Tag: TeamKinetic volunteer management system Page 1 of 2

TeamKinetic Admin Guide

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On 19th January 2023

In Application Features and Tutorials, Training

Welcome to this TeamKinetic Admin Guide. This is essential for any admin user setting up a new TeamKinetic site, or any new member of staff using an existing TeamKinetic site.

In this post, you’ll have access to all the TeamKinetic quickstart videos. You can get help at any time by clicking the ? help icon in the top right of your screen within the system.

Overview

An overview of system users and what functions each user has access to.

A look at the relationships between each user.

Initial Setup

The initial setup steps confirm things like your about us page and other application content.

It’s also important to set up your registration settings including what data to collect, and opportunity categories.

Remember there is always help available on every page by clicking the ? at the top right of your screen.

Look and Feel

During step 3 we will cover how to add your logo, set up all the colours for menus and links, and set your page backgrounds and the home page content.

Your First Opportunity

Adding opportunities is of course a fundamental skill to learn!

We have a number of different types of opportunities and many options available for creating an opportunity that serves your needs.

It can be as simple as a quick opportunity which has only a few questions to answer, all the way up to a complex repeating opportunity that spans months.

Invite Volunteers

Now you have your application set up just how you want it and have some shiny new opportunities ready for your volunteers, you’ll need some volunteers.

One of the quickest and easiest ways to get your volunteers registered is to send them an invite email with a special link they can follow to register.

You can keep track of all your invites by going to Volunteer Management → Invite Volunteer.

Manage Opportunities

Once your opportunities have been added and volunteers are starting to sign up you will spend a good percentage of your time managing your opportunities and the volunteers that have joined.

Our opportunity management dashboard has all the tools you’ll need to communicate effectively with your volunteers, schedule new sessions, place and move volunteers between sessions and lots more. It is probably the major hub for your application.

Create Events

An event is a group of opportunities that has something in common.

Each event gets its own mini-site with a picture that you can share and link to.

Events also show up on the opportunity search page and in the weekly newsletter. This makes it easier for volunteers who are not bothered about what they do but just want to be part of the big event.

Volunteer Rewards

Rewarding your volunteers is vital to maintain and improving retention rates.

We have a few ways you can reward volunteers including the achievement badges, both automatic for hours served and your own Award Badges that you can award for any reason (volunteer of the month etc.).

We strongly encourage you to set up your own Award Badges and bring a smile to your volunteers.

Communication

You’ll need to stay in touch with your volunteers and there is a myriad of ways to do that with TeamKinetic.

There are a range of customisable automatic emails, email groups, email filters (by age, gender etc.), system notifications, Facebook, Twitter and using SMS texts.

You’ll always be in close contact with your volunteers.

Reporting

Reporting and insight are invaluable to finding out what has been going on in your programme.

Here you’ll learn about the various reporting, maps and visualisations that are available out of the box with TeamKinetic.

You can also request custom reports just for your organisation if required.

Mobile Use

Volunteers can download the TeamKinetic mobile app for their Android or Apple phones, allowing them to log in, join opportunities, log hours, update their information and much more.

If you still need some help using TeamKinetic, don’t hesitate to use our live chat feature. This can be accessed under Help and Support.

You can find TeamKinetic on social media and listen to our podcast:

Twitter       Facebook       LinkedIn       YouTube       Instagram       Podcast

 

Are you enjoying using TeamKinetic? If you could leave us a review on G2, we’d really appreciate it! We’ll even send you a little thank you.

TeamKinetic Volunteer Guide

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On 16th January 2023

In Application Features and Tutorials

Welcome to the TeamKinetic Volunteer Guide. We’ll go through the key things you’ll need to know about the system so you can get started volunteering for the causes that speak to you.

You’ll have received the welcome email by now and we urge you to take a look as it will contain essential information.

The first screen you’ll see after registering is your Dashboard.

This is the hub for your volunteering and where you will find most of the information you need. You can access the various sections from the menu on the left-hand side, just click any of the headings to move to that section. Lets take a look at some of the key pages;

Click below to go to each page.

TeamKinetic – 2.10 Interim Release

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On 19th January 2022

In TeamKinetic Features, Technical Updates

Hot on the heels of 2.09 from December we have another interim release for you. This one focuses on improvements to the expenses functionality after feedback and suggestions from our fantastic users. As always though, there is plenty of stuff to talk about.

Volunteer Expenses Improvements

Volunteers now have a few more options; they can update their bank details at anytime, delete unprocessed expense claims, and quickly view any current claims. Additionally if the claim has not yet been processed the volunteer can also update any of the details. We’ve also adjusted the layout so it looks better on small and mobile screens.

