Tag: Government

Can Local Authorities afford to not have Volunteer Management Software?

By

On 11th August 2021

In Local Authority

Local authorities undeniably manage many volunteers, am I right?

Well, statistics show that approximately 71% of people volunteered at least once in 2019 and many of these people volunteer through their local government or organisations closely linked.  

To make it even harder for those who manage and track volunteers in the public sector, these volunteers fall into many different roles in very separate parts of your organisation. Volunteers pop up in libraries, galleries, museums, parks, neighbourhoods, adult social care, sports development, environment, public health, community engagement and more. To say it’s a complicated picture is to massively understate the difficulties we know you face. 

Some of the questions we know you get asked: 

  • Is it even possible to safely support and govern volunteers across the whole organisation? 
  • How do you report on volunteering as a council? 
  • What’s it worth to us as an organisation, what’s the business case?  

Those in charge of managing services for the council and those managing volunteers in those services undoubtedly have a lot on their hands. But if the pandemic has highlighted anything over the past 18 months, it’s the essential role volunteers can play. We have seen massive public support to volunteer during these unprecedented times. In fact, the volumes of people who wanted to volunteer were overwhelming for many organisations as they did not have the infrastructure in place to cope with such an influx of new volunteers.

On top of all these complications, Local Government needs to work hand in hand with local voluntary sector partners to ensure a coherent approach to volunteering across their communities. This is a dynamic and complicated problem and we think our volunteer management software would certainly help. 

What We Can Offer You…

1. Your Own Customisable Application

Yes, you read that right, with us you get to create a fully customisable, and accessible application to suit your organisation’s needs, check out the example below. You can develop an identifiable brand around your amazing volunteers and the work they do. You can set standards and rules as to what opportunities are seen via your site. You can track activity by volunteer, group, venue, by the department or service area. You can use some of our advanced mapping tools to track where volunteers are making a difference and what impact they are making at a ward-by-ward level. We provide you with the tools to empower your communities to thrive.

2. Easily Create New Opportunities 

Our software enables you to create your volunteer opportunities in minutes. Not only can you create singular opportunities, but you can also calendar schedule your opportunities on a weekly or monthly basis.  

It is also easier for volunteers to sign up for opportunities. With TeamKinetic available as both a native app and as a responsive design, it allows volunteers to easily access all opportunities from whichever device they choose. They can also easily filter their opportunities based upon what they are interested in i.e. museum volunteering.

We also provide ‘how-to’ videos to make it even easier for you!

That is why our software also provides you with customisable Key Performance Indicators on your volunteers. This reporting enables you to tell the story of your volunteers achievements and impact, and it lets you make informed decisions about where and who to invest in and what type of return you will get on that investment.

These reports include all the vital information you need, including:

  • Pie charts on ethnicity, employment status, gender, and age of volunteers.
  • The geographical spread of volunteers and opportunities.
  • Web usage.
  • Number of hours logged.
  • Volunteer registrations (on a day to day basis.)
  • The number of opportunities available. 

From this, you can understand more about who volunteers most under different areas (i.e. museums, parks, libraries etc). This allows you to understand which area of volunteering is more popular to certain ages, genders and more…

 

4. Efficiently Communicate With Your Volunteers

With us, communication with volunteers has never been easier. No longer do you have to spend your time fumbling through spreadsheets and documents to find your volunteer contact information. You can now email or text all (or just one) of your volunteers with one click. And, to make it even better, you can send text messages scheduled for a certain time, potentially to remind volunteers about their opportunities and improve attendance.

5. Offer Rewards And Incentives

You can encourage and engage your volunteers like never before, all from using TeamKinetic. You have to option to reward volunteers with achievement badges, hour trades, and award badges; all of which are fully customisable. You can also create your very own achievement badges for your volunteers too. You can then provide volunteers with feedback, and the volunteers can give feedback on the opportunities.

So, What Are You Waiting For?

For as little as £19 a month you can have all of this and more. Perfect for managing all your volunteers in libraries, galleries, museums, parks, and everywhere else! 

Book your demo tour today by emailing chris@teamkinetic.co.uk or start your free trial here.

As simple as that. 

Taxing question for David Cameron that threatens community benefit of cricket

By

On 24th June 2015

In News & Views

Taxing question for David Cameron that threatens community benefit of cricket

http://gu.com/p/4a3c4?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_WordPress

David Cameron’s Big Society volunteering plan and what it might mean for you.

By

On 13th May 2015

In News & Views

imgID15611225.jpg-pwrt2Half of the UK workforce would be given three days’ paid leave each year to volunteer, under Conservative plans unveiled on Friday.  Every public sector worker and anyone working in a company with at least 250 employees – more than 15 million people in total – would be entitled to the volunteering leave, David Cameron announced.  The Prime Minister said the pledge is “clearest demonstration of the Big Society in action”.

A series of high profile business figures welcomed the new plans for paid volunteering leave.

Mike Rake, chairman of BT, went one further than the Prime Minister, describing corporate volunteering as a “triple win”. He said it was “a win for the community, a win for individuals doing the volunteering, and a win for companies”.

