Our sincere apologies for the length of the outage reported today, we always strive to give our customers the best possible service and we failed today to identify and resolve the issue quickly enough.
What Happened?
From approximately 08:30 on Thursday 30th December our services started reporting connectivity issues. These increased in severity until at approx 09:15 it was not possible to connect to any of our services. At this point our main network connections were reporting a network cable unplugged error.
The issue was restricted to wider network access and at no time was data loss an issue, the services continued to run successfully and data integrity was retained.
Full service was restored at approximately 13:30.
Why Did This Happen?
A network switch was reporting spikes in packets sent by our services and eventually hit the maximum threshold for packet traffic within 30 minutes. This activated the StormGuard feature of the network which helps to prevent malicious traffic taking over the network by isolating the offending section of the network.
No corresponding increase in traffic was reported and general network traffic generated by our services was within normal limits.
The switch was reset but would repeatedly trigger StormGuard and block access to our services.
What Did We Do?
Initially we requested that all cabling was checked, and this was found to be in place and seemingly active. We then checked our network drivers and reset all connections. It was suspected at this point that there may be a hardware failure of our own network cards and so a new server with new network cards was provisioned in case we needed to move data if we could not restore connections.
Whilst the new server was provisioned we started to audit connection points further up the network chain, that are out of our direct control, with our provider. Eventually a network switch was identified as blocking traffic from our servers.
Once the switch was identified as the cause of the outage, but no corresponding issue was found on the servers we requested that the network switch was switched to its redundant backup partner.
The switch is a deep level switch shared by other independent services and so the switch to the redundant partner takes time to effect.
Once the partner switch was brought online and the block removed all services were restored and all data fully available.
What Are We Still Doing?
We are monitoring network traffic between our servers and the switch and have instigated an audit of the server logs and access to rule out any possibility of malicious programs or access.
What Could Have Prevented This Issue and What Now?
We did not identify the ultimate cause quickly enough. The server interface does not include any indication of this block that is applied further upstream. Our service provider has already prepared some guidance on how to identify this issue in the future and is looking at ways to include StormGuard notifications in the user interface.
This issue was not caused by a bug or misconfiguration but a hardware failure. We could not have prevented the hardware failure, they will happen eventually, but as we were not aware of the potentially blocking actions of StormGuard it took us longer than necessary to restore access.
We will be updating our disaster recovery procedure to include making checks on upstream switches and other network hardware in the case that there appears to be network hardware issues with our servers.
We have had very few outages in our history. This is the first major outage that affected all customers and was persistent for more than a few minutes. Our last unexpected downtime was reported on March 20th 2021 and lasted for less than 3 minutes.
You can view our current and historical status report at https://teamkinetic.statuspage.io/
With t-minus 3 days until Christmas Day, we wanted to look back at our 2021 with a round up! It’s been another tough year for everyone, but we’ve managed to find some light in moments this year. From award shows to blossoming partnerships, 2021 has been a year of developments for TeamKinetic.
Let’s have a look at our year in numbers.
January – March
The year started very much as this one is finishing, much to everyone’s frustration.
Volunteering was still very much on the agenda as we saw vaccination programs in full swing across the country. We were really proud to support a whole range of organisations mobilising an amazing army of volunteers.
People talk about the Anti-Vax brigade but we can tell you first-hand the Pro-Vax crowd are amazing and were out in force at the start of the year, and we take our hats off to each and every one of them!
March brought some wonderful news when we were honoured to be awarded ‘The Partner Excellence’ and the ‘COVID-19 Response Recognition’ awards for our work with Halton and St Helens Voluntary Community Action at the iNetwork awards. It was a huge achievement for TeamKinetic and our partners and a milestone we won’t be forgetting – especially for the recognition of our efforts throughout COVID.
The key achievements from our work with Halton and St Helens saw 1,744 volunteers registered and together they offered 8,688 volunteering hours. Our volunteer support economic value offered £80,796 during the first six months of the programme. For those feeling lonely or isolated, we were able to support 16,161 telephone calls to make those feel a little less lonely during repeated lockdowns and restrictions. Overall, we were able to support 32,993 in such a short amount of time and we can’t be more proud of the project.
We can’t thank Halton and St Helens VCA and St Helens Council enough; along with every single amazing volunteer for your commitment and drive, you make it all worthwhile. If you haven’t seen their short video on how important volunteers were during COVID, spend a couple of minutes and check it out.
May and June
Moving onto May, we held our first online conference, focusing on COVID-19, and what happens next. We’d like to say thank you to all our speakers and to those 140 people who attended. With talks from the likes of Gethyn Williams, Dr Jurgen Grotz, Kathryn Palmer-Skillings and our own Chris Martin, the conference was a success!
We do have a quick wrap-up video that you can check out here.
In June we said some hellos! We welcomed Alex back into the fold. Having already completed her placement year at TeamKinetic, we welcomed back a familiar face. You can read her (re)introduction to TeamKinetic life, here.
Coming back to TeamKinetic has been great! I’m grateful to the team for offering me this position straight out of university and I’m looking forward to what we can achieve next.
Alex
We also welcomed a fresh face to the team: Katie. Along with Alex, Katie also wrote an introductory blog post which you can read here.
It’s been a whirlwind of a time since I joined in June and I can’t wait to see what comes next in the next six months.