Administrator Expense Improvements

Administrators can now create a new expense claim for any volunteer without impersonating them. Just tap in the name of the volunteer and complete the form, dead easy.

When exporting the expense details to a CSV, we now include a link to the uplaoded receipt file if it exists, which makes it easier to pass the details on to a different department.

The volunteer’s bank details are now also visible and editable on their management page. All processed claims when marked as paid, are stored along with the bank account details that were recorded at that time, so you will have a nice audit trail if accounts change.

New Custom Emails

We’ve added a couple of new custom email and also split the emails up into three tabs; sent to volunteers, providers and admins.

You can now edit the password reset email to add more information and instruciton if your volunteers are struggling. This email was previously sent but was not customisable.

We’ve also added a brand new process for when a volunteer removes themselves (see below) from the system and we’ve added a custom email to go along with that process.

New Restore Feature For Volunteers

Previously when a volunteer deleted their own account they were taken back to the homepage and their data and login details were immediately removed.

Now the new custom email (see above) is sent and the volunteer is given some information about what happens now; when their data is destroyed etc. Most importantly, the email contains a special link that the volunteer can use to restore their account if they change their mind, or in case of a mistake. The volunteer has 48 hours to restore the account before its removed.

More Customisable Registration Fields

We’ve added the data sharing confirmation questions to those that are customisable from the super admin pages. So you can now update the label and the tool tip for these fields.

We’ve also improved the tool tip recognition code for your customised registration fields so they show more effectively now.

Dual Language Support for Custom Questions

We did previously support dual language for custom questions but now super admins can edit and adjust all their own custom questions at anytime from the same interface as the main language questions.

Dual Language Support for Customised Registration Questions

Additionally super admins can now also adjust the text, labels and tool tips for all the required registration questions instead of relying on the fixed translations.

Provider Search Speed Improvements

You may have noticed the provider search page was slowing down and took a number of seconds to return the first set of providers. These slowdowns when using the same database query as previous are due to table size effects and data complexity. The same query works fine upto a tipping point, then its slows down precipitously. The query has been redesigned and is now nice and snappy again.

As this is an interim release, we dont have the beta test period we employ with our larger release. This means this release will be hitting your browsers this week. Get in touch if you have any questions or feedback.

Thank you.

TeamKinetic 2.09 Interim Release

By

On 29th November 2021

In Application Features and Tutorials, TeamKinetic Features, Technical Updates

Another great value interim release for you all, and only a few weeks since the last one! This one is all software based, no hardware or infrastructure updates, which is much better for my health and sanity =)

Update Feedback from Volunteer Dashboard

Providers and admins can now update a volunteers feedback from the feedback section on the volunteer dashboard page. Just hit the update link and you can save it right there – no refresh required.

 

New Translation Engine

For those customers (Enterprise only) that use an alternative language to English (get in touch if you are interested) we have now brought all translations in-house to our own replacement engine.

This has a number of advantages; we can update and add new replacements fast, translator marked Super Admins can provide translations right there in the Super Admin area, and they can request new replacements to be added.

Using our own replacement and translation engine has increased the page load time for translated pages by four fold, an excellent result.

Send Custom Newsletters Whenever You Want

The bulk email system has been updated to use the same HTML wrapper as the weekly newsletter, so all your bulk emails will now look better and have more branding elements for your organisation.

When creating bulk emails you can now select any number of opportunities to be included in the email. You have the option of including the events that week and if you want to show the volunteer’s statistics across the top. These are all displayed in exactly the same way as within the newsletter so its now possible to send a newsletter type email to any of your volunteers, for any of your opportunities, whenever you like!

We have also rearrange and refactored the preview and draft buttons so you can now send a preview email to your email instantly and save a draft copy without leaving the page. We also now update the saved draft each time you hit the save draft button, rather than creating a new draft.

Expenses Module – First Phase

This is another great Enterprise only option to help you manage your expenses. You’ve been able to mark an opportunity as expenses provided for quite a few versions now. This new module closes the loop for expenses.

Volunteers can select applicable opportunities from their dashboard, upload a receipt, an explanation of what the expense is for, and the amount they are claiming.

Admins get an alert when a new claim is submitted by a volunteer and can manage them all from a simple interface.

The admin can view the receipt, adjust the claim amount, and update the claim status. A full history of changes and notes is maintained and viewable underneath the main claim.

We have also added some additional profile data points for UK bank account and sort codes which are only requested and stored if a volunteer makes an expenses claim. One day we hope to create some in app payment methods but we’ve yet to find one that has been acceptable to the majority of our customers yet…but we are still looking!

