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It is with great pleasure that TeamKinetic can announce they are now the volunteer platform for Greater Sport. Working with the County Sports Partnership to extend our hugely successful work with Manchester City Council. Greater Sport requested a volunteer service that offered the people of Greater Manchester more choice whilst allowing the Local Authorities a level of local administration and control.
As a County Sports Partnership, Greater Sport had identified how successful Manchester City Council had been in recruiting and deploying Volunteers both for their clubs and their major events program. They identified how as a CSP area volunteers could benefit from seamless sharing of volunteer opportunities across the Local Authorities whilst also providing the level of local insight demanded by the ten local authorities of Greater Manchester.
This did pose a number of major technical challenges, as each Local Authority had different requirements and were able to offer significantly different levels of support to their volunteers. TeamKinetic worked closely with GreaterSport to develop a workable solution and we are proud to announce our Pilot volunteer platform project is up and running with plans for a much wider rollout early into the new year.
It is ours and Greater Sport’s belief, that this new volunteer platform will allow the generous and sports-mad people of Greater Manchester to access some of the finest events and clubs the UK has to offer.
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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.
SMS marketing is considered an electronic form of communication. That means its use is governed by the Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations. It may sound scary, but it really isn’t that hard to understand. However, I thought it worthwhile to go over the basics of the EC Directive to help you better understand what you can and can’t do with your SMS marketing.
In the warnings issued by the ICO, several key paragraphs from the EC Directive are quoted. They basically say that no one can send unsolicited messages to any individual without prior consent. It then goes on to state three criteria used to determine what consent means (from Regulation 22):
“A person may send or instigate the sending of electronic mail for the purposes of direct marketing where –
(a) that person has obtained the contact details of the recipient of that electronic mail in the course of the sale or negotiations for the sale of a product or service to that recipient;
(b) the direct marketing is in respect of that person’s similar products and services only; and
(c) the recipient has been given a simple means of refusing (free of charge except for the costs of the transmission of the refusal) the use of his contact details for the purposes of such direct marketing, at the time that the details were initially collected, and where he did not initially refuse the use of details, at the time of each subsequent communication.”
That is honestly a mouthful of words, but very important ones. Here’s a simple interpretation you can take when dealing with your Volunteers.
As long as you ask for consent when signing a Volunteer up to the TeamKinetic system, which you do as part of the terms and conditions. you can send that Volunteer text messages that are related to the service the volunteer undertakes. For example, other voluntary opportunities and non-voluntary information that is similar to the Volunteering the person has undertaken. This could be a training course that is suitably matched to the volunteer’s area of voluntary experience, or other services as long as they are related to the Volunteering.
You can not send SMS messages about unrelated services or products. For example, the opportunity to buy a holiday or book cinema tickets unless that was specifically related to the voluntary opportunity the volunteer signed up to.
Part c is important, as you must make it simple for the Volunteer to opt out of any future communications if they wish.
Following these rules will keep you inside the law and hopefully will keep your Volunteers happy. If you have any stories of good/bad practice examples of how to use SMS messaging to increase Volunteer retention and recruitment please feel free to send them to us.
You can find TeamKinetic on social media and listen to our podcast:
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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.
Health and Safety, those dreaded words. The reason to stop, an excuse not to do something. I’m sure anyone who reads this blog gets that same sinking feeling when someone uses health and safety as an excuse to make sure something does not take place. I hope to share some of the useful Volunteer Health and Safety information that has been shared with us at TeamKinetic.
I must make it very clear from the very start; I am not a health and safety expert and any advice I offer is either from other sources who I will aim to credit or my own experience. I also want to open this debate to other Volunteer Managers or those who have real Volunteer Health and Safety experience. Please share your knowledge and best practise with our audience. No advice will be ignored and all will be welcome.
Anyone who wishes to correct any mistakes or offer further clarification can always e-mail me at info@teamkinetic.co.uk and just put Volunteer Health and Safety in the subject field and I will happily add to this post.
Volunteering by its very nature involves people undertaking roles and responsibilities that often lack clear description, they are not employed and as we have found, people have the most amazing ability to do the craziest things! All this means you can take nothing for granted.
So what have we learnt whilst operating TeamKinetic?
From the point of view of a technology provider who talks on a very regular basis with those that work at the coal face with volunteers and opportunity providers day to day, its never dull!
We must first establish some key distinctions so it is clear who is responsible or has a duty of care during the volunteer process (I will try and keep to a minimum the Health and Safety terminology). I must also state that although this advice might be applicable to most volunteer situations it is written based on the volunteers being deployed via a VolunteerKinetic powered opportunity.
