Volunteers make a difference in a whole range of settings and organisations from small volunteer led community groups, larger national and international charities and the NHS and other public sector organisations.
Coronavirus
You may need to adapt your volunteer management practice during the coronavirus outbreak. For specific guidance on volunteer management during the covid-19 pandemic, please visit our coronavirus pages.
Why involve volunteers in your organisation?
Involving volunteers can add great value to what your organisation does and support you to achieve your mission and strategic objectives.
Involving volunteers can help you to:
- Engage a more diverse range of skills, experience and knowledge
- Reach more of your beneficiaries
- Raise awareness about your cause as well as your organisation, its profile and what you do
- Build relationships within the community in which you work and contribute to supporting others in your community. By providing volunteering opportunities you provide opportunities for social inclusion, skills development and potential routes to employment. There is also evidence that volunteering can help to improve health and wellbeing for individuals
- Inform the development and delivery of your activities, projects or services by bringing in new opinions, ideas or approaches. This can help you to adapt, stay relevant to what your beneficiaries and community needs as well as identifying opportunities to improve what you do
- Deliver your service or projects in a more effective and efficient way which can help to save money and resources. However organisations do have to invest in supporting volunteering for this to work effectively.
There is research and evidence which helps to demonstrate the impact volunteers can have for organisations, beneficiaries and the community.
Read what other research tells us about volunteering.
For more information on good practice methods for recruiting volunteers you can download the Investing in Volunteers quality standard framework