The managed expenses module is an enterprise only feature. Administrators can switch this module on and off and allow trusted providers to be able to mark an opportunity with the managed expenses flag. The managed expenses runs alongside the regular expenses flag, so anyone can still mark an opportunity as paying expenses, and this will show in the search filters and opp description, but only enterprise admins and trsuted providers will be able to add this managed aspect to those expenses.

Front page customisations

Our new front end (if you are not using it we suggest switching it on as volunteers seem to prefer it!) has some extra customisations, and now they are all also available in your chosen alternative language (enterprise only).

If you can’t find a suitable image, then it will fill the background with some of your chosen colours with a subtle animation effect so it will still look great even without an image.

Accreditation Improvements

We’ve standardised all the accreditation badge prints now so there will be zero variability between badges no matter how you print them.

We’ve also added the help and support menu to the accreditation menus so you can open support tickets straight from there without having to return the main volunteer menu.

The event access screen now accommodates the full 12 possible areas for each event and correctly displays access for each selectable zone.

There have also been quite a few small improvements and enhancements to the UI/UX as we harmonise it with the main application.

You can try out these features as normal on the beta site before the interim gets pushed out on 5th December. We’ll be notifying everyone and getting together some training videos and materials to make sure you can hit the ground running.

Closing Opportunities Added to Dashboard

Opportunities that are closing within 7 days are now shown to providers in their dashboard under the tasks panel.

These have been available on the administrators dashboard for a little while now but have now been brought across to the provider dashboard as well.

Happy Birthday Message for Volunteers

Just a little message on their dashboard when it is their birthday, wishing them the best and thanking them for volunteering.

We’ll be adding more life events to these notifications over time, like anniversaries of them registering, joining their first opportunity, logging their first hours etc.

Restore Recently Deleted Volunteers

We receive quite a few support tickets where administrators have accidentally deleted a volunteer, or deleted the wrong volunteer.

So we have implemented a restore feature that will work for 48 hours after the deletion. You can use the new DELETED filter in the volunteer search page to find all the volunteers that have been deleted in the last 48 hours. To restore a volunteer just hit the checkbox next to their name and then use the CHANGE STATUS bulk action in the bottom blue bar to restore them.

Once the 48 hour period has expired you will not be able to restore that volunteer. We can restore volunteers after this period for upto 30 days from cold storage backups but there is a charge.

Administators cannot restore a volunteer that has removed themselves, for obvious reasons; however all their hours are anonymised and retained.

Anonymised Hours from Deleted Vounteers Included

You can now see your anonymised hours from deleted volunteers in the quick stats area of the reporting pages. It combines the totals and highlights the total from deleted volunteers in brackets.

The date of removal is used as the hour logged date.

TeamKinetic 2.05 Interim Release

By

On 26th October 2021

In Application Features and Tutorials, TeamKinetic Features, Technical Updates

We have had a busy few weeks and have rolled out another interim release packed full of useful changes and updates suggested by our users.

Additionally we have also updated our infrastructure over the last few weekends with minimal distruption. All our servers and virtual environments are now on the latest server operating system and our database has also been updated to a new version. We’ve also thrown some more hardware at the application and I hope you have noticed some snappier responses.

Custom emails for opportunities

You can now add a custom email to an opportunity that is sent when a volunteer joins INSTEAD of the universal email (the universal email remains accessible and customisable as before). So if you have a special message to give to volunteers that join certain opportunities here is your chance.

It’s super easy to use and access, quick check box to say you want to use a custom email then you will see the normal editor window where you can craft the email.

Administrators can add an attachment to these emails from the normal list of email attachments you are used to seeing in the bulk email and email customisation areas.

Remember, this email is sent INSTEAD of the universal one, so be sure to include full details.

Custom email for role applications

Just as above, now when super admins are creating or editing roles they can add a custom email that is sent when a volunteer applies for that role.

It all works identically as for custom opportunity emails, and once again is sent instead of the universal email.

Close applications for an opportunity

Admins and providers can now hit a button on the APPLICANTS tab for apply first opportunties which will close applications for the opportunity without closing the opportunity. This enables already accepted volunteers to carry on as normal, and access new sessions, without attracting any new applicants.

Opportunity image enforcement option

Super Admins can now elect to switch of the mandatory upload of images for each opportunity. This option is OFF be default.

Information about the opportunity the intial role application was for

When a volunteer first applies for a role we record which opportunity this was on. We used this to enable the auto application to the opportunity if it was required, once the role applicaiton was complete and successful.

We have now started to show this information on the role management page so you know which opportunity the volunteer was originally interested in.

The volunteer also gets this information, along with a link to the original opportunity so they don’t need to hunt around to find it.