From the point of view of a volunteer manager who is brokering opportunities that are often provided by others, we think there are some important issues to consider.
Volunteers and opportunity providers must take all reasonable responsibility for their own health and safety.
This should be made clear in any code of conduct you create.
Although you are acting as a broker of opportunities, the responsibility (duty of care) for ensuring safety at a venue, location or during an activity is that of the opportunity provider. They should have a risk assessment for the activity, public liability insurance to protect volunteers and the people they may come into contact with through the role, and policies and procedures in place that they make you aware of; such as fire evacuation procedures. These basic responsibilities should not just extend to volunteers but all potential people who may be affected by the normal operation of the organisation and opportunity.
This does not fully exclude the broker from any responsibility, and in our opinion, best practice on behalf of the programme administrator is to provide opportunity providers with guidelines. These should offer a set of operating standards an opportunity provider should meet.
University of Manchester Athletic Union have kindly offered to share their Health and Safety Checklist and Public Liability letter. You can use or adapt these to your personal needs. We also suggest a provider code of conduct. This covers the more soft policies around effective volunteer management, and may include some of the following points:
- Ensure someone is available to welcome volunteers, to offer a basic site induction and to be a point of contact whilst the volunteer is on site.
- Make sure volunteers are aware of “comfort facilities” such as staff rooms, toilets and areas to get food or drink.
- Try to speak to a volunteer before they leave, ask for feedback on their experience, and offer a thank you where appropriate for their help.
This is just a couple of ideas, that will hopefully ensure your volunteers stay safe and happy whilst working with your providers.
The End User Licence Agreement (EULA) that all volunteers agree to when they volunteer as part of a TeamKinetic system makes the following clear.
Do not arrange to meet strangers in strange places alone. Ensure you check out who they are and you are happy to attend an opportunity. If you are not sure contact the Administrator.
As people are notoriously bad at reading Terms and Conditions we suggest to volunteer managers to make this point clear to all volunteers, that to arrange to meet a stranger through the internet, even through this service, carries some risk and volunteers should do everything they can to ensure they know where and who they are meeting.
Similar advice should be given regarding what information people offer to share via the internet. VolunteerKinetic is designed to help manage volunteer-to-provider connections. Connections made outside the system can be dangerous and as a manager, impossible to track. So we suggest that volunteers and providers use only the system to communicate.
If a volunteer or provider act in a way that is inappropriate or dangerous, do you as an administrator have a policy and procedures in place to manage complaints, respond to allegations and deal with incidents?
From an organisation’s perspective, the volunteers are considered the same as any other person. Do you have up-to-date policies and procedures, including Safeguarding and Health and Safety and do you have a way to ensure volunteers follow these procedures whilst they are under your management?
Many of these situations are extremely rare and a little forward planning and support from the system administrator can make it easy to share good practice amongst providers. Ensuring that the providers and volunteers follow the advice can be more difficult, but having open channels of communication means that problems are easily reported and dealt with. Encouraging feedback from all participants we think offers a great way to keep on top of potential issues.
Source Material
Volunteer Health and Safety is fraught with potential difficulty and is somewhat open to interpretation. It is with this in mind that I would like to share the following links that I have found useful whilst writing this article. If I can leave you with any advice it’s that good procedures around setting up new opportunity providers and volunteers will ensure many issues can be identified early. Secondly, talking to your providers and volunteers regularly, using the feedback tools available through VolunteerKinetic will offer additional insight and help identify potential issues before they become serious.
http://www.hse.gov.uk/voluntary/further-advice.htm
http://www.hse.gov.uk/voluntary/when-it-applies.htm
http://www.hse.gov.uk/voluntary/manage-low-risk.htm
This article will be the first in a series where we look at the technologies available to volunteer managers. With more ways to communicate becoming available almost every day, we want to look at your options and try and advise which will provide the most bang for your buck.
A quick look at the technologies available to volunteer managers and your volunteers tells you there are more options available than any one person can reasonably manage, facebook, Blogging, twitter, SMS, Instagram, YouTube, Vine and the list goes on. So how do you select the technologies that suit your Volunteers and how do you use them to maximum effect?
Remove Barriers!
Providing an environment for Volunteers with as few barriers to entry as you can, is the best place to start. Technology can be used to simplify and improve the Volunteering experience whilst providing a platform for marketing, advocacy and an open marketplace of opportunity. It must also be considered that at its worst, technology, can be the biggest barrier to entry due to poor design, ineffective use of data and creating an environment that does not allow Volunteers flexibility and room to grow and develop.
