Coronavirus has introduced so many new challenges for communities over the past 18 months, but it’s also presented foundations to build a stronger community. Moving out of the pandemic means the focus is now on building the relationships between volunteers and organisations; along with renewing that drive to volunteer in the first place. This could mean we have to rethink the roles within volunteering moving forward.
Remote Volunteering?
The use of remote volunteering over the pandemic has been phenomenal in helping those who’ve really needed it. Due to this, there is a larger market for this kind of volunteering, as so many people have volunteered in this way lately. In order for virtual volunteering to continue, volunteers must be attracted to your organisation’s missions as the social aspect towards volunteering has been stripped back. Communicating that their small contribution will make a difference will keep them involved and feeling positive for helping the community.
The pandemic has also increased the amount of online recruitment. So how have organisations found and kept in touch with their volunteers? It feels inevitable that recruiting volunteers online is something that will carry on far into the future. For organisations, their next steps may be to solidify their presence online. This is where a volunteer management system would come in handy; with TeamKinetic you can recruit more volunteers than ever before, and have constant contact to keep them informed.
Flexibility…
To create a more accessible volunteering route, there needs to be flexibility. For those who cannot commit to certain dates and times: flexibility allows for no obligation to return. It also means that volunteers can now access the risks beforehand (because they haven’t committed to a continuous role). Despite saying we’re coming out of the pandemic, people still have to assess the risks before going out (coronavirus included)! While it becomes more of a challenge for organisations to be flexible, breaking down roles into smaller opportunities is a way to include more flexibility.
Looking towards the future
There is a feeling that volunteering has taken a strong leap forward over the past 18 months. There is a renewed purpose to help those who really need it: we’re more aware of our communities’ vulnerabilities. Volunteering has increased massively over the pandemic and as a result we have to focus on preserving the positive changes that we have seen.
Interested in TeamKinetic?
Why not come and try our system for free! 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.
Volunteering at its core is an entirely selfless activity completed by people with no expectation of acknowledgement. Despite this, we believe volunteers deserve to be rewarded for their hard work. But how do you do this without them logging hours?
Why is logging hours so important?
In short, data. This data is key to your organisation to:
Measure success. Logged hours can represent the amount of work your volunteers are doing for their community or particular cause.
Track your audience. Knowing which volunteers are continually volunteering and which ones aren’t could be incredibly insightful. Is there a particular demographic volunteering more than others? Is there a demographic that is hard to retain? This data could uncover aspects that need to change, leading onto our next point…
Make improvements. No volunteering programmes are perfect, but the best ones regularly review and make changes to improve. If there’s a particular demographic that isn’t returning, why?
So how do I persuade volunteers to log their hours?
Show them how easy it is. Showing volunteers how quickly they can log hours might help them
Incentivise! Offering rewards can be a great way to get volunteers logging their hours. However, the best way to do this is to offer low-value rewards as often as possible.
Intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation. Imagine this: you offer one big prize (e.g. a hoodie), after a volunteer has logged 100 hours. They log hours as a way of reaching that prize, but once they reach those 100 hours they lose motivation to log future hours – or worse, return at all. (Extrinsic motivation) However, if you offer small rewards such as thank you messages they will be consistently motivated by the positive way the act makes them feel. (Intrinsic motivation)
Intrinsic motivation is all about making your volunteers continually feel good about the work they’re doing and the difference they’re making, rather than working towards one particular reward.
So how do you keep up this motivation? Giving them nice feedback is a great place to start! This will show how much you value them and will mean more to them than you may think.
Utilising TeamKinetic to Incentivise Volunteers
Leaving Feedback
TeamKinetic allows you to leave feedback when logging a volunteer’s hours. If you forget or don’t have time to personally thank your volunteer at the end of their session, this section gives you the chance to do so. It also lets the volunteer log their own hours and leave feedback about the opportunity they joined.
Ask anyone who has volunteered – receiving feedback is a great feeling and can push volunteers to return and continue volunteering for you.
Achievement Badges
This incentive is a great way to push your volunteers to log more hours. Once a volunteer logs their hours, they will add together to create their total volunteer hours. A small way to help increase volunteers’ hours is to have achievement badges when they reach certain hour milestones.
TeamKinetic has achievement badges automatically built into the system. The achievement badge pictures and names can be customised. These badges are a great way to incentivise volunteers and get them to keep on volunteering so they can reach the next milestone.