New and fixed reports

We have added a pie chart showing the proportion if volunteers on events and opportunities that have reported as having special needs or disabilities, downloadable of course.

The pie chart showing the ethnicity of volunteers on opportunities and events was not using distinct volunteers, but all the joined sessions. This has been fixed and is now accurate and the total volunteers will match the number given in the summary for volunteers.

Improved profile editing for volunteers

The layout when editing the profile for a volunteer has been tidied up and the various layouts for external volunteers, provider editing pages have also been improved.

We have split out the location aspects of their profile from their personal details, so you can update and edit independantly. This will help where location details have not been recorded properly but you still need to update other aspects of their profile.

Feedback report is now downloadable

Added a download button to the feedback report page so you can grab a full list of all the feedback at anypoint.

New filter for searching volunteers

You can now choose in the TYPE filter, to show volunteers that will and that will not receive bulk emails. A volunteer only receives bulk emails if they have opted in, have a valid email address, and have been granted access.

Faster searching

The opportunity search page speed has been improved by excluding distance calculations where possible and also using a boundary box method of finding matching opportunities rather than calculating the distance from the volunteers location and all other opportunites.

This is not as accurate but much faster and the accuracy is perfectly acceptable for this search. This means that empty or null searches, which are by far the most performed search such as;

https://volunteering-wales.net/volunteers/search

can return the maximum 250 opportunities in less than a second.

Providers having multiple accounts is now optional

The ability for providers to create their own sub accounts for collegues to use to login is now an option. You can find it in the super admin menu > options > everything else tab.

Better ordering of completed opportunities for volunteers

When volunteers view their opportunity tab in their dashboard, completed opportunities were ordered by their start date (age). We’ve switched this around now so that the opportunities are ordered by the date of their last session on that opportunity. So the opportunity that was mostly recently completed is at the top.

In app criminal checks

We are just finishing our initial development of in app criminal checks with KnowYourPeople in the UK. This wil mean you can fill out a simple form in the app, send it off and within 24 hours or so you will have the completed criminal check details available on the volunteers profile.

They will also send the certifcate to the volunteers address and your organisation name will appear on the certificate.

We don’t have finalised prices for the each check, but we are confident they will be less than £12 per check for the enhanced version.

If you are interested in trialing this new feature please get in touch.

Should you still be working with online volunteers post-covid?

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On 13th October 2021

In COVID-19, Volunteer Management

Now we’re heading back to ‘normal’, should you still be working with online volunteers? YES! By recruiting online volunteers from quite literally anywhere you’re expanding your reach. When it comes to volunteering: the bigger your reach, the better! Virtual volunteering slots here perfectly. 

In today’s blog post, we’re outlining the ways you can make sure your virtual opportunities stand out from the rest. 

Making Your Opportunity Stand Out

Your Opportunity Title. When creating your opportunity, make sure your title is compelling and attractive. A volunteer is more likely to join an opportunity that instantly excites them, so having a strong title is key. It’s also worth mentioning somewhere in the title that the opportunity is remote. 

Opportunity Description. Simply, don’t post the full list of details. Searching volunteers are likely to be leading with emotion – and a long description of there duties isn’t going to entice them. We suggest giving snippets of their duties but focus on explaining the impact they’ll be making.

Jargon. For a number of volunteers, this is their first time volunteering. Any specific language or acronyms should be left out. It’s most likely going to confuse potential volunteers, so keeping it as simple as possible will get more interest from new volunteers.

Calls To Action. Give potential volunteers the ‘next steps’ for joining an opportunity. Your opportunity should always have contact details too, for any other questions or support they might require. 

Image Use.  The use of imagery taps into volunteers’ emotions. Using the right image can trigger mirror neurons in the brain, so the volunteer feels the emotions portrayed in an image. Your images can also show that your organisation is inclusive to all. It’s important that your imagery is right, and sends the right signals to those browsing. 

Checking Your Posting. Once your post is complete, make sure to double check it. Go through and check that all the information is correct as well as looking out for any spelling/grammatical errors. It’s also worth, once posted, looking at the opportunity through a potential volunteer’s eyes – do they have everything they need to join? 

Are You Screening Your Volunteers?

Now that you’ve perfected your opportunity listing, and you have a set of virtual volunteers, the screening process can begin! What should you be considering when it comes to your volunteering screening process? 

At the outset, you need to find out where your volunteer will be working. Are they going to be in a pace that’s quiet and private, or will they be in a busy environment? The key thing is that they are able to volunteer effectively in the place they’ve set up. 