Katie
With new welcomes, we said some goodbyes at the start of July. We said goodbye to Chloe and Sammy, who were our 2020/21 placement students. They took charge of the TeamKinetic conference and supplied you with dog pictures on our Twitter. Alex and Katie are more cat people, and so our pet content has changed significantly over the past couple of months (much to Chloe and Sammy’s dismay).
Both Chloe and Sammy are well underway with their final year at university. We’re wishing them the best of luck seeing out the rest of their degree.
July and August
July saw us return to the office full-time as we thought the world was getting back to normal. It also saw the return of the legendary TeamKinetic staff night out, I must apologise to Chloe, Sammy, Katie and Alex as the night was so messy this appears to be the only surviving picture of these 3 ugly mugs!
August saw the launch of TeamKinetic 2.0 the latest all-singing and dancing version of TeamKinetic. Unlike previous updates, this one was a monster with more new features and controls than anything we had done before. Not only that we had updated and replaced all the old legacy code with a new and improved code base. Steve and Rolf worked day and night to get it ready and after it launched to find and fix those pesky bugs.
This new code base has set us up to be able to continue to improve the service quicker and hopefully will ensure you guys have the very best technology available for the next few years.
September
In September, we were so proud to announce our partnership with the Association of Volunteer Managers. Founder, Chris Martin, detailed our hopes for the next 12 months, some of which we’ve started on already…
Over the next 12 months, we will be working with the team at AVM to develop some accessible resources and materials that you might find useful if you are thinking about how you might use digital. We will be exploring what type of member offers and benefits you might like from us to make it easy and affordable for you to look at digital volunteer management and most importantly we hope to get to know you all a little bit better.
Chris
You can watch Chris and Ruth at AVM discuss the new partnership below. We’re excited to see what can become of this partnership with AVM heading into 2022.
We also worked with the guys in Scotland to help them launch their first ever cross-sector heritage volunteer campaign called Make your Mark. The ambition of the campaign was fantastic, how can they recruit a new generation of heritage volunteers and how can they broaden inclusion and accessibility to a whole group of new people. We were really happy to be part of the program and that TeamKinetic was to be used to drive the recruitment campaign. You can watch their launch video here, it’s pretty cool.
— Make Your Mark in Volunteering (@MakeYourMarkVol) December 1, 2021
October
October brought Halloween and our sponsorship of AVM’s annual conference. The two-day conference opened up insightful conversations with speakers that really got us thinking! It was our first time sponsoring the event and it was really nice to support something we have attended for so long.
It was also really lovely to catch up with people and see a number of faces we hadn’t seen in a while, even if it was just over Zoom, who knows what next year might look like but fingers crossed for catching up over the buffet or a glass of wine.
October also brought the first of our talks regarding digital volunteer management with the Charity Retail Association. We really wanted 2021 to be the year we looked at how we could better support the wider sector and working with both Charity Retail and AVM were key decisions that would enable us to share our knowledge and support the wider sector.
If you were there, I hope our 30/40 minute talk was insightful for those attending, and we hope we will be doing more of these in the new year.
November Talks:
We had a quick start to November with the Local Government Chronicle Awards. Once again, we were nominated in two categories, for our work over the past year with Halton and St Helens. The categories were Campaign of the Year and Technology. While we didn’t win, it was an honour to be nominated. We have to thank everyone at Halton and St Helens and the volunteers for creating such a successful project. (Chris also enjoyed a night away in London maybe a little too much if his hangover was anything to go by!)
We also were honoured to be asked to talk at COP26. The invitation came from the team running Make Your Mark in Scotland. We also heard from the likes of Chester Zoo, the National History Museum and Rob Jackson. It was another insightful day, which Katie personally enjoyed live tweeting her way through.
Volunteering, like every sphere of human life, needs to look at its role in climate change and it was really inspiring to hear what is happening and what you can do to make a change.
If you missed it why not check it out here:
The middle of November meant it was time to head down south for the day. Jumping on the train to London, we met up with the Charity Retail Association for their People Management Group – a successful hybrid event we spoke at. This was the first hybrid event we’ve attended, and we wanted to highlight the work put in by the team to make sure everything ran smoothly. While half of the attendees weren’t in the room, it never felt like they were anywhere else (apart from the leftover lunches!) We want to thank the CRA for including us in multiple of their events over 2021, and we hope to be continuing this into 2022.
Being back in person at an event was great and it felt like it was all going to be plain sailing moving into 2022, little did we know what was about to change everything!
December Celebrations:
In December, the Health Innovation Network (HIN) on behalf of NHSX released an evaluation into the value of micro-volunteering applications during the global pandemic. We were really excited to be a key contributor to the findings. The findings were also positive towards TeamKinetic and our approach to localised Micro-volunteering community response.
Through the use of these applications, over 100,000 individuals carried out 1.5 million tasks for the vulnerable during the global pandemic. Evidence suggests that micro-volunteering engages a willing volunteer force and addresses unmet community needs. It was also clear that the pandemic drove interest into the value of these platforms.
We also managed to squeeze in our Christmas party and our annual Christmas jumper day which was fun.
December has not quite turned out as we would have liked. There are refreshed calls for Volunteers to support the booster campaign. It’s all starting to feel a little like Groundhog Day as we find ourselves back in a COVID-induced crisis.