Custom Badges
Have you ever thought about starting a ‘volunteer of the month’ award? To give your volunteers an extra incentive to volunteer more or make them feel appreciated? Yes? Keep reading, you may like what you see…
TeamKinetic allows you to create custom award badges for your volunteers. These could be ‘volunteer of the month’ or ‘volunteer of the year’. They can be absolutely anything you want and look however you want, with the fully customisable option! Once you have assigned the award to a volunteer, they will receive an email with the award in it to congratulate them. Again, this recognises the efforts your volunteers put in, helping you to retain more volunteers and hopefully gain more.
Logging hours with TeamKinetic
Logging hours with TeamKinetic is easy – as it should be on any volunteer management system. See below for the full process laid out in less than 25 seconds!
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!
You can find TeamKinetic on social media and listen to our podcast:
The 2021 Q2 major release for TeamKinetic is now approaching our beta test phase where we invite and encourage all our users to have a poke around!
It’s a full jump to Version 2 as we have totally updated the volunteer application with the latest .NET platform (admin and provider to come), have introduced some new features and done some major work to align the design and feel across the whole application. We’ve also got some brand new native apps for android and iOS that will be out a few weeks after the desktop release.
Here are some of the highlights for this major release milestone.
Volunteer Roles
Many of our larger customers, and those with greater governance requirements will get alot from this new feature. It’s a bit like super charged APPLY FIRST feature!
A role is a set of steps that must be completed before a volunteer is approved on an opportunity. Super admins define the role, which is organised around four steps, each with as many (or no) tasks as you require. Each role has its own name, description, and a spot to add some information that is emailed to the volunteer when they first apply for a role.
Roles are applied to one or more opportunities, and once a volunteer has completed all steps on a role they can join any opportunity which requires that matching role, once they have satisfied any other pre-requisites to joining.
For example; if a volunteer joins a litter picking opportunity which has a role called ‘basic role’ then they will be required to jump through a number of onboarding steps as defined by the ROLE. But once they have done this they can go onto join any other opportunity which is also linked to the ‘basic role steps’ and it will not require them to go through the steps again (as they have already completed those role steps).
Each task can be flagged as actionable by the volunteer or administrator, they can complete that task from their dashboard when they have satisfied the requirements.
Administrators are alerted when a volunteer joins an opportunity requiring a ROLE, they are alerted via the actions tab on their main landing page.
The administrator can then monitor and record the volunteers progress through each of the steps within the ROLE, through to completion.
Each role task can be started by an admin, then completed and a full history log is maintained and visible at all times.
An application can be approved once all the tasks have been completed, but there is no enforced order to task completion.
When a volunteer is approved on the ROLE they are emailed (custom emails available of course) and shown a list of corresponding opportunities that they are now eligible to join.
Additionally, if a opportunity has its own APPLY FIRST status and a role requirement, then once the volunteer is approved for the role they are automatically placed in the applicants queue for that opportunity, they wont have to do anything else.
New Scheduling Features
We’ve added a brand new feature for adding volunteers to sessions. You can now select any number of volunteers and add or remove them from any number of sessions in one hit!
You can select from the current joined volunteer list, or search for new volunteers.
It’s super simple but much quicker than moving them individually (still available).
We’ve also re-designed our day schedule report so it’s much easier to see what is going on day by day.
You can still view any period and restrict it to certain opportunities or events, but now you’ll see every day in that period in a calendar like display.
You get the day, all the opps that have sessions on that day, how full the session is (full sessions are highlighted) and can click through to view a list of volunteers on that session.
You’ll be able to see empty days and poorly subscribed sessions really easily, then click through and start adding volunteers using the new multi-add feature we just introduced!
Re-Designed Applicants Dashboard
Applicants are now clearly divided into new, successful, and denied. You can instantly approve or deny a new applicant and then revert that decision and mark them as newly approved. This was something that proved popular in the roadmap voting.
The on-screen messaging and alerts have been improved and standardised so you’ll always know what’s happening.
Modern Front Page
Although our existing front page allows for a lot of customisation, many of our customers have been asking for a simpler cleaner look to their front page.
So we’ve have added a new modern layout that will be the default for all new customers. It’s got much simpler settings, just a single image and a message box, to worry about, looks great on all screen sizes, and gets right to the point so volunteers can login and register quickly.
Multiple Provider Accounts
This is a useful little feature for when there are multiple individuals at an organisation that all need to login as providers as manage their opportunities, but dont want to share login details.
Providers can now create and manage their own user list without any intervention required from the admins or super admins. Just add a name, email address and password and they can go ahead and login.
Multiple Meetings and New Meeting Features
Previously a volunteer could only have one active meeting at a time, now you can book and manage as many meetings as you like for volunteers.