“We welcome the Prime Minister reminding us of the importance of business to society,” he added.

Peter Cheese, chief executive at the CIPD, the professional body for the HR industry, said: “Our research shows that corporate volunteering benefits society, as well as businesses through building stronger roots with the communities they work in and serve, and engaging and developing new skills in their employees. It’s great to see this agenda being championed.”

John Cridland, Director General of the CBI: “Businesses encourage their employees to volunteer in the community and should do even more to increase this. It is a win win for everyone concerned”

Bear Grylls, the adventurer and TV presenter, also backed the plans, saying: “Firm Government support that enables millions to volunteer is a huge step forward towards building solid communities all around the UK.”

However, not everyone supported the idea. Lisa Nandy, Labour’s Shadow Minister for Civil Society, said: “Giving every public servant three extra days off could cost millions of pounds but there’s no sense of how it will be paid for. If just half of public sector workers took this up it would be the time equivalent of around 2,000 nurses, 800 police and almost 3,000 teachers.”

Some business groups are in little doubt that the policy will hit companies’ bottom lines. As Simon Walker, director general of the Institute of Directors, put it:

“Businesses should support their staff if they want to volunteer, but the architects of this idea cannot pretend that forcing firms to give an additional three days of paid leave will do anything other than add costs.  This announcement not only undermines the Tory record on reducing business regulation, it also puts additional pressure on public sector employers, and ultimately the taxpayer. Frankly, the essence of volunteering is that it is voluntary. The IoD would welcome proposals to incentivise and make it easier for companies to facilitate volunteering, but it has to be a choice.”

Ryan Bourne, head of public policy at the Institute of Economic Affairs, was even more trenchant in his critique the Conservative’ latest plan to increase volunteering:

“This is another example of politicians imposing burdens on business and taxpayers for the sake of sounding caring. At a time when everyone is telling us that the NHS and other services are overstretched, the idea that it should be a priority to allow public sector employees to take three days off for volunteering elsewhere, funded by the taxpayer, is ludicrous.”

What does it mean for the voluntary sector? Sir Stuart Etherington, chief executive of NCVO, and Asheem Singh, director of public policy at Acevo, think this is a exciting proposal for the voluntary sector and businesses.

Etherington said: “Many charities urgently need more volunteers to support their work, while volunteering is an excellent way for employees to develop skills and confidence that will benefit their employers. Anything that helps encourage our culture of volunteering is very welcome. We look forward to seeing the detail of the proposal.”

Singh said: “It recognises the crucial role of charities in building a better society. The workplace is a new frontier for social action, and this new legal right will help support a new generation of socially responsible citizens.”

However, some people on Twitter question the Conservatives’ agenda with this policy, arguing that it is just another way to fill gaps in public services.

Oonagh Aitken, chief executive of CSV, said: “As an organisation with an established employee volunteering programme, we know the benefits to employees, the workplace and communities.”

She does, however, argue that: “If this policy is to be implemented, it highlights the need to invest in volunteering organisations so that the best use is made of employees’ skills and interests when they do volunteer.”

The key question is how to make all this work for the charities – traditional team building initiatives (such as fence painting) can be a drain rather than a boost so the challenge is to design something more meaningful that can be completed in three days. Most successful schemes take a lot of resource to set up well and often a broker is required to develop something that is mutually beneficial for both businesses and charities.  Volunteering in a more collaborative and flexible way, for example allowing employees to choose causes they care most about, or being able to ‘pool’ their volunteering days. That way the volunteering has greater impact on the charity, is more engaging for the volunteer – and yields greater benefits for the business will be key to this policy leading to Volunteers rather than the Volun-told.  It seems certain that the Big Society is still very much a controversial subject.

Council sports budgets cut by £42m

By

On 20th April 2015

In News & Views, Sport

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-31624412

Regeneration Sport 22 AMore than £42m has been axed from councils’ sports and leisure budgets since 2010, a BBC survey has revealed.

Among the regions which saw the biggest losses were London and north-west England, which saw cuts of more than £12.3m.

Sports stars and charities said they were concerned cutting facilities was “short-termism” that could impact on communities’ health and fitness levels.

The government said it was investing in grassroots sport.

Some of the biggest cuts occurred in the North West, where Liverpool City Council closed Woolton Swimming Pool, saving more than £3m.

In the West Midlands, which saw £9.6m of cuts, the region’s only 50m pool – in Coventry – was among the facilities to face the axe.

And in London, where budgets were cut by £8.8m, Mornington Crescent Sports Centre in Camden was among the facilities to close.

In other regions, Sheffield lost the Don Valley Stadium, where Olympic heptathlon champion Jessica Ennis-Hill had trained, while Newcastle-upon-Tyne saw the closure of its City Pool in 2013.

David Moorcroft, the Commonwealth Games gold medallist and former chief executive of UK Athletics, said: “In times of cutbacks to public services, rightly or wrongly, sport and leisure is one of the first things to get cut.