It’s been an uncertain year at times. While we’re still waiting for the days we can ‘go back to normal’, we think we’ve managed to have another successful year and that we have helped to make volunteering that little bit easier and more accessible.
If we have learned anything from 2021, it’s that you can’t plan too far in advance. You should enjoy the simple things in life and take the small victories where you can find them. You just can’t be sure what’s around the corner.
All that’s left to say is Happy Holidays and Merry Christmas to those that celebrate. And, finally, have a Happy New Year – we’ll see you in 2022!
“It’s Chrisstmaasss!” For many this festive time of year is to relax and enjoy time with friends and family; but, for many, Christmas is a time of sadness, loneliness and stress. 2021 has been another tough year for charities, and those that they help. At Christmas time, charities rely on volunteers, donations, or fundraisers to help them through this festive season. With at least 3.5 million people not looking forward to Christmas this year for a myriad of reasons, It’s time to unleash your inner elf, and start volunteering or fundraising in your local community.
Befriending Services
According to Age UK, more than 2.5 million older people have no one to turn to for help and support. The charity’s network of local groups means there are a number of opportunities available for you to engage with- they aren’t limited to just Christmas, but maybe Christmas is the best time to start.
These opportunities also include their befriending scheme, both face-to-face and through telephone calls. Partnering with The Silver Line, Age UK offers free phone friendship services, meaning you’re able to comfort someone over the phone, from your own home. At many Age UK branches, you can become a befriender volunteer and visit an older person in their home or accompany them to doctor’s visits or the theatre. You can hear more about the befriending services through Rose and Sarah’s story here.
Age UK isn’t the only charity who offer these types of befriending services, Independent Age and Royal Voluntary Service offer similar services, open to volunteers just like you.
Befriending services are across the country this Christmas. No one should feel lonely.
Crisis at Christmas
Charity Crisis has been helping those take their first steps out of homelessness since 1967. Christmas donations of just £29.06 helps provide a place that’s safe to stay at, hot meals- including a Christmas Dinner, companionship and year-round support such as training and education to help someone end their homelessness for good.
Crisis this year has setups in London along with multiple other regions across the country, including our very own Manchester. In London, Crisis will be providing accommodation during the Christmas and New Year period to those who would alternatively be spending Christmas on the streets.
They’ll also be opening their day centres in the capital along with their other sites across Britain delivering hot meals and providing advice, health and wellbeing services. For those who may still be cautious to volunteer due to the pandemic, Crisis will be continuing to provide their volunteering opportunities in a socially distanced way. If you’d like to know more about Crisis, and the ways you can help this Christmas, have a look here.
Crisis at Christmas: Together we will end homelessness.
Local Community Based Organisations:
Local volunteering opportunities are just a few clicks away, and you’re likely to find an opportunity that fits you perfectly. If you’re struggling to find opportunities, head to our TryVolunteering site, or look for national schemes set up specifically for this time of year.
Why not look at opportunities that focus on helping young people within your local community. For those less fortunate, it can be a confusing and frustrating period. With around half a million people, including 200,000 children being pushed into poverty by the universal credit cut, volunteering, fundraising and donations may be needed more than ever.
Become a Secret Santa and raise money to help bring food, love and warmth to vulnerable children this Christmas. Last year, Santa’s across the UK reached 604,000 young people and their families. Supporting these children is now more important than ever- start your Santa journey today, here.
What Are You Waiting For This Christmas?
Volunteering this Christmas doesn’t just have to help those in need, there can be benefits for you too. Volunteering, fundraising and even making a small donation can make you feel good and positively impact your mental health. You might even learn a new skill along the way!
So, what are you waiting for? Start helping to make a difference to those in need, so everyone can enjoy Christmas this year.
We’ve recently released TeamKinetic version 2.09 and you may have noticed a few new features. We’ve added new emailing and expenses features in our latest update.
New Email Features
The video above lays out all the new features.
When creating bulk emails you can now select any number of opportunities to be included in the email. You have the option of including the events that week and if you want to show the volunteer’s statistics across the top. These are all displayed in exactly the same way as within the newsletter so its now possible to send a newsletter type email to any of your volunteers, for any of your opportunities, whenever you like!
We have also rearranged and refactored the preview and draft buttons so you can now send a preview email to your email instantly and save a draft copy without leaving the page. We also now update the saved draft each time you hit the save draft button, rather than creating a new draft.
New Expenses Feature
The video above lays out information needed when adding/processing an Expense.
This is an Enterprise only feature. Administrators will have to switch this module on and off via the Super Admin Menu → Options → Opportunities → ‘Use the in app managed expenses module’.
Opportunities can now either be marked as ‘Managed Expenses’ and/or ‘Expenses Paid’.
Expenses Paid simply means that volunteers will be reimbursed. In this case, you should add details about what expenses are paid and if there’s a cap on the amount. This is useful for providers to specify that their opportunity pays expenses. Managed Expenses means that volunteers will be able upload expense claims which can then be managed by administrators. Managed expenses are always also marked as expenses paid.
