volunteering software Archives

Tag: volunteering software

How TeamKinetic Transforms Volunteer Management For Good…

On 17th November 2021

In Case Study, Charity, Hospice, Volunteer Management

Willowbrook Hospice provides care for patients with life limiting diseases living in St Helens, Knowsley and the surrounding areas. They rely on their fundraising methods and their dedicated volunteers. After realising they needed a volunteer management system, they came across us, TeamKinetic.

Why TeamKinetic?

For Willowbrook hospice, their previous system was archaic- there was no way to engage with their volunteers. We know the importance of interacting with volunteers we have already, so this was a concern for Willowbrook. They needed a system that allowed for this interaction. Willowbrook also wanted a web-based programme which would allow everyone to access the site from anywhere.

Benefits of using TeamKinetic:

One of the biggest benefits for Willowbrook, as mentioned above, is the ability to access the system anywhere. It’s critical for volunteer managers in each of Willowbrook’s nine shops to have access to the system. This way each shop manager can see who’s coming in to volunteer, and has all the information they need in one place.

In Willowbrook’s case, their current contact details for volunteers was through paper, which we all know isn’t the most effective. With TeamKinetic’s data protection and GDPR compliance, Willowbrook Hospice are able to see necessary contact information on volunteers profiles. If there is an emergency, managers know exactly where to go to find an email address or a phone number.

Having this information at hand means that they’re able to be more present in volunteers’ lives, through emails and messages. Since using our system, Willowbrook’s volunteers have noticed the change- they feel as if they’re more involved with the Hospice due to the update emails they receive. Willowbrook has learnt the importance of communication and engagement between themselves and volunteers along with the importance of volunteers talking with each other too.

Willowbrook Hospice’s communication:

For Willowbrook, they’ve created a befriending team between their volunteers. They’ve brought their volunteers together to support each other- especially through-out the pandemic. TeamKinetic hosts a private notes function, so Willowbrook can update when they’ve spoken to a volunteer.

All this communication has meant that volunteers feel more involved than ever with the happenings around Willowbrook Hospice and their nine shops. By involving volunteer managers and volunteers, it becomes much more likely that they will spread Willowbrook out into the world further. You’ll be attracting new volunteers whilst building and retaining the volunteers you already have. In Bev Neilson’s (a volunteer manager at Willowbrook) words, “if you want efficient communication, then you’re going to get it with TeamKinetic, definitely”.

Willowbrook also outlined the quick response rates you can get with the TeamKinetic system;

“We’ve had small events that have come up now and again. We had an event that came up where we could sell things in a local Garden Centre. It’s something we had to implement quite quickly because it was over Christmas. So, I created it on TeamKinetic and had it emailed out to all the volunteers. I would say within the hour, we filled up all the slots for two weeks worth of people volunteering for it. I think that raised over £2,000; without TeamKinetic that would never have happened.”

The ease of creating an opportunity online, and advertising it out to volunteers meant that they’re unexpected fundraising occasion was a success! Our advertising options aren’t limited to just emails, you can automatically send out a post on social media when you’ve created an opportunity, or bulk text your volunteers to let them know!

Willowbrook Hospice advice:

You’ve heard a lot from us, so here’s Willowbrook’s advice for those looking to manage their volunteers more efficiently;

“I think having this system in place helps because everything is in one place. Before it all felt a bit jumbled, we were going from system to system to try and run everything, and engage volunteers while still trying to keep in touch with them. Whereas now, we’ve got one system that we can use and as it’s web-based, like I said before, we can access it anywhere.”

What’s Next For Willowbrook Hospice?

What is happening for Willowbrook at the moment? They’ve recently celebrated World Hospice and Palliative Care Day on the 9th October. Willowbrook have decided to incorporate a Reaching Out Focus into their 2019-2022 Strategy and Organisational Work in line with this year’s theme: ‘Leave no-one behind- equity in access to palliative care.’ There objectives are as follows:

All the members of the community we serve are aware of our services, have equal access and feel comfortable to do so.
To see more people from across the communities we serve.

Thank you to Bev Neilson and Willowbrook Hospice for letting us in behind the curtain!

Find out more:

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.

How to get your volunteers to log hours

By Alex Evans

On 19th July 2021

In News & Views, TeamKinetic Features, Volunteer Management

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!

And if that’s not clear enough you can check out our full tutorial videos on logging hours as an opportunity provider and logging hours as a volunteer!

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:

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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.

A Strong Opportunity Can Increase Your Volunteer Retention Rates

By Rolf Herbert

On 23rd June 2020

In Application Features and Tutorials, Volunteer Management

Advertising an engaging volunteering opportunity is not always the simplest task. And often the clearest messages can become disfigured, resulting in your opportunity becoming less attractive to prospective volunteers. Below we’ve identified some examples of how to design and present a strong volunteering opportunity on your TeamKinetic platform. Each element has been streamlined to guide you through an on-brand TeamKinetic experience that is engaging and most importantly, eye appealing to your volunteers.

Where should your opportunity live

The most obvious place of all is your own website, for your prospective and current volunteers your website provides a safe and secure portal in which you can display your volunteering opportunities clearly for all to see. In turn, it will also allow you to easily collate data on the number of people viewing your opportunities page, by monitoring web analytics with Google Analytics.

