, just from volunteering!

Seeing TeamKinetic create an easy to use volunteer management software for organisations instantly made me want to work for them. Knowing organisations rely heavily on volunteers and also having lived the exciting experiences as a volunteer, I knew this company were creating something incredible and I was keen to be involved.

Lockdown Hobby

During the lockdown, like most people, I decided to take up a new hobby to keep myself busy. I have always been into shoes and clothes, so I decided to start painting them. Each design has opened up my creative mind and has helped me relax, however, this hobby has quickly turned into quite the obsession and I find myself painting till 3 am!

Painted butterfly shoes.

Final Words

I am excited to start this new chapter in my life and am thankful for this opportunity to work with TeamKinetic who will help me to develop my skills in marketing and get some hands-on experience at the same time. I am looking forward to working with a motivated team who share the same values and drive as I do and meeting TeamKinetic’s customers, getting to know more about their organisations and what I can offer for them! I can’t wait to get stuck in!

Sammy Reid

sammy@teamkinetic.co.uk

For more information on volunteer management software visit our website or call 01619145747

Champions of Europe, Champions of Volunteer Management…

By

On 17th June 2020

In News & Views, Sport

…Champions of England?

All football fans are aware of the current quality of Liverpool FC – a team that won the Champions League earlier this year and looks well suited to win the Premier League now that football is returning.

But away from the pitch, they’re true champions of volunteering. The LFC Foundation has used TeamKinetic’s volunteer management system since May 2018, and we’ve seen first-hand how great the work they do is!

LFC Foundation, volunteers, volunteer management software, volunteer management system, volunteer management, TeamKinetic,

A bit of background info:

The LFC Foundation is the official charity of Liverpool Football Club. Building on the Club’s work in the community over the past 20 years, the charity was formed in 2010. The Foundation delivers 24 community programmes across their three impact areas; Wellbeing, Skills and Communities, every week.

We’ve loved helping the LFC Foundation recruit, retain, and manage their volunteers. We’ve even volunteered with them ourselves! You can find all our LFC Foundation blogs by going to this link.

LFC Foundation, volunteers, volunteer management software, volunteer management system, volunteer management, TeamKinetic,

Liverpool FC dedicating so much time and energy to their foundation volunteers is admirable. Now, of course, other clubs have foundations and recruit volunteers, but do they see it as a focus? It appears that most do not. The work done by the Liverpool FC Foundation gives people from all walks of life a chance to do what they love – play football. When we volunteered there in August, it was great to see how happy everyone was. That happiness was mostly made possible by the LFC Foundation staff and volunteers. We salute you!

A quick look into Premier League teams tells you that not many other clubs place such a focus in their volunteer programmes. In fact, LFC might be the only ones investing in a volunteer management system for their foundation. Is this because other clubs don’t see volunteering as a focus? We hope not! We prefer to believe they just aren’t aware of the benefits of having a volunteer management system yet.

Let me tell you about the benefits of a volunteer management system

Oh, here we go. Another company trying to sell something. While, yes I am trying to sell you something, I’m also trying to save you countless hours and effort you already waste on your current volunteer management processes.

First of all, volunteer management systems help you recruit volunteers more easily. When they sign up to your system, they’ll see all active volunteering opportunities instantly. Beats sending your contact details into an abyss, doesn’t it?

Secondly, a volunteer management system can aid volunteer retention rates. The system will display all ongoing volunteering opportunities, even allowing you to invite volunteers you think will be interested. Meaning that they won’t have to wait for you to contact them about the opportunities your club is hosting. This is likely to encourage your volunteers to keep on volunteering with you for a long time.

Finally, any good volunteer management system should make managing your volunteers a piece of cake. With the ability to communicate with all volunteers through a chat room, create groups, and analyse your volunteers through our reporting features, our volunteer management system should give you all the tools you need to become a champion volunteer manager – and make your life easier!

Want to become a champion too?

Here at TeamKinetic we can help with all your volunteer management needs. Go to our website to create a demo site – it’s completely free! You can also call us on 0161 914 5757 with any questions.

Don’t hesitate to reach out on social media, you can find us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. You can also go to our YouTube channel to see some examples of the features we have to offer and some of the people we already work with.

How Volunteers Are Tackling COVID-19

By

On 5th June 2020

In COVID-19, News & Views

Think back to New Year’s Eve, 2019. Did you make resolutions?
When you pictured 2020 what did it look like? I’m not sure anyone could have predicted what we’re living through right now.

Despite living in such unpredictable circumstances filled with loss, there are still good things happening out in the world. In particular, I want to talk about COVID volunteers – especially during Volunteers’ Week 2020.

Helping Their Communities Through Crisis

The most common form of volunteering recently has been deliveries. Delivering food parcels to those who are most at-risk is a great way volunteers have been helping their local communities. 

A further example of volunteers providing basic necessities comes from Compassion London. They’re a group of professional chefs and volunteers who worked out of Wembley Stadium to provide meals for thousands of local people. 