If enabled, volunteers can select applicable opportunities from their dashboard, upload a receipt, an explanation of what the expense is for, and the amount they are claiming. Admins will get an alert when a new claim is submitted by a volunteer and can manage them all from a simple interface. The admin can view the receipt, adjust the claim amount, and update the claim status. A full history of changes and notes is maintained and viewable underneath the main claim.
Any issues?
New updates can create small problems elsewhere in the site (despite rigorous testing!) If you run into any issues on your site, don’t hesitate to reach out to us. You can either use the live chat feature, or raise a support ticket.
As an act that is entirely selfless, rewarding volunteers may seem like an impossible task – surely the work is rewarding enough? While, yes, the work is rewarding. It doesn’t keep a volunteer motivated to keep volunteering for you. So how do we reward charity retail volunteers?
In this blog we’ll go through a variety of ways, because not every volunteer will respond to the same methods.
First, why do they volunteer?
Understanding the reasoning behind your volunteer’s commitment can help you tailor recognition and rewards to them personally. Here are some common reasons:
Because they care about the cause/have been personally impacted by the organisation.
As a good way to fill their time.
To join friends and family who volunteer.
Because it’s a good networking opportunity.
Because it contributes to something wider – e.g. the Duke of Edinburgh award.
So how do we reward charity retail volunteers?
This is where it starts to feel complicated: formal vs informal, intrinsic vs extrinsic, physical v digital, etc. But don’t worry! We’ll lay it all out for you so you just have to worry about picking the right method for your volunteers.
Formal v Informal Rewards
Formal rewards are usually regarded as those you plan ahead of time. This could include things like award ceremonies, volunteer of the month awards, and certificates.
In contrast, informal rewards are the smaller things you would use on a day-to-day basis. Instead, it focuses on improving the experience for volunteers. You might reward volunteers in this way through bringing them refreshments while they work, having conversations about how their experience could be improved. A great benefit of informal rewards is their low cost and significant ongoing impact.
Intrinsic v Extrinsic Motivation
Volunteering can be personally rewarding to many people and this good feeling is often a big motivator. Intrinsic motivation is all about helping your volunteers continually feel good about the work they’re doing and the difference they’re making, rather than working towards one particular reward. It follows the same premise as informal rewards – you want to reward volunteers by continually improving the state of your volunteer programme.
On the other hand, extrinsic motivation involves volunteering because of outside factors, such as receiving a reward. This isn’t always a negative thing, as mentioned above, people often volunteer as part of something else. For example, a student may volunteer in a charity shop in order to fulfil one of the requirements of the Duke of Edinburgh Award.
There’s always potential to retain this kind of volunteer through intrinsic motivation. If they become motivated by the way volunteering makes them feel, rather than fulfilling a requirement, they’ll be more likely to keep volunteering for you.
Physical v Digital
Now we know about the different types of motivation and rewards, we can start thinking how to deliver them. Those of you who are not yet fully engaging with digital may feel more comfortable delivering purely physical rewards (such as thank you cards and teas/coffee). One Welsh charity even decided to help the local community beyond their existing efforts. The Gellideg Foundation Group gave their volunteers gift cards to small local businesses as a reward, helping boost the local economy and keep local shops open!
However, there are a whole host more options available to you via digital means. And you never have to stick to purely digital or physical rewards – there’s room for both to be used effectively.
How can I reward volunteers with TeamKinetic?
TeamKinetic can facilitate a range of options when it comes to rewarding your hard-working volunteers.
First of all, after every opportunity, volunteers and opportunity providers are asked to leave feedback. This feedback serves as a way to praise the volunteer but can also be used to improve internally. If any volunteers have issues, these will be sent to you and you can deal with them. Giving volunteers a great place to work is a great step to help them feel appreciated.
Furthermore, the system offers HourTrades. These are rewards for reaching a certain number of volunteering hours logged. This can be set to anything you desire, offering a wide range of incentives to your charity retail volunteers.
We also have Opportunity and Achievement Badges. Opportunity badges can identify opportunities that will contribute to an award, such as the Duke of Edinburgh Award. Achievement Badges are awarded over time – the more hours a volunteer logs, the better badge they receive! These are saved digitally but for an added touch you could create physical badges to match!
Try it for yourself
You can start a free trial of TeamKinetic on our website, giving you access to everything the system has to offer for 30 days.
If you want to find out more about the system, or have any questions you can use the chat feature on our website, email us, phone us on 0161 914 5757, or find us on social media:
You can find TeamKinetic on social media and listen to our podcast:
If your organisation has an established volunteer programme, you’ll have your volunteers up and running with good quality opportunities, but now it’s time to evaluate. Maybe you’re already analysing your volunteer programme, but is it enough?
Analysing your volunteer programme can provide key insight into the impact of your programme. This could include how you’ve improved the lives of people in the local community and key demographics of your volunteers. So let’s dive right in…
The Fundamentals
Let’s start with your goals. Do you have them and are you achieving them?
Simple reporting tools can help you recognise whether you’re hitting these goals. If you are, it can inform how you go about setting new goals. If not, it’ll give you an idea of how to adjust your operations in order to achieve them. And if you’re yet to set any goals, key KPIs can help you draw some up.
What are KPIs?
Key Performance Indicators: a set of quantifiable measurements used to gauge a company’s overall long-term performance. This could include things like:
The monetary value of services rendered by volunteer support
Number of people in the community served by volunteers
So Why Is It Important?