“It’s really unfortunate because the health and happiness of the nation and communities is based around being able to access facilities that encourage people to take physical activity.

“Ultimately, if we are trying to reduce obesity among young people, you can’t really have clubs and volunteers doing all that work. Once a facility is lost, it’s gone forever. When you come out of recession, it’s very difficult to rebuild it.”

Emma Boggis, chief executive of the Sport and Recreation Alliance which represents sports governing bodies in the UK, said she had “some sympathy” with local authorities “and the extreme financial pressures they are under”

“But reducing investment in sport and in leisure facilities is storing up problems for the longer-term,” she said.

“Limiting access to leisure facilities will result in greater inactivity and bigger costs to the NHS in terms of tackling conditions like diabetes, cardiovascular disease and depression.”

Sports and leisure spending since 2010
North West -£12,372,959
West Midlands -£9,638,972
London -£8,891,367
North East -£7,147,948
East -£5,114,871
East Midlands -£5,038,980
South West -£3,347,463
Yorkshire -£3,209,581
South East £12,340,287
Total £42,421,854

The Department for Culture, Media and Sport said £1bn of public money had been invested into grassroots sport through Sport England.

David Sparks, who chairs the Local Government Association, said councils had had “little choice” but to squeeze budgets.

“The reality is that, within a few years, well over half of the council tax everyone pays will have to be spent on social care,” he said.

“With demand on these life and death services continuing to rise and funding from central government continuing to fall, councils will have little choice.”

 

The Labour Manifesto – what does it mean for volunteering

By

On 15th April 2015

In News & Views

Ed+Miliband+Speech+Scottish+Labour+Party+Conference+XyWH-NPlU5il

With the dust starting to settle and people having time to digest all the promises we look at some of the key areas of the Labour manifesto and what it might mean for Volunteers.

A Labour plan to bring back guaranteed childcare from 8am to 6pm in all primary schools has made it into the party’s manifesto.  First mooted in September 2013 the policy had since been sidelined as the party focused on criticising unqualified teachers and opposing the government’s free schools programme.  But “wraparound childcare” is back on the agenda. A single sentence in Labour’s education manifesto, released last week, has become an entire paragraph in the party’s main manifesto, launched today in Manchester.

“We will help families by expanding free childcare from 15 to 25 hours per week for working parents of three and four-year-olds, paid for with an increase in the bank levy. We will also introduce a legal guarantee for parents of primary school children to access wraparound childcare from 8am to 6pm through their local primary school. As well as helping parents, this will provide children with before and after-school clubs and activities, helping to raise their aspirations and attainment. This will be underpinned by a new National Primary Childcare Service, a not-for-profit organisation to promote the voluntary and charitable delivery of quality extracurricular activities.”

Most interesting is the final point which refers to this provision being provided by the voluntary and charitable sector, although detail is thin on the ground right now it would appear that Labour are keen to see the existing 3rd sector providers meet this demand but it does not explain how this will be funded.  With many schools already offering extensive activities and providing some type of service it is unclear how the National Primary Childcare Service will actually operate.

Asheem Singh, Director of Public Policy at the Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary Organisations, the UK’s largest trade body for charity and social enterprise leaders said:

“Charities and social enterprises will be most excited by the Labour promise to repeal the Lobbying Act. When politicians voted to restrict the amount grassroots campaign groups could spend on campaigns in this election year while voting at the same time to raise the amount that politicians could spend on their own campaigns, a basic principle of decency and democracy was violated. At ACEVO we are pleased that our sector’s persistence and the argument of our manifesto ‘Free Society’ has been accepted. We look forward to this injustice being rectified, ideally in the first hundred days of the new parliament, whoever wins the election.”

The Lobbying Act reduces the amount grassroots campaigners can spend in an election year by 60%. Earlier this year politicians voted themselves a 23% rise in the amount they could spend during the campaign.

Labour’s commitment to early intervention and preventative, community care is welcome and it is only through proper partnership with state and community providers that we can make a difference on a community basis. Labour have committed to pooled budgets that bring health and care together, but more detail is needed to see how this might be delivered on a community-by-community basis and what this might mean for the voluntary sector providers.

Labour’s proposals to localise public services and get funding to organisations that deliver social value through regional banks are welcome news to the sector but will require more detail. Localism has three dimensions – economic, constitutional and public service based evidence suggests that detailed policy is needed on all three if excellent services with a plurality of providers can be delivered.

What is really becoming clear is that both parties see a growing role for the voluntary sector in the next parliament which is sure to see a continuation of budget cuts and austerity whichever party wins.  Both main parties have recognised the importance of an active voluntary sector to protect some of those public services.  Volunteers and volunteer organisations must wake up to the new politics of the 21st century where they play an ever more important role.

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TeamKinetic will be attending Leadership Convention 2014 run by Sport and Recreation alliance.

By

On 30th October 2014

In News & Views, Sport

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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:

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.

Police budget cuts: unpaid volunteers now used in key roles

By

On 29th October 2014

In News & Views

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

police image for blog

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.”

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