A little closer to home for us, The Bread and Butter Thing operates across Greater Manchester. The service redistributes surplus food from supermarkets and manufacturers to people on low incomes – the number of people using this service has risen greatly as a consequence of COVID-19.

Volunteers have also been called upon to ‘befriend’ members of their communities. The scheme pairs volunteers with someone who is alone in isolation. This tackles loneliness which is especially prevalent right now due to lockdown rules.

The key to finding a cure?

Scientists across the world have proposed that human trials could be introduced to test a vaccine quickly. These trials would involve volunteers, and while there are many dangers involved, it could help provide a cure much sooner.

Volunteers would have to be fairly young (mid-twenties) and in good health to apply for the trials. Knowing the potential risks associated with the Coronavirus, volunteers for the trials would be doing an incredibly selfless act.

Want to help?

For anyone considering face-to-face volunteering, you must ensure you are fit and healthy to do so. You can access the latest government advice relating to COVID-19 here. To find local volunteering opportunities, contact your council or simply do a quick ‘volunteering opportunities near me‘ internet search.

You can also search for existing opportunities near you with TryVolunteering.

What have TeamKinetic done to help?

We started offering our volunteer management system free of charge for the duration of the pandemic to help organisations recruit larger numbers of covid volunteers. Furthermore, we created a whole new community tasks dashboard to make it easier for covid-specific tasks to be created and completed. It is our hope that more people are involved with volunteering than ever before!

Find out more about our work through these blog posts:

Responding to a Global Pandemic: The TeamKinetic Way

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On 27th May 2020

In COVID-19, News & Views

The COVID-19 pandemic has been at the centre of our lives for the past few months. As the chaos begins to settle (slightly), we thought we’d take the time to reflect on our response to the virus. 

Let’s go back to the 17th of March. Following new advice from the government to cut all non-essential contact with others, TeamKinetic closed our office and made the switch to working from home. 

Business as usual?

Being a provider of volunteer management, we had to wonder whether volunteering could even continue if people were being told to stay at home. However, there were at-risk people out there who were in need of medical supplies and food.

The biggest question we had was how exactly we could help these people in a safe way for both those who were at-risk and the volunteers. We not only had to consider the physical safety of everyone involved, but also the safety of their personal data.

We quickly set to work developing a new system that would connect volunteers wanting to help in their community with people who were in need of help.

New Features Developed

  • A new simpler, customised home page for organisations to let their volunteers know what their options and opportunities are during the COVID pandemic
  • Brand new community task feature set that allows for the creation, assignment and management of community requested tasks for vulnerable and at need individuals
  • API for the community task management
  • Progressive Web App for volunteers to search/find/join and complete community tasks
  • Volunteer ID card and QR code for the community task app users
  • Chat between the assigned volunteer and organisation admins
  • Push notifications

New Hardware and Infrastructure

Furthermore, we were anticipating spikes in traffic as various announcements were made so made some internal changes to help manage these spikes.

  • Transferred community task load to AWS elastic servers
  • New Google map management and capacity (for directions and geo location)
  • New logging and monitoring installed to check capacity and demand in near real time

Overall, with the new system changes it is now easier and faster to create volunteering opportunities (now called tasks). We believe this significantly helped combat the chaos felt by volunteer managers in the early stages of the pandemic.

Next, we had to find a way to make all our current users aware of this system while also targeting organisations that we thought could benefit from using it.

Creating awareness

The enterprise version of the system is entirely free of charge for the duration of the pandemic. By offering this extended trial period, we hoped as many organisations could get their own systems up and running to spread the positive influence of volunteering as much as possible!

We also hosted a string of webinars showing how to use the system. This allowed viewers to interact with our developers, ask questions, and raise any concerns they had. This seemed to be very beneficial for both us and our customers. It was great to hear from people directly, especially if the comments were full of praise!

You can read all our blogs related to the COVID pandemic by clicking here.

What’s next?

The system is being continually developed to meet the needs of our customers and make the volunteer management process as easy as possible. It’s also important to consider how the system can be used in a post-COVID world. Which is hard to imagine right now! The activities done by these volunteers don’t have to be confined to this pandemic, they can be done at any time. We believe that the kindness shown by these volunteers to help the more vulnerable members of their communities should be the norm across society.

Why can’t we continue to help each other on a daily basis?

Want to try it for yourself?

If you’d like to see how the TeamKinetic system can help you recruit and manage volunteers during COVID and beyond, check out our website to get started with a free trial.

Getting Started With TeamKinetic Workbook, volunteer management, volunteer management software, volunteer management system

Getting Started with TeamKinetic: Lesson One – Basic Setup

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On 11th May 2020

In Getting Started Workbook

Now you’re up and running with your own TeamKinetic volunteer management system, it’s important to go through a few basic setup steps. Let’s start by customising things such as your ‘About Us’ page, terms and conditions, and registration fields.

The About Us page tells the people who visit your site the most important things they need to know about you: who you are, what you do, who you help through volunteer work and how you help them, etc. 