Analysing your volunteer programme is a pathway to discovering a whole host of things.
Volunteer retention rate can suggest the happiness of your volunteers or quality of your opportunities. If volunteers aren’t happy and don’t have access to good opportunities, they won’t keep coming back. You can read more on how to fix this issue in our ‘How to Increase Volunteer Retention (and keep it!)‘ blog. Just remember: a happy volunteer is a loyal volunteer!
Furthermore, volunteer demographics can be compared to demographics in your area to see whether your programme is attracting an expected variety of people. If not, why not? For example, demographics showing a very high proportion of white volunteers in a very ethnically diverse area could suggest there are barriers to people in your community who want to volunteer. Our recent post ‘Is Your Pool of Volunteers Diverse and Inclusive?‘ provides valuable tips on how to improve this within your own organisation.
However, data isn’t just about spotting areas for improvement. It could also be used to identify those who are going above and beyond for your organisation. With tools like hour logging and feedback, you can see which volunteers are giving their time the most and receiving praise for their work.
How can I get started?
There’s a good chance you’re already managing your volunteers digitally, but are you using volunteer management software? Software can put everything in one place for you, allowing you to manage, communicate, and analyse your volunteers in a few clicks. You can read more about implementing volunteer management software in this blog.
While it’s possible to analyse your volunteers using spreadsheets and other software, it’s definitely much easier to have everything in one place. Instantly have everything you need to manage your volunteers all in one place, leaving you more time to focus on the important stuff.
Why not try TeamKinetic?
You can start a free trial of TeamKinetic on our website. This will let you check out all our features for 30 days. This includes features such as volunteer-owned profiles, the ability to log hours completed, and reporting tools. If you like what you see, contact us to book a demo and see how we can help your organisation manage your volunteers and start analysing your volunteer programme!
Another great value interim release for you all, and only a few weeks since the last one! This one is all software based, no hardware or infrastructure updates, which is much better for my health and sanity =)
Update Feedback from Volunteer Dashboard
Providers and admins can now update a volunteers feedback from the feedback section on the volunteer dashboard page. Just hit the update link and you can save it right there – no refresh required.
New Translation Engine
For those customers (Enterprise only) that use an alternative language to English (get in touch if you are interested) we have now brought all translations in-house to our own replacement engine.
This has a number of advantages; we can update and add new replacements fast, translator marked Super Admins can provide translations right there in the Super Admin area, and they can request new replacements to be added.
Using our own replacement and translation engine has increased the page load time for translated pages by four fold, an excellent result.
Send Custom Newsletters Whenever You Want
The bulk email system has been updated to use the same HTML wrapper as the weekly newsletter, so all your bulk emails will now look better and have more branding elements for your organisation.
When creating bulk emails you can now select any number of opportunities to be included in the email. You have the option of including the events that week and if you want to show the volunteer’s statistics across the top. These are all displayed in exactly the same way as within the newsletter so its now possible to send a newsletter type email to any of your volunteers, for any of your opportunities, whenever you like!
We have also rearrange and refactored the preview and draft buttons so you can now send a preview email to your email instantly and save a draft copy without leaving the page. We also now update the saved draft each time you hit the save draft button, rather than creating a new draft.
Expenses Module – First Phase
This is another great Enterprise only option to help you manage your expenses. You’ve been able to mark an opportunity as expenses provided for quite a few versions now. This new module closes the loop for expenses.
Volunteers can select applicable opportunities from their dashboard, upload a receipt, an explanation of what the expense is for, and the amount they are claiming.
Admins get an alert when a new claim is submitted by a volunteer and can manage them all from a simple interface.
The admin can view the receipt, adjust the claim amount, and update the claim status. A full history of changes and notes is maintained and viewable underneath the main claim.
We have also added some additional profile data points for UK bank account and sort codes which are only requested and stored if a volunteer makes an expenses claim. One day we hope to create some in app payment methods but we’ve yet to find one that has been acceptable to the majority of our customers yet…but we are still looking!
The managed expenses module is an enterprise only feature. Administrators can switch this module on and off and allow trusted providers to be able to mark an opportunity with the managed expenses flag. The managed expenses runs alongside the regular expenses flag, so anyone can still mark an opportunity as paying expenses, and this will show in the search filters and opp description, but only enterprise admins and trsuted providers will be able to add this managed aspect to those expenses.
Front page customisations
Our new front end (if you are not using it we suggest switching it on as volunteers seem to prefer it!) has some extra customisations, and now they are all also available in your chosen alternative language (enterprise only).
If you can’t find a suitable image, then it will fill the background with some of your chosen colours with a subtle animation effect so it will still look great even without an image.
Accreditation Improvements
We’ve standardised all the accreditation badge prints now so there will be zero variability between badges no matter how you print them.
We’ve also added the help and support menu to the accreditation menus so you can open support tickets straight from there without having to return the main volunteer menu.
The event access screen now accommodates the full 12 possible areas for each event and correctly displays access for each selectable zone.
There have also been quite a few small improvements and enhancements to the UI/UX as we harmonise it with the main application.
You can try out these features as normal on the beta site before the interim gets pushed out on 5th December. We’ll be notifying everyone and getting together some training videos and materials to make sure you can hit the ground running.
