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!
Two: Retail Trust’s Tackling Domestic Abuse Campaign.
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.
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