The Terms and Conditions can be changed if you wish, but if left alone your system will use the default TeamKinetic set of Ts & Cs instead. 

Registration Fields can be a very useful thing to customise as we know every organisation is different and may require different pieces of information about volunteers before they can sign up. 

Task

Customise your basic TeamKinetic setup options.

The Process

Step One
Click the admin cog in the top right corner.

Step Two 
Click ‘Setup’

Step Three 
For now, we suggest updating information in the following tabs:
– About Us
– Terms & Conditions
– Registration Fields
– Gender/Ethnicity Lists

 

You can find out more about configuring your system settings in this playlist. It goes through all the options available in the Super Admin menu (that’s you!)

Workbook Intro
Lesson Two
Getting Started With TeamKinetic Workbook, volunteer management, volunteer management software, volunteer management system

Getting Started with TeamKinetic: End of the Workbook

By

On 7th May 2020

In Getting Started Workbook

We’ve reached the end of this workbook, by now your system should be fully functional and you should be comfortable with the basics on a day-to-day basis. You might even be comfortable enough to start training other people within your organisation to use the system yourself. If not, don’t worry, this workbook can be easily shared!

Now it’s time for you to figure everything else out for yourself…

Just kidding!

While we may not have any more lessons in this workbook, we still have resources to help you out while you continue to figure out the more intricate aspects of your TeamKinetic system. 

Case Studies

You can see testimonies from people who have used our system dotted throughout our blog posts. This is probably the best way to find out how to get the most out of the system. Below we’ve linked some of the case studies we’ve done in the past.

Universities: University of Manchester, 

Charities: Seashell Trust, 

Local Authorities: Stirling Council (Active Sterling), 

Sport: The LFC Foundation, GB Taekwondo, 

Healthcare: Warrington Halton Hospital, 

Help Videos

You can find short videos on almost every feature the system has to offer. They can be found by going to the ? box next to your admin settings cog (see right). There you’ll find an array of searchable help videos that should help you in a couple of minutes or less.

If you can’t find a video for a feature, feel free to contact us either through social media or by raising a support ticket and we’ll help you out!

We’d love your feedback!

We’d be extremely grateful if you could take a quick minute to complete this feedback form. This will help us improve the workbook in the future, helping all our users get the most out of their systems! 

Give your feedback here: https://forms.gle/BJc2HLKRVgRc2h86A

Lesson Nine
Getting Started With TeamKinetic Workbook, volunteer management, volunteer management software, volunteer management system

Getting Started with TeamKinetic: Workbook

By

On 7th May 2020

In Getting Started Workbook

Welcome to the Getting Started with TeamKinetic Workbook. The aim of this book is to teach you the basics of your TeamKinetic system in less than ten steps. Basically, this is everything you need to know to get started and improve your overall volunteer management. We recommend that you move through these lessons at your own pace to make sure you get the most out of it.

Before we start…

We’ll be using some key terms in this document that you may not be familiar with yet. To avoid any confusion from the off, let’s go through them now!

Opportunity

An ‘opportunity’ is any activity that a person can volunteer to do. Every opportunity must have a provider. Opportunities can either have set sessions or be flexible. 

Session-based Opportunities

Sessions can either be recurring (daily, weekly, monthly, etc) or individual. Use this for opportunities with specific dates and times.

Flexible opportunities

In contrast, volunteers can log hours for flexible opportunities at any time. This is great for opportunities that can be done from any location or at any time.

Provider

The ‘provider’ is the individual or organisation that is offering the opportunity. The provider should be the one communicating with volunteers about opportunities they’ve signed on for. They have their own accounts on the system.

Admin

The system ‘admin’, we hope, is you reading this. The admin has access to all areas of the system that we’ll be going through in this workbook.

Now that’s all cleared up, click below to go to Lesson One

Lesson One
Getting Started With TeamKinetic Workbook, volunteer management, volunteer management software, volunteer management system

Getting Started with TeamKinetic: Lesson Nine – Reporting

By

On 7th May 2020

In Getting Started Workbook

Now you’re more familiar with the system and you’ve completed a few opportunities successfully, it might be time to do some reporting on your volunteer base. Reporting can be an effective way to keep track of your volunteer management programme and how your volunteers are getting on.

Tasks

  1. Create a basic report (e.g. based on a characteristic such as gender/ethnicity/age).
  2. Submit a request for a custom report.

The Process

Task 1

Step One
Go to ‘Reporting’.

Step Two 
Click ‘Reports & Analysis’. 

Step Three 
Go to ‘Volunteers’. 

Step Four 
Select a date range and data set then click ‘Download CSV’.

Task 2

Step One
Go to ‘Help & Support’. 

Step Two 
Click ‘Support Tickets’. 

Step Three 
Click ‘Create New Ticket’. 

Step Four 
Fill in the required fields and upload a CSV data set of the report you wish to create.

Lesson Eight
End of Workbook Notes

Page 18 of 21

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