Closing Opportunities Added to Dashboard
Opportunities that are closing within 7 days are now shown to providers in their dashboard under the tasks panel.
These have been available on the administrators dashboard for a little while now but have now been brought across to the provider dashboard as well.
Happy Birthday Message for Volunteers
Just a little message on their dashboard when it is their birthday, wishing them the best and thanking them for volunteering.
We’ll be adding more life events to these notifications over time, like anniversaries of them registering, joining their first opportunity, logging their first hours etc.
Restore Recently Deleted Volunteers
We receive quite a few support tickets where administrators have accidentally deleted a volunteer, or deleted the wrong volunteer.
So we have implemented a restore feature that will work for 48 hours after the deletion. You can use the new DELETED filter in the volunteer search page to find all the volunteers that have been deleted in the last 48 hours. To restore a volunteer just hit the checkbox next to their name and then use the CHANGE STATUS bulk action in the bottom blue bar to restore them.
Once the 48 hour period has expired you will not be able to restore that volunteer. We can restore volunteers after this period for upto 30 days from cold storage backups but there is a charge.
Administators cannot restore a volunteer that has removed themselves, for obvious reasons; however all their hours are anonymised and retained.
Anonymised Hours from Deleted Vounteers Included
You can now see your anonymised hours from deleted volunteers in the quick stats area of the reporting pages. It combines the totals and highlights the total from deleted volunteers in brackets.
The date of removal is used as the hour logged date.
Organisations should be diverse and inclusive to the communities they serve, and your volunteers should mirror that. So, how do organisations achieve this? A recent agenda consulting survey gives us some more detail into how volunteering organisations value diversity.
Agenda Consulting undertook a survey as part of their ‘Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in the UK Third Sector’ report. The report looks to understand people’s views and experiences of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) within the organisations they work with. The survey covers 8 sectors: Gender, Gender different to that originally assigned at birth; Ethnicity, Disability, Religion, Sexual Orientation and Age.
Agenda Consulting Survey:
The overall view from survey results states the average positivity for DEI is 72%, with neutrality being 21%. The average negativity is 7%. What is most surprising is that the highest level of negativity is regarding age: at 12% negativity overall.
It’s clear that while there are mostly positive results, there’s still work to be done: 67% of respondents feel the leadership groups display their commitment to DEI. However, just 48% of people feel their organisation is committed to promoting the representation of diverse groups. By recruiting and retaining a workforce that is diverse, you can work towards building stronger perceptions.
Sector Results:
The results show for gender little difference between men’s and women’s perception, yet statistics from Agenda’s People Count, show that gender balance shifts as we move through levels of seniority. There may be an imbalance in results. 76% of the survey sample are female, fitting with Volunteers Count of 70% of all volunteers being female. For more information, we have a blog post which dives into the reasons why women volunteer more than men.
For those whose gender is different to that originally assigned at birth: results suggest there needs to be education within the sector. Only 50% believe that, regardless of gender reassignment, people are treated equally. By increasing the education or knowledge of volunteers surrounding DEI, it becomes an organisation-wide initiative, instead of being held to within one department.
There is a strong perception that there is equal treatment regarding ethnicity, with 73% of people feeling like everyone is treated equally irrespective of race/ ethnicity: but 10% disagree. Perceptions of equal treatment are considerably lower for those respondents from an ethnic minority. More awareness is needed throughout organisations: and this should be done by the very people who it directly affects. We’ve looked deeper into the socio-economic status surrounding volunteers and whether volunteering is too white and wealthy…
Disability, Religion, Sexual Orientation and Age:
The results from disability-related questions show that 67% feel people are treated equally, with 24% neutral and 9% feel negatively. This use of ‘neutral’ suggests that volunteers don’t have enough insight. This is possibly due to the fact that just 4% of volunteers are disabled (according to Volunteers Count). If we remove those barriers, we open volunteering up to a wider community with fresh ideas and skills, representing wider society as a whole.
74% feel that people are treated equally despite a person’s religious beliefs, with 22% of people feeling neutral and 4% opposing the statement. There are several groups who are the least positive. Agenda’s report outlines those who identify in another way and ethnic minorities as standouts for those who aren’t as positive. It can be suggested that this is down to wider societal stereotypes, which are translating into the volunteering sector.
Overall, only 1% of those who identify as Lesbian, Gay or Bisexual (LGB) felt they weren’t treated equally due to their sexual orientation, whereas 84% of people did. During the survey, it was LGB groups who thought less positively about the statements being asked of them. This possibly suggests that they are more aware than others about the inequalities minorities face.
As mentioned above, it is age that has the greatest discrepancy when it comes to being treated equally. Out of the 3% of under 25s who took part in the survey, only 59% felt positively, with 18% negative. As age increases, the negativity does too. This suggests a divide within organisations among age groups on whether certain groups of people are treated equally.
So Why Should We Increase the Diversity of Volunteer Programmes?
Harvard Business Review confirms that when a team member shares the ethnicity of their client, the entire team is 152% more likely to fully understand the client. This ability is crucial for volunteer programmes. By increasing the diversity of your organisation you receive new ideas and approaches to your work; with new volunteers, you gain people from different educational backgrounds with different soft skills, like communication.