To ensure your volunteer is working effectively, are their any supplies or training required? Ensure that your volunteer has completed their training steps, and can access everything they need to start volunteering; this check makes sure there can be a smooth process into the opportunity, because there’s no stop/starting as a volunteer doesn’t have access to something important. 

Volunteers will be interacting with a number of different people – let them know the basic information on how they should interact. This can help build up a volunteer’s confidence, so they interact with the organisation and those it helps more. 

Make sure that you’re frequently staying in touch with those who virtually volunteer, over email, chat or video call. You can touch base weekly or monthly, building up a relationship that keeps them returning to volunteer. Establishing this relationship is important, volunteers want to feel seen and heard, like they aren’t just on the outskirts of the organisation. 

Volunteer Motivations

You can also match volunteers with other opportunities you think they might be interested in. One way you can do this is through understanding your volunteers motives. VolunteerPro teaches a lot about a set of motivations a volunteer is likely to have, and how they can be applied by volunteer managers. Their motivations are: 

  • Values: Where in which volunteers take something meaningful from the hours they spend volunteering. 
  • Careers: Opportunities open doors for volunteers to advance in their careers or network with likeminded people from their industry. 
  • Social: Volunteers can find themselves in emotional and supportive environments which they can also benefit from. 
  • Enhancement: Volunteering gives leadership development to volunteers and changes their perception of power to some extent. 

Volunteers that are open and motivated are most likely to have more than one goal in mind, rather than running on one single purpose. For some, they might not yet realise what those goals or motivations are, but they want to help in any capacity. 

Think it’s time to invest in volunteer management software?

You can start a free trial of TeamKinetic on our website. This will let you check out all our features for 30 days. If you like what you see, contact us to book a demo and see how we can help your organisation manage your volunteers!

How to get young people volunteering at heritage sites…

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On 6th October 2021

In Community, Volunteer Management

The HistoricScot Youth Forum was established to understand how to get young people volunteering and involved in the heritage sector. Historic Environment Scotland (HES) have been involved with Young Scot, in a 24 month partnership to help expand the engagement, participation and involvement of younger generations from different backgrounds to influence their activity and decision-making processes.

In previous conversations, there has been a multi-generational issue, especially regarding younger generations. Over the past 18 months, Young Scot have been tackling this problem of the lack of young generation involvement. Their results are presented in this report and contribute towards the Historic Environment Scotland 2019-22 corporate plan.

The report is spilt into three key themes: Community and Schools, Volunteering and Work, and HES sites all with a focus on future engagement of young people within the heritage sector. These recommendations are based off results from surveys.

Community and Schools Responses

For many, school is the first time people will engage with the historic environment. It’s highly likely that those who engage with historic environments as an adult have had experiences as a child, so ensuring sites are engaged with schools is crucial. 

The majority of young people nowadays find their information through online social media platforms, so if they aren’t connected to HES platforms, they aren’t going to be engaged with it. For 32% of respondents, they didn’t have a connection to historical places around Scotland, despite 47% expressing interest. 

Through their research, Young Scot have created these recommendations for the future: 

  • Start discussions with marginalised communities about how their heritage can be represented. 
  • Create history resources that are widely accessible for young people to learn and connect with. 
  • Develop relationships with schools and spread awareness of HES in classroom settings. 
  • Facilitate and engage with schools who have decided to visit sites and keep them engaged afterwards. 

Volunteering and Work Responses

Volunteering can be an important factor for individuals entering employment into the sector. Survey results show that 3/4 of respondents hadn’t considered a career in the historic environment but 60% of people wanted to know the ways work opportunities can engage them. Currently, the heritage sector attracts volunteers that are male around the age of 35 (according to Young Scot research). 

Lack of awareness towards employment, partnered with minimal advertisements are just two of the barriers which stopped people volunteering. If no one can see the opportunities, your pool of volunteers are significantly reduced.

In regards to young people, offering roles in areas they’re passionate about provides them with purpose and will help younger generations gain interpersonal skills they need. It’s especially vital now that these generations have lost time for social encounters due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

For Volunteering and Work, Young Scot had the following recommendations:

  • Create an online space for young people to showcase who they are and their skills for quicker sign up or applying opportunities. 
  • It’s imperative that those with or without the internet have equal access to opportunities. 
  • Start promoting your volunteering opportunities on the platforms where young people are, such as Instagram and Twitter.
  • For new volunteering roles, tailor the opportunity’s advertisement to a diverse group of young people through language, tone and imagery.

HES Site Responses

Currently, heritage sites host a number of opportunities for specific demographics and it’s mainly families. Due to this, there is still work to be done in engaging young people. For many heritage sites, this age range is forgotten, when they should be included.