Additionally we have added the ability to specify if the meeting is to be virtual, and if so, to add the link to the virtual meeting, or if not the location of a face to face meeting. You can also add a custom message which gets sent along with the normal custom email for new meetings, so you can let them know any extra information they need.
We’ve also tidied up the induction section of a volunteer manage dashboard and added the meeting details there. From here you get a link back to manage meetings and can also add a new meeting for the volunteer right from their dashboard.
Opportunity Badges
These are linked to opportunities showing that the opportunity is linked to a specific award scheme.
Example: If logged hours on the opportunity can go towards a volunteers Duke of Edinburgh Award, then they might attach it to the ‘DofE Opportunity Badge’.
Just add a name, description, and a badge image to create your opportunity badges. These can then be added to your opportunities, filtered on in the search and are displayed to the volunteers.
Great for quickly indicating to your volunteers what sort of opportunity its likely to be.
Gender List Editable in Alt Language
For those of you that take advantage of our alt language feature and translations (and if you don’t..why not?!) you can now view and edit your gender lists in your chosen alt language.
These are instantly reflected on the registration pages..which brings us to…
New Volunteer Registration
Volunteers begin their registration either by providing an email address, or by registering with Google or Facebook.
If they use and email address they will receive an email with a special link to confirm their email address and continue with their registration.
This will cut down drastically the number of bogus registrations and also reduces the initial inertia for registration. This first step of registration is recorded and we’ll be able to get some great insight into what is preventing volunteers from completing their registration.
We have also worked on the registration page itself; made it shorter, improved the location section, and added more on-screen help.
We think it’s a definite improvement and will hopefully lead to a higher rate of successful registrations.
New Search Page
The public search page is now more compact and the events have been moved to the right so they don’t obscure the results.
When viewed on smaller screens the layout adjusts accordingly so events are still visible.
Opportunity Images
You might have noticed in the screenshot for the search page that we now support adding images to opportunities!
We know from our experience that this has to be quick and painless or providers just don’t bother. So we’ve put in place a number of features to try to make this easy for providers.
Images are mandatory for opportunities, you cant add your first opportunity without uploading at least one image
You can select from your previous images, so once you have one you don’t have to keep uploading
When creating an opp, it will default to your last used image
ABOVE: Admin/Providers view when creating opportunityABOVE: Volunteer view of opportunity with image
It really couldn’t be easier! These images are responsive and will adjust in height and width to cope with any sized screen.
Everything Else
Multiple groups are selectable from the bulk email screens
Can add files to the private notes section
Course management improved
More admin options available
More opportunity sharing data available along with suggestions of other organisations you might want to join forces with
Volunteers can see how many slots are available in each session before they join
Induction questions are now sortable
New report showing the ethnicity breakdown of active volunteers
No, I’m not joking and no I haven’t got the secret for that either…but anyway, often volunteering is recommended for older adults to keep them active and busy. People aged 65 and over are the age group most likely to have volunteered recently. As we get older many people naturally slow down however we should only gear up!
I can rest when I’m dead, I’m too busy living.
My beloved Great nan
Volunteering can cover a wide spectrum, from volunteering locally or abroad through various organisations. The nature of how you volunteer is irrelevant really, it’s the spirit of volunteering which really counts.
Evolutionary Psychology
Evolutionary psychology suggests that volunteering can have clear benefits which improve the psychological and physical well-being of the volunteer, not just the recipient.
Research by psychologist Stephanie Brown indicates volunteering helps manage stress, provides greater relationship satisfaction, reduces depression, and the biggie – increase your life expectancy. Taking into consideration medical history, age, social activity and other uninteresting factors. But volunteering appears to reduce the risk of death by 25% – which is a good enough reason for me!
Stress-less volunteer more
Don’t stress, it’s more likely to cause death! Stress plays a large factor in our bodies immune system and volunteering reduces that stress. The act of helping elicits feelings of usefulness. This produces the hormones oxytocin and progesterone which bring feelings of happiness and combats the symptoms of stress.
Working too hard!
Overworked volunteers can become stressed which doesn’t allow them to receive all the health benefits from volunteering. Your volunteering like anything should be managed and controlled. Volunteer management is very important and should be done to prevent burnout and increasing, instead of decreasing, stress.
What to take from this
Those who devote time, about 100 hours per year (just 10 days), are most likely to exhibit positive health outcomes from volunteering. The secret to a happy and healthy life is to remain mentally and physically active right up until the very end, especially after retirement, and volunteering is an excellent way to achieve that. That’s what my Great Nan did!