All of this helps your organisation, but it also helps those you volunteer for: your volunteers can be role models. Those who can see themselves within volunteers can inspire and increase their aspirations. They may also want to volunteer in some capacity too! Organisations should be looking towards becoming inclusive for all, for a stronger future.
So How Do We Increase the Diversity of Volunteer programmes?
There are a number of strategies to ensure your volunteer programme can become inclusive for all. Starting with your language. Switching up your language to attract certain groups of people can help you gain a wider audience.
Start to build relationships! Building up relationships with communities means you can speak freely and they can too! It’s important to identify those communities you want to engage with: it’s important you’re authentic.
The policies that your organisation has may need rewriting. What you have written down versus the culture surrounding your volunteer programme can be drastically different.
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion are so important for volunteer programmes who want to move forward. It’s simple, organisations must be inclusive for all. Your pool of volunteers should mirror the community you work in. With a diverse pool of volunteers, you have an opportunity. Team bonding exercises can bring people together.
AVM’s Making an Inclusive and Accessible Recruitment and Onboarding Experience
Save the Date! Wednesday the 27th April, 9:30am- 12:30pm, AVM are hosting an event helping you to create an inclusive and accessible recruitment and onboarding experience! Straight from AVM, at this event you will…
Hear ideas on how you could adapt your recruitment and onboarding process to be more inclusive
Learn how organisations have overcome some of the barriers to inclusive recruitment
Reasonable adjustments that can be made to ensure your recruitment process is accessible to all
How to attract a diverse range of volunteers and what you might need to consider
Have an opportunity to plan your next steps, in small groups with your peers
Learn more about the event and how you get your tickets here!
Manage Your Volunteers:
We now know how important diversity and inclusion are to volunteer organisations and volunteer management. An efficient and effective management system is needed to help you help your volunteers and the community. TeamKinetic can help you recruit, retain and realise the potential of your volunteers…
You can find TeamKinetic on social media and listen to our podcast:
On Thursday, we were lucky enough to be one of the speakers during the Charity Retail Associations People Management Group. We popped on a train, and arrived in London ready and eager to finally see other people in the flesh! We’d like to thank the Charity Retail Association for inviting us to speak about how digital can help volunteer management. As a volunteer management system company, we felt we could really help attendees who may be thinking of heading to the digital side.
We’ve collected four key takeaways from the day’s events…
One: Recruitment is one of the biggest challenges at present.
Recruitment became the focus for many throughout the day, every organisation has had trouble with recruiting both volunteers and paid staff. Many organisations are struggling to find van drivers for collections and drop offs. With the Christmas period around the corner, this demand is only going to increase. The question becomes, what changes can we make to attract more staff, more volunteers, more drivers?
During the group discussion, we thought about the ‘fixes’ within staff recruitment that may be needed. These fixes included allowing staff to start straight away. With a focus on van drivers, getting them up and running as quickly as possible will help ease the pressure of collections and pick ups – can we speed this process up?
We also spoke about raising the profile of organisations – get yourself out there! In the next few years, there’s a very high chance that at least 60% of the high street will be charity shops. So why are they second choice employers? There is an understanding that a charity role is charity, when in reality it isn’t. We should be looking at job roles, as jobs, it’s something commercial and should be treated as such!
The first of two talks over the course of the day was Retail Trust’s Joe Ryan. Joe spoke about the ‘Retail Industry Against Domestic Abuse’ (RIADA) campaign running in partnership with Dunelm and the Domestic Abuse Alliance. The charity is supporting employees of retail both in the workplace and at home: and in recent weeks have had a focus on domestic abuse.
Retail Trust’s aim is to work together with the charity retail sector to become a unified voice to offer support to victims. They have a management guide, and policy template, free to access on their website- here.The expectation is for all organisations to create and decide on a policy and start to implement this within the workplace.
Three: Is Digital The Way Forward?
Our talk focused around what impact digital technologies have on volunteer management. We’re aware we may have thrown quite a lot of information at attendees in such a small time, so here’s the most important information for you now…
At TeamKinetic, we strive to make volunteering easier for everyone. We believe digital is the way forward. For those who may not have a volunteer management platform, we suggest using a Moscow format:
Mo: Must Have.
S: Should have.
Co: Could have.
W: Won’t have.
Through Moscow, you should be able to define the features and benefits you want out of a volunteer system, and those that you don’t! You’ll then be able to access your options, and find the best for you.
Once you have your system, using digital can help you recruit more volunteers than before through quick and easy sign ups. Retain your current volunteers by increasing the communication between organisation and volunteer. And realise the potential of your volunteers through live reports and feedback. If you’d like to dive deeper into a system that can help you do all of this, start a FREE trial with TeamKinetic, here!
Our Conclusions:
Digital technologies/systems will change how you’ve worked. You should be able to support more volunteers, become more creative and have deeper insight into your programme.
Whatever product you use must be suitable for both digital and non-digital participation.
Finally, good volunteer management tools need good volunteer managers.
We hope this whistle stop tour of our session can help anyone looking into volunteer management systems. If you’d like to know more about anything we’ve covered- head over to our blog page, where there’s in-depth posts about utilising your digital space.
Four: Post-COVID Stamina.
Our final key takeaway is something we haven’t really heard before: ‘post-COVID stamina.’ Post-COVID stamina, we believe, can affect everyone.