In Young Scots’ survey, they found that if sites became more technology based, or held more events, then visits would be more enjoyable for younger generations. In a separate matter, over a quarter of respondents cannot access all parts of heritage sites due to the lack of accessibility provided.

Based on the information from the survey, Young Scot highlighted gamification as a way to engage young people within heritage sites. Gamification is applying elements of games to other activities, normally completed as an online technique to keep people engaged. Heritage sites can use this as a technique to interest young people into engaging with their content.

The report created a number of recommendations for heritage sites: 

  • Make sure that all facilities are accessible to everyone, without this, there is a barrier against those with disabilities from accessing the heritage environment. 
  • Design new events, exhibitions and educate young people of the cultural changes within society.
  • Host events to celebrate minority groups and their heritage in Scotland’s history. 
  • Make improvements to the website and the types of content it provides: specifically where people can go to learn more. One way to do this is to create hubs for different age groups. This, along with the introduction of gamification, creates an online community where young people can meet other, like-minded people.

Conclusions…

From Young Scot’s experience with engaging in the sector, there is a disproportionate underrepresentation of those from a variety of backgrounds. Heritage sites don’t reflect the diversity of the sector, the organisation, or Scotland as a whole. This barrier in particular needs to be overcome to make HES as accessible as possible for all young people.

The introduction of the latest technology can engage audiences at a younger age; paired with a strong relationship with schools, the historic environment can recharge younger generations of their love for Scotland’s culture, past and present.

Young Scot is hoping the recommendations made throughout the report can start conversations within HES on the future of younger generations in the sector. They encourage HES to continue involving young people in future plans to make a real impact. 

Want to start engaging with your volunteers more? 

Calling all heritage sites! We’ve worked with Volunteer Organisers Network and Historic Environment Scotland to create the Make Your Mark Portal, which can promote your heritage opportunities to new audiences and helps you with your volunteer management. You can find out more about Make Your Mark here. 

If you’d like to know more about us here at TeamKinetic, and how we can help you manage your volunteers, you can access our website here.

Volunteer Passports: Is this the future?

By

On 8th September 2021

In COVID-19, News & Views

The following round-up blog post comes from a research report commissioned by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), on Volunteer Passports that TeamKinetic helped to support. 

During the COVID-19 pandemic, we were reminded of just how important volunteering is to communities. It’s suggested that around 12.4 million adults volunteered during the pandemic, 4.6 million of those for the first time! The pandemic has made waves within volunteering and with more and more organisations coming together to find a collaborative approach to recruitment and onboarding; there have been movements to introduce volunteer passports into organisations. 

What is a Volunteer Passport?

If you aren’t familiar, a volunteer passport can hold all the verified credentials a volunteer might need in order to volunteer, which can serve as credentials to a pool of organisations. This can be called volunteer portability; this concept refers to the easing of movement across different organisations and roles. Volunteer passports can be a quicker way to apply as a volunteer as any references or training needed has already been completed and verified! 

Passporting Aims…

The initiative aims to address key issues regarding volunteer recruitment, management and development…

In certain contexts, such as emergency response volunteering, volunteer passports can be a mechanism to recruit and onboard large numbers of volunteers to opportunities locally and at speed. With passporting, the aim is also to improve the effectiveness of matching volunteers to opportunities tailored to what they’re interested in, or want to take part in. It also means that volunteers can be ‘re-deployed’ onto different tasks where they may be needed. This also ensures that micro, ad hoc and event-based volunteering opportunities are supported, also known as volunteer portability. 

Reducing volunteer vetting can save time and money for all parties, through the standardisation of volunteer training and management. In the past, there have been previous initiatives that have explored this locally or within a particular sector, improving the consistency of trained volunteers. 

What about alternative practices?

Here’s a quick run-through of the practices that could be integrated into volunteer passports: 

A number of volunteering organisations already match volunteers with volunteering opportunities they find may be a good fit, based on previous opportunities or through a skill-based match. Many volunteers started volunteering through word of mouth therefore, online volunteer passports may be deemed unnecessary. Any passporting system would have to consider how the offline side could be integrated successfully. 

Volunteer profiles have also been in previous initiatives, numerous management platforms have offered volunteers a facility where they can develop and build their ‘profile.’ This can be used as an alternative to CVs or LinkedIn, which volunteers involved in the report have emphasised. Volunteer passporting could mean it addresses an aim that has already been met.  

Other related schemes have been surrounding rewarding volunteers. Just like within the TeamKinetic system, schemes can provide rewards through ‘time banks’ or ‘time credits’, where a volunteer’s time is recorded, which they can then use to redeem a reward of some sort. The reward would depend on the organisation they are working with. We know how important recognising and rewarding volunteers are, so volunteer passporting has to include this, or something similar. 