So what lessons have we learnt over the last 8 years of building Websites for Volunteer Organisations?
Can you remember what you did before Google? How did people get anything done? Websites are ubiquitous now and peoples expectations from websites are only being set higher and higher. Expectation is that most tasks can be undertaken on the web when we need to do them, from On-line banking, paying your council tax or ordering a pizza.
From a volunteer’s point of view, what do they need from a website?
We have found through extensive Volunteer research over the last 6 years that the number 1 requirement for Volunteers is simplicity of use. If the website is difficult to join, offers poor search results and prevents Volunteers from getting on to Volunteer opportunities with a single visit to the site, the chances are it will result in lost Volunteer Engagement.
You may not be in a position to use a system such as TeamKinetic, so our advice is to build a website with the Volunteer as your customer and always keep your customer in mind. Make sure it’s easy for your Volunteer to find opportunities that suit their interests and finally look at how the Volunteer goes from impulse to Volunteer to actually arriving at that first opportunity, examine that process and look at how you can remove and reduce the various barriers they will face. Don’t make your website an additional barrier.
Implementing a VMS?
If you are lucky enough to be able to look at Websites such as TeamKinetic or some of the other systems that are available on the market currently then bear in mind the following checklist:
Does your volunteer get clear advice and instruction at each stage of the process? (reminders and instructions via Text, e-mail and in their online profile.
Is there someone the Volunteer can contact if they have questions?
Does the system collect feedback on the Volunteer experience that can be used to further develop the opportunities on offer?
and most importantly: is the website easy to use for Volunteers?
If you can find a website solution that meets the criteria outlined above we think you will enjoy success with your Volunteer programme. Over the next few weeks, we will explore some of the other channels of communication, services and technologies that we think you can leverage to enhance and develop the experience for your Volunteers.
If you have any questions or suggestions about technologies available to volunteer managers and how they can make a difference please feel free to get in touch on the details below as we would love to hear what you think.
If you would like to find out more about TeamKinetic then please get in touch and arrange a demo.
I look forward to your suggestions.
You can find TeamKinetic on social media and listen to our podcast:
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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.
TeamKinetic version 6 has entered its testing phase and will be ready for release shortly. We’re very excited about this release and are thinking of naming it something other than a simple number increment as its a huge release and represents something of a milestone for TeamKinetic.
We’ve now got an ever-growing user base and engaged volunteers and the number of opportunities available has expanded rapidly. The software has also been used in more varied situations and types of organisations and we have got some fantastic feedback and ideas that has sparked quite a few innovations in the new TeamKinetic. I’ll be writing a series of posts talking about specific new features but here are a few quick facts about version 6.
Upcoming Features
- We’ve committed 175 changes and bug fixes, ranging from tiny typos to entirely new features and workflows.
- The CSS and styling has been rewritten to be more responsive and to accommodate the larger screens that are the norm.
- A brand new media management page for looking after images and files that you can attach to emails.
- New inline editable system emails for things like volunteer registrations and joining opportunities.
- Approximately 5500 lines of code have been changed or added.
- Simple binary thumbs up or down feedback
- Integration with the Mandrill email service to help increase the success rate for email delivery and open rates.
- New Google analytics service developed in house to track web views and visitors.
- Custom URLs for your events
There are lots more features to tell you about but you can always take a sneaky peek on our Beta site.
You can find TeamKinetic on social media and listen to our podcast:
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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.
We are proud to continue our support of the NCVO and are happy to announce that we will be attending the NCVO Trustee event on the 10th of November 2014, taking a display stand at the event.
If you would like to arrange a meeting with the team or the opportunity to see the software in action at the event then please don’t hesitate to get in touch. We look forward to talking to th delegates about how we can help them recruit, manage, deploy and retain their volunteer workforce for the future.
You can find TeamKinetic on social media and listen to our podcast:
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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.
For the first time, TeamKinetic will be taking a display at the Leadership Convention 2014 on the 12th and 13th of November, we look forward to listening to the speakers and taking the opportunity to talk to the various organizations in attendance about how they see Volunteering and the impact it could have on their business moving forwards.
http://www.sportandrecreation.org.uk/civicrm/event/info?id=1430&reset=1
If you are attending the Leadership Convention 2014 and would like to book an appointment to see a demo of the software or would just like to talk to us about how we could help you and your Volunteer workforce, then please don’t hesitate to get in touch.
You can find TeamKinetic on social media and listen to our podcast:
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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.
