The ability for universities to prepare students with the skills and experience required by businesses is critical in today’s competitive economy.
Students at The University of East London (UEL) are offered the chance to build a strong portfolio of voluntary work placements within local, national, public and third sector organisations, giving them the experience and contacts to assist them after they graduate.
Why Did They Change?
Their previous volunteer management system offered few customisation tools, meaning that they couldn’t capture some key pieces of information. The limited reporting library also meant they had very limited insight into how much volunteering was actually happening, and if that experience was good or bad.
Frequently students and organisations would avoid updating their details simply due to the awkwardness of the user interface, this eventually resulted in a system entirely out of date.
Students were often shown opportunities which no longer existed, or contact details that had since changed. This was very frustrating for both the students and the providers of the opportunities.
“These system limitations caused us to hold back on promoting the system, which reduced our visibility on and off campus”
Joe Crook – Volunteering Manager
The Move to TeamKinetic
UEL implemented TeamKinetic with a focus on boosting their student employability levels whilst also having the ability to recruit, manage and communicate with their volunteers directly through the system.
“With TeamKinetic, we now have access to the information we need in real-time, including who has signed up and who has completed their induction, and how many hours they have logged which is vital to our volunteer programme.”
Joe Crook – Volunteering Manager
Within 4 months UEL had enrolled over 350 students and 80 providers regularly adding opportunities. By allowing students and businesses to control their own information administration of the system is minimal.
“We spend around 6 hours per week administering the system, which is great as we now have more time to promote our service to local businesses and students.”
Joe Crook – Volunteering Manager
The reduced administration has allowed UEL to focus on marketing opportunities instead of getting caught up in the logistics. This has enabled them to utilise TeamKinetics feedback functions giving them valuable insight into the students’ experience, allowing them to develop and pass on best practice.
“The system has diversified the way that we communicate as we have started to use the functions that are available to us. We also actively use the online news feeds and case studies and this allows us to communicate to our volunteers much quicker and easier than before.”
Our community partners enjoy using the system due to its clean interface, the fact that the opportunities have an expiry date, and that they can add relevant information per position means the opportunities are always accurate and up to date. “
Joe Crook – Volunteering Manager
The Future
The success of the system has allowed UEL to focus on achieving higher conversation rates, from enrolment on the system to placement within a local business.
“We now know which students have signed up and are currently and actively volunteering on a variety of opportunities.”
The TeamKinetic platform is powerful and offers us unprecedented insight into our volunteering programme. The ability to personalise our online presence is fantastic, allowing us to customise the look of the site in line with our branding guidelines, giving us a much more professional feel to the site which is important when dealing with external businesses.
I have already recommended TeamKinetic to a number of Universities around the UK, if you want a professional looking volunteer programme, I advise you to take a look as it is superior to anything else I have come across.”
Joe Crook – Volunteering Manager