Key Areas of Demand

In order for volunteering-involved organisations to support volunteer passports there are some key areas of demand. The report consistently highlights that portable IDs, and DBS checks are deemed to be a core element of potential volunteer passports. This is because they benefit volunteers, organisations and stakeholders from different voluntary sectors. The introduction of portable IDs and DBS checks is welcomed by organisations as a way to reduce the admin burden that comes with mass onboarding. For volunteers, it reduces the barriers they may find when wanting to volunteer in a different sector. 

Allowing organisations to have a shared pool of volunteers would help particular types of volunteering such as emergency, event-based, and micro-volunteering. This element is a way of always having volunteers on hand to offer opportunities to.

From the suggestion for portable IDs, the standardisation of volunteer training is also of interest. Standardising training will be beneficial through local volunteer portability and regarding specialist skills with individual sectors. Not only can volunteers help across different organisations in their local area, those volunteers with specialist skills, are enabled to complete certain tasks for a number of organisations within the sector. 

Another element was found that there needs to be some sort of validation of volunteers’ experiences and skills. For some volunteer groups, this would be incredibly beneficial, where volunteering could become a potential route to employment, the validation of skills can be added to a CV etc. This aspect was also thought to offer benefits in terms of supporting social integration and the well-being of different marginalised groups. 

What Does Each Sector Think?

The research for the report presented some experiences and views from each sector regarding the introduction of volunteer passports and how they might be used. 

The health sector has seen a rise in volunteer passporting over the past couple of months, and the expectation is for the demand to grow. The sector has found that passporting ensures agile and efficient emergency responses along with the integration of statutory and non-statutory services. The demand has also increased in the community action sector; portability at local level of training and skills has already been introduced, so there is potential to build on existing initiatives to deliver a comprehensive passporting system in local areas.  

Regarding the culture sector, museums and heritage sites perceived passporting as beneficial. Specifically highlighting the portability.

Portability allows for volunteer learning and skill exchange, reducing administrative burden. There has been interest in developing a shared volunteer training standard within the sector.

In some areas, the sector has found they have been oversubscribed with volunteers. Therefore, standardising training and easy portability means volunteers can be moved into new routes while staying in the sector they’re interested in. 

While there is strong demand in certain sectors, the sporting sector has seen very little demand for a passporting system, with the exception of portable DBS checks. The report shows that demand is low as volunteer recruitment is mostly organic, so there’s little interest in the digital brokerage of volunteer passports. Along with this, for individual sports, qualifications are already there in terms of training, and therefore the standardisation of training has been met and recognised. 

So How Will it Work?

How might volunteer passports work moving forward?

  • Commonality: Volunteer portability is more likely to work when there is a common denominator between organisations whether this be locally or sector-based. This commonality between organisations may be essential to building a ‘federation of trust’ aligning volunteer standards and processes. 
  • Sustainable? Stakeholders have concerns that passport initiatives may not be sustainable. This is due to the temporary nature of funding, and a lack of resources. To overcome these issues, volunteer-involved organisations have stressed the need for passporting initiatives to be developed in a realistic way, building this into a long-term strategy for volunteering. 
  • Credibility: The Credibility of passport schemes is incredibly important for volunteer engagement and organisations. Some examples of the ways individual volunteer passporting schemes have been credible have included: endorsements from national councils of volunteer organisations and local authority and government institutions. 
  • Data Standards: This is a strong requirement from digital platform providers and organisations who explain that any volunteer passport system would only work if it was developed with open data standards. 
  • Control? Various organisations have emphasised how important it is for volunteers to be the ones controlling their data. For example, in previous initiatives, there have been options for volunteers to pause notifications at times when they were busy or wanted to stop volunteering for the moment.
  • Access: There is an element of exclusion and barriers for small organisations due to a lack of digital infrastructure and skills to join in on volunteer passporting for those who work for their organisation. Where are smaller organisations going to find and retain their volunteers? 

Expectations of Government Support…

There are areas where central and local governments can support volunteering in the context of volunteer passporting, including: 

  • Raising awareness of current possibilities to make DBS checks portable and improving their portability. 
  • Providing legal clarity over certain issues curtailing volunteer portability or any other elements of passporting. 
  • Working with the voluntary sector to support greater standardisation where appropriate through funding for resources and infrastructure. 
  • Encouraging volunteering by making sure other government policies do not pose barriers to volunteering. 

Where Does TeamKinetic Fit In? 