Name your opportunity

Be clear and concise, over the years we’ve seen many volunteer managers fall victim to the mistake of over advertising their volunteering opportunity. The best practice would be describing the opportunity in its simplest form by using as few words as possible, for example ‘volunteer caretaker’. By over complicating simple roles with complex names will only off put your volunteers. You may also wish to add a location, contact email and phone number as these are the key details which your volunteer is likely to need straightaway.

Outline your opportunity

Now here’s your opportunity to say more, no pun intended… When writing your descriptions keep them short and sweet, whilst listing the main tasks the volunteers will be expected to do during the opportunity.

Why not offer an incentive? We’ve found from customer feedback that these make the opportunities more appealing to volunteers. For example, an incentive may be unlimited tea and biscuits or a free T-shirt. If we know anything about volunteers we know they love tea and biscuits.

Finally, summarise the benefits. In this part you will want to describe how this volunteering opportunity will bring your volunteer’s fulfilment. How will their volunteering efforts make a direct impact?

Be clear in your presentations of your opportunity, make key information stand out.

When and where?

These are the fundamental outlines which are absolutely necessary when creating your volunteering opportunity. Day, time and location will outline the commitment time frame in which your volunteers will have to make. Also if possible make clear what type of volunteering opportunity this is, event, ongoing or just a one-off.

Show off the good REVIEWS

Make your feedback visible, think of your feedback like your own personal catalogue of reviews. In a modern world filled with decisions, reviews offer simple and relevant guidance. Similarly to this, the feedback from previous volunteers will provide guidance to your potential volunteers, encouraging them to enjoy the same positive experience.

Call for action

Always leave some visible call to actions, these will encourage the volunteer to perform some form of action. Call to actions may be subtle but they are all nudging your volunteer to do one thing. And that’s registering on your opportunity.

Call actions can include

Social media sharing links
Document printing
Internal links (other opportunities, company website)
Register / Logging in options

Here at TeamKinetic we can help with all your volunteer management needs. Go to our website to create a demo site – it’s completely free! You can also call us on 0161 914 5757 with any questions.

Don’t hesitate to reach out on social media, you can find us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. You can also go to our YouTube channel to see some examples of the features we have to offer and some of the people we already work with.

Volunteering in National Parks and Green Spaces

By Rolf Herbert

On 4th November 2019

In Heritage & Culture, News & Views

Fresh air and endless miles of thick grass green carpets cover the many hills and mountains across the English countryside. Doesn’t sound like the worst place to volunteer. Volunteering for any National park or green space across the UK is an excellent way to be active outdoors. England is fortunate enough to have ten national parks spread across the country. So why not get involved? Volunteering in green areas can include a whole range of excellent opportunities.

Peak District National Park volunteers

Osian Wilson

Osian, who is autistic, started as a Youth Ranger and now volunteers almost every day. During his time as a volunteer Osian has built drystone walls, repaired paths, pulled ragwort, cut bracken, planted trees, felled trees, litter picked and carried out ecological surveys. Osian spends at least 9 hours a week volunteering.

MTB Volunteers

The Peak District MTB volunteers participate in a number of activities to protect, promote and preserve mountain biking in the national park. Members work voluntarily with The Peak District National Park Authority and Derbyshire County Council, carrying out sensitive repairs to many of the most popular trails in the Peak District

Which opportunities are best suited for you?

Volunteer Rangers

You could be like John Wayne
Or at least pretend to be…

Volunteer Rangers commit themselves to help maintain the National Parks. Rangers can expect a whole variety of tasks, from being up to their waists in waders, to helping park tourists. The excitement of being a Ranger is that every day can bring new challenges with the opportunities to work alongside new people. This may seem like something just for the older adults however, young rangers can start from the age of 14.

How do you fancy?

Red Squirrel transects to monitor squirrel behaviors and populations.

Interacting with visitors is an essential part of being a Ranger. Especially in the busy summer Holidays.

Building otter holts to encourage otters to re-colonise and breed along waterways.

Cotswold Wardens

You could also be like Ned Stark (warden of the North).
But we all know how that ended…

Anyone can become a Cotswold warden (Not everyone can be John Wayne though). All that is required is a commitment, willingness and a positive attitude. In exchange for your hard work wardens are provided with full training, all the equipment they need and travel expenses.

Activities can include

Working Parties take part in a range of projects from drystone walling, hedge laying, and tree planting to installing kissing gates and pond restoration.

Parish wardens work closely with parish councils, farmers and residents to help keep footpaths open and identify local features in need of restoration.

Guided Walks, the Cotswold Way is one of the very famous walking paths among many which attracts thousands of tourists each year.

Maybe you could help with school assemblies and days out exploring the Cotswolds.

Organisations you could be apart of

National Trust

The National Trust received over 61,000 volunteers between 2017 and 2018 giving more than 4.6 million hours of their free time to chip in and help the National Trust. Could this be you in the upcoming year?

TCV

TVC aims to make happier healthier communities. Many urban communities lack green space TVC aims to unite communities and green spaces together to deliver lasting outcomes for both.

The Wildlife Trusts

Wildlife Trusts are located across the UK totalling to 35,000 regular and casual volunteers. There are many ways volunteers can devote their free time to help wildlife from, species surveying, community gardening, plant identification and the many more opportunities for you to explore.

People don’t get access to as much green space as they should to stay healthy, this can be because of many reasons. Nature of your job role, city living and limited green areas. So why not try to get out there? Think volunteering and think green!