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.

March round up

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

Rolf, Steve and Chris on the Razzle

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.

 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:

November round up

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.

You can access the full evaluation summary report by clicking here.

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!