As mentioned at the beginning of this blog post, TeamKinetic helped support this report we’d like to thank the DMCS for inviting us to help! We’re intrigued to see how volunteer passports and passporting develop in the next couple of years. We’re currently looking at ways we could introduce volunteer passporting, or elements of passporting, into our system. 

If you’d like to know more about us here at TeamKinetic, you can start a free trial of TeamKinetic on our website. This will let you check out all our features for 30 days. If you like what you see, contact us to book a demo and see how we can help your organisation manage your volunteers!

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.

The Whitworth Gallery, in partnership with TeamKinetic

By

On 4th August 2021

In Case Study, Heritage & Culture, News & Views

At the start of 2020, The Whitworth made the leap to take on TeamKinetic as their volunteer management software provider. They made this change just before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, meaning working from home gave them the perfect opportunity to understand and implement the system.

The Whitworth Gallery is described as historic, contemporary, academic, and playful. Founded in 1889, the first English gallery in a park has been transformed by a £15 million development in 2015. As part of their volunteer programme, volunteers are able to contribute across the gallery. This includes supporting artists, textile care, art gardening, digitising their collection, cataloguing their library, assisting in the delivery of workshops, and much more.

Fiona Cariss, volunteer manager at The Whitworth says,

“We chose TeamKinetic as they’re a local organisation to our gallery and already supply the volunteer system for Manchester City Councils Volunteering opportunities.

The Whitworth is in partnership with Manchester Art Gallery, along with Manchester Museum too, so it means in the future we could look at sharing our volunteers and opportunities across the partnership through the system.

In a way the past 18 months has been a perfect time to implement the new system with TeamKinetic, as we’ve managed to test it with our volunteers whilst everyone has been at home-  it helped us reach out further to our locality making it easier for them to register their interest and hear about the volunteering opportunities straight away. The data and reporting aspects of the system has and will definitely help in combining everything we need when we’re evaluating the programme and reporting back to various funders.

So far all our volunteers have found it easy to register and it’s a very usable system, in which you get a lot of support from TeamKinetic too. The Whitworth Volunteer Programme is looking forward to working with TeamKinetic further in the future when we have more volunteering opportunities coming up.”

Find Out More…

If you’d like to volunteer with the Whitworth, you can check out their opportunities here.

TeamKinetic helps to build better volunteer communities by providing great tools for volunteer managers that save time, increase impact and improve insight. Our goal is to make volunteering easy for everyone no matter what. But don’t take our word for it, why not check out our customer reviews.

For more information on how we can assist with your volunteer management and getting the best out of all your volunteers visit our website or contact us on – 0161 914 5757

SPAM – THE WORST KIND OF MAIL!

By

On 31st March 2021

In News & Views

Urgh spam. No, not the canned meat. The inconvenient annoyance that seems to find its way to my email every day! It’s a human thing to receive spam/junk but why do we get it and how can we spot spam? These are the questions that come to mind when I’m staring at an email asking me to click a link to pay for something I swear I never bought! Well, here at TeamKinetic we are going to explain how we protect you against spam, why we get spam and how to spot it… 

Protecting against spam

At TeamKinetic, we don’t want our customers being bombarded with spam emails. So, to help with this we first used Google Captcha, a method which tries to distinguish between robots and humans. But, the robots got smarter! There were signs that the system was getting easily defeated by the bots… Don’t worry it isn’t an i, Robot situation!

Now, we have found a better way to detect and remove as much spam as possible, we use a multifaceted approach which includes:

  • A non human visible honeypot which forms elements that bots love to fill in.
  • Testing to see if JavaScript had been run.
  • Timing how long it takes to complete and submit a form (robots are much faster than humans)!

Why do we get spam?

Its practically impossible to stop all spam. If you are too strict you lose valid emails but if you are not strict enough, too much spam will get through the cracks. It is difficult to find the perfect balance but we feel we have have hit the nail on the head. I can tell you that we get 98% less spam using the combination methods above than when the contact us form is left without protections. Sounds great, but what about that 2% that gets through, how can you spot those types of emails? Keep reading to find out…

How to spot spam emails

Most of the phishing and spam messages we get contain dire messages about your domain name and or the search engine optimisation (SEO) for your website. Your domain, if its is managed by us, is automatically renewed, there is no danger of it being de-registered and neither do you need to pay to keep it registered. The same goes for SSL certificates. Others talk about errors on the website and offer to fix them if you download a program; DONT! As a general rule don’t follow any links in any unsolicited email or message. There are some useful tips for how to spot phishing messages on the IT governance website.

What we advise…

If you get any emails which seem suspicious or you seem to be receiving many at once, never click on a link or send personal information. Open a support ticket or head to our website to start a live chat and we will gladly look into this for you. 

Remember, stay safe offline and online!

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