Forces are taking on helpers for forensics and at crime scenes as cuts bite, says union
Police using Volunteers for key jobs (Guardian 19/10/14)
Daniel Boffey
The Observer, Saturday 18 October 2014 21.20 BST
Beat officers: Police on crowd control at a property fair at Olympia, London, last week.
Their numbers have been cut by 20% in recent years. Photograph: STEFAN WERMUTH/REUTERS
Police forces are quietly taking on unpaid volunteers as crime scene investigators, forensic experts and emergency planning officers as 20% budget cuts bite, it can be revealed.
Forces across the country have been taking on volunteers to fill some of the most sensitive police staff roles and some are seeking to escalate their recruitment drives. There are now 9,000 police support volunteers replacing 15,000 staff jobs lost since 2010. Some forces report plans to double or triple their voluntary staff in the next year.
A report by the public sector union, Unison, due to be published on Monday, complains that there has been no public debate about the trend for volunteers to move from peripheral roles, such as chaplain or custody visitors, to key positions. Home Office guidance on police support officers stipulates that volunteers should not under any circumstance replace the roles of directly employed police staff. Yet responses to Unison’s freedom of information requests provide a long list of job roles carried out by volunteers, many of which have been or are paid roles. These include involvement in forensics, crime scenes, the drug testing of people in custody, emergency planning, property detention, deployment management and the provision of scientific support.
The authors of the union’s report, Home Guard of Police Support Volunteers to Fill in for Police Cuts, write: “The idea of police volunteers has a long history in the shape of neighbourhood watch and the special constabulary. However, the recent rapid rise in the number, and the exponential growth in the roles of police support volunteers, breaks any consensus that may have existed around volunteering for, or with, the police. The impact of the cuts on the police staff workforce has been particularly savage, with 15,000 jobs being cut across forces between 2010 and 2014.
“In this new era of scarce resources, holding to the historic Home Office principles for volunteering schemes has become that much harder. In this report, Unison suggests that these ground rules are now being regularly breached and are in need of urgent review.”
The forces reporting the highest number of volunteers are Thames Valley with 70,459, Surrey with 32,000 and West Yorkshire with 19,432, although Unison say that they do not have an issue with many of the roles filled.
The report also reveals that there have been moves by some within the College of Policing to introduce unpaid police community support officers (PCSOs). Lincolnshire and Northampton police forces were said to be willing to pilot the proposal. PCSOs are civilian members of police staff employed as uniformed non-warranted officers. Pay for PCSOs varies from force to force from between around £16,000 to around £27,000 a year, but there have been widespread redundancies in recent years.
Unison say that with the support of others within the college, the idea of supplementing their ranks with unpaid volunteers had been blocked for now, but they warn of “a worrying trend”.
The revelation comes as police staff in England and Wales, including community support officers and fingerprint officers, are to be balloted for industrial action in protest at a 1% pay offer.
Last week unions representing civilian staff said they were angry that after a two-year pay freeze they were being subjected to the same restrictions as other public sector workers. NHS staff, including midwives and nurses, went on strike on Monday.
Deputy Chief Constable Martin Jelley at Northamptonshire Police, which is doubling its voluntary staff to 1,000, and where some volunteers are employed in forensics or intelligence, said: “We have many volunteers who assist us in a wide variety of ways, as do many other organisations; they provide important support to our officers and staff, helping keep our communities safe.” Policing minister Mike Penning said the deployment of volunteers was the responsibility of each force. He said: “This flexible approach allows forces to respond to the individual needs and priorities of their local communities.”
It is with a huge sense of pride we are happy to announce the Sports Volunteering Conference run in partnership with Manchester Metropolitan University is to return again next year. This year’s event was a real pleasure to be involved in and although we have learned some really useful lessons for the next event, we are already planning and looking forward.
The day was filled with positive stories about how Volunteering and the volunteers themselves make such a difference to events, organisations, and everyday sports people. Hearing from a wide range of speakers who shared their experiences on the Olympics, the Commonwealth Games, Universities and just about everything else in between was really inspiring.
The conference was also an opportunity to pose some difficult questions that as Volunteer organisers and and strategic planners we need to look at. It was clear that there is a real need for greater insight and understanding about what motivates volunteers, are there different types of volunteers and how we get our clubs to better engage with a wider Volunteer workforce.
Over the next few days we will be releasing some more notes on the event and the slides that were used by the presenters so please feel free to share and use as you require, and I look forward to seeing you all at our next event in 2015.
You can find TeamKinetic on social media and listen to our podcast:
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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.
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