Obviously, those who have contracted COVID have to take time to recover, and stamina has to be built back up. We also believe those who haven’t had covid can also experience this. The pandemic and repeated lockdowns has meant that many people were able to regenerate themselves and their motivations; but two years later, that motivation could have diminished. We’ve even felt it sometimes around the office!
This post-COVID stamina means that, in our case, volunteers are more susceptible to becoming unwell and it can be tough to balance your own health and helping volunteer/help run a business. It may take time, but stamina will pick up, we will get stronger, and back on track in the ways we want.
Conclusions and Thank Yous…
We hope these takeaways and snippets into the Charity Retail Association’s People Management Group, starts off conversations within your organisation (and between organisations too) on how we can start to positively move forward and, as always, if you find yourself wanting to explore a volunteer management system, why not start a FREE trial with TeamKinetic today…
On one last note, we’d again like to thank the CRA for allowing us to talk about what we’re passionate about. An insightful day, with welcoming attendees across the retail sector- we hope that others enjoyed the day as much as we did.
Willowbrook Hospice provides care for patients with life limiting diseases living in St Helens, Knowsley and the surrounding areas. They rely on their fundraising methods and their dedicated volunteers. After realising they needed a volunteer management system, they came across us, TeamKinetic.
Why TeamKinetic?
For Willowbrook hospice, their previous system was archaic- there was no way to engage with their volunteers. We know the importance of interacting with volunteers we have already, so this was a concern for Willowbrook. They needed a system that allowed for this interaction. Willowbrook also wanted a web-based programme which would allow everyone to access the site from anywhere.
Benefits of using TeamKinetic:
One of the biggest benefits for Willowbrook, as mentioned above, is the ability to access the system anywhere. It’s critical for volunteer managers in each of Willowbrook’s nine shops to have access to the system. This way each shop manager can see who’s coming in to volunteer, and has all the information they need in one place.
In Willowbrook’s case, their current contact details for volunteers was through paper, which we all know isn’t the most effective. With TeamKinetic’s data protection and GDPR compliance, Willowbrook Hospice are able to see necessary contact information on volunteers profiles. If there is an emergency, managers know exactly where to go to find an email address or a phone number.
Having this information at hand means that they’re able to be more present in volunteers’ lives, through emails and messages. Since using our system, Willowbrook’s volunteers have noticed the change- they feel as if they’re more involved with the Hospice due to the update emails they receive. Willowbrook has learnt the importance of communication and engagement between themselves and volunteers along with the importance of volunteers talking with each other too.
Willowbrook Hospice’s communication:
For Willowbrook, they’ve created a befriending team between their volunteers. They’ve brought their volunteers together to support each other- especially through-out the pandemic. TeamKinetic hosts a private notes function, so Willowbrook can update when they’ve spoken to a volunteer.
All this communication has meant that volunteers feel more involved than ever with the happenings around Willowbrook Hospice and their nine shops. By involving volunteer managers and volunteers, it becomes much more likely that they will spread Willowbrook out into the world further. You’ll be attracting new volunteers whilst building and retaining the volunteers you already have. In Bev Neilson’s (a volunteer manager at Willowbrook) words, “if you want efficient communication, then you’re going to get it with TeamKinetic, definitely”.
Willowbrook also outlined the quick response rates you can get with the TeamKinetic system;
“We’ve had small events that have come up now and again. We had an event that came up where we could sell things in a local Garden Centre. It’s something we had to implement quite quickly because it was over Christmas. So, I created it on TeamKinetic and had it emailed out to all the volunteers. I would say within the hour, we filled up all the slots for two weeks worth of people volunteering for it. I think that raised over £2,000; without TeamKinetic that would never have happened.”
The ease of creating an opportunity online, and advertising it out to volunteers meant that they’re unexpected fundraising occasion was a success! Our advertising options aren’t limited to just emails, you can automatically send out a post on social media when you’ve created an opportunity, or bulk text your volunteers to let them know!
Willowbrook Hospice advice:
You’ve heard a lot from us, so here’s Willowbrook’s advice for those looking to manage their volunteers more efficiently;
“I think having this system in place helps because everything is in one place. Before it all felt a bit jumbled, we were going from system to system to try and run everything, and engage volunteers while still trying to keep in touch with them. Whereas now, we’ve got one system that we can use and as it’s web-based, like I said before, we can access it anywhere.”
What’s Next For Willowbrook Hospice?
What is happening for Willowbrook at the moment? They’ve recently celebrated World Hospice and Palliative Care Day on the 9th October. Willowbrook have decided to incorporate a Reaching Out Focus into their 2019-2022 Strategy and Organisational Work in line with this year’s theme: ‘Leave no-one behind- equity in access to palliative care.’ There objectives are as follows:
All the members of the community we serve are aware of our services, have equal access and feel comfortable to do so.
To see more people from across the communities we serve.
Thank you to Bev Neilson and Willowbrook Hospice for letting us in behind the curtain!
Find out more:
TeamKinetic helps to build better volunteer communities by providing great tools for volunteer managers that save time, increase impact and improve insight. Our goal is to make volunteering easy for everyone no matter what. But, don’t take our word for it, why not check out our customer reviews.
For more information on how we can assist with your volunteer management and getting the best out of all your volunteers, visit our website or contact us on 0161 914 5757.
