Tag: local Authority

Can Local Authorities afford to not have Volunteer Management Software?

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. 

Save Your Mutual Aid Groups!

Lockdown 3! How did we get here? 

Flashback to 10 months ago…

March 23rd 2020, Boris Johnson addressed the nation to declare the first Lockdown in the UK. At this moment many people, myself included, believed this lockdown would only last a few weeks and we would be back to normal before we know it. Little did we know, 10 months later we would be 3 weeks into our 3rd Lockdown. 

The Evolution of Lockdowns

Let’s start from the beginning. Lockdown 1 begins on the 23rd March. People are told not to go to work and others are told to start shielding. Here begins the volunteering boom! The vulnerable are having to shield to protect themselves from the virus but are unable to go shopping, collect prescriptions or get any other essentials. This is where the efforts of locals began to show, people took charge creating mutual aid groups to protect and help the shielding. Irene Cree from Glasgow Life agreed that ”Mutual aid groups reacted really quickly, in many respects much quicker than the public sector did.” They reacted so quick in fact that according to the report Communities Vs Coronavirus: The Rise of Mutual Aid, in July it was recorded 4,000 of these groups were formed since the beginning of the pandemic, with as many as three million participants.

The solidarity of our country showed the support we had for one another, but when another lockdown hit us in the midst of winter, there were the initial signs of burnout to be seen!

Lockdown 2 was hard, a month of rain and cold in the lead up to the busiest time of the year. This lockdown I know for myself was a struggle and like many, the urge to volunteer was decreasing. Mutual aid groups were still doing their thing, but with limited support from stake holders like local authorities, their efforts were struggling.  It cetrianly felt harder to protect those they had up to this point.

Technology has played a signifcant role and for some mutual said groups has been a main ingredient to their success in the pandemic, however many mutual aid groups were trapped in a non-digital hell hole trying to manage all of their volunteers and tasks from spreadsheets and whats app. 

Fast forward to today and we are 3 weeks into lockdown 3. Fatigue is very real and obvious and we can only image how hard it must be for mutual aid groups this time round.

Technology still offers real opportunity for many mutual aid groups. Many have survived through the strength of will and chacter of their main participants but to keep on going they will need to use technology to ensure the organisational resliance and data security are in place to enable them to carry on. They also need lots of support from their local stakeholders in health, local government and the community if they are  to keep this community solidarity going. 

Can you Help Mutual Aid Groups?

So, how can you help? Back in August 2020 we spoke with Nivvi Morales, a member of COVID-19 Kenilworth Support, about their time using TeamKinetic to manage their volunteers. Their need for “a volunteer management system where we could communicate efficiently, assign tasks, track tasks, and keep our data safe.” was met, as we were able to provide the support and security they required. 

But for many they do not have the experiance, skill set or knowledge to adopt a digital system to keep their data secure and volunteers enagaged.  ‘Local authorities can help make mutual aid a positive legacy of COVID-19‘ offers some useful advice:

“Mutual aid groups are based on volunteers acting on their own free will. Local authorities must encourage and promote mutual aid groups for what they are – the social capital of a neighbourhood. A strategy that promotes mutual aid should be light touch, work with existing community partners, and focus on facilitating rather than directing activity. Mutual aid groups should always retain the ability to decide what they do and how they work.”

Being able to support these groups is crucial and a way to do this is through technical guidance. Helping them find a secure and manageable system will keep them in control of their volunteers and opportunityies and tasks whilst ensuring individuals feel safe, valued and enaged.

TeamKinetic

Improves communication, creates easy reports automatically, keeps sensitive data secure, options for DBS checks and provides more opportunities to recognise volunteers’ efforts. Sound like the ideal features these groups need? Well, we have you covered. TeamKinetic allows for all of these and can provide impeccable support as seen with COVID-19 Kenilworth support “the ability to raise a ticket if they had an issue with the system, which would then be supported straight away.”

Our community task function was specifically designed with mutual aid groups in mind. These allow for volunteers to pick up tasks such as, picking up shopping, collecting prescriptions and delivering these to the shielding person. Claire Redford-Kerr from St Helens and Halton VCA has spoke about how they have used the the community tasks dashboard and how “our volunteers [can] very quickly pick up tasks on there [and] they can chat to one another on there. So being able to text them or email them as a group or a specific cohort of volunteers, it’s really important for us and helps us to manage the way, when and who gets involved.”

If you would like more information about our system please visit our website or call on 0161 914 5757. You can also set up a 30 day free trial to test out all of our features!

Stay Safe!

 

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