The Challenge of Effective Volunteering
Volunteering management represents one of the most challenging aspects of delivering social value. Creating alignment between volunteering opportunities and workforce engagement requires careful planning. When businesses allocate 1-3 dedicated volunteering days per employee annually, they’re making a significant investment. The destination of these valuable hours matters greatly. Simply tracking attendance rates fails to capture the true benefits of a volunteering program or measure its actual impact.
Common Pitfalls in Volunteering Management Systems
The market offers numerous volunteering management systems and apps, each with its unique value proposition. Businesses naturally gravitate toward solutions promising minimal coordination and management effort. However, several important considerations deserve attention:
- “Always open” opportunities with flexible attendance may seem convenient, but question what meaningful benefit they deliver to the cause. In reality, very few tasks can achieve impact without structured inputs and dedicated timeframes.
- Skills-based volunteering requires detailed understanding of expertise levels. A VCSE (Voluntary, Community and Social Enterprise) organization cannot benefit from a vague skill description like “finance” without understanding the volunteer’s specific financial expertise.
- Timing is crucial for both skilled and non-skilled volunteering. Whether planting trees or addressing a charity’s legal challenges, activities have specific timeframes when they’re needed. Generic listings without timelines serve little purpose.
- Most importantly, evaluate whether the volunteering effort truly addresses the VCSE’s actual needs.
A concerning statistic reveals that 50% of charities report accepting volunteers they didn’t actually need. While done with good intentions to build long-term collaborations and meet volunteer demand, this phenomenon represents an enormous societal waste.
The whatimpact Approach to Meaningful Volunteering
At whatimpact, our National Social Value Marketplace has been designed to avoid these pitfalls while facilitating meaningful volunteering connections. We acknowledge that volunteering always requires management—we don’t falsely claim otherwise. Instead, we’ve built a robust system enabling businesses to plan meaningful volunteering with VCSEs and promote these carefully selected opportunities to their staff:
- Structured Offer System: Volunteering coordinators post volunteering offers for VCSEs to apply for. This dynamic allows those VCSEs to proactively apply to the volunteering resources with their specific projects.
- Clear Expectations: Our system clearly defines where, how, when, and with what specific outcomes the business aims to volunteer. This clarity helps VCSEs understand whether they’re a genuine match.
- VCSEs Also Promote Their Needs: VCSEs also list their needs in their profiles, and businesses can browse suitable candidates in specific geographical area, with specific causes and beneficiary details on our nationwide marketplace.
- Private Communication Channel: Both parties can discuss offers, opportunities and applications through our partnership management dashboard.
- Verified Partnerships: When both sides wish to proceed, they verify the match, and the business can promote these opportunities to their staff in our Volunteering HUB.
- User-Friendly Employee Experience: The Volunteering HUB is a simple website where employees don’t need to create profiles. They can view opportunities, register as instructed, and report their hours, give details of the organisation and geographical location they volunteered in, testimonials, and photos.
- Comprehensive Impact Reporting: Each verified partnership enables the business to request detailed impact reporting against their manpower investment. VCSEs receive £50 compensation per report for this outcome-based reporting that aligns with TOMs and GOV Social Value Model frameworks.
- Additional Flexibility: For employees seeking their own opportunities, they can also access our comprehensive VCSE directory with volunteering requests and contact organisations directly.
This model consistently generates meaningful volunteering opportunities that accommodate diverse preferences. Nothing is more powerful than volunteers realising their meaningful contribution. We’ve facilitated numerous success stories: IT teams implementing CRM systems for VCSEs, marketing teams developing fundraising concepts, operations directors coaching VCSE leaders, construction professionals renovating spaces, and individuals becoming online helpline volunteers—just to name a few.
The Value of Meaningful Volunteering
We truly encourage businesses to focus on the quality and impact of volunteering. Nothing is more unmotivating to employees than realising their efforts weren’t really needed or that the support they provided wasn’t meaningful. When volunteers see tangible results from their contributions, it creates a positive cycle of engagement that benefits everyone involved—the business, the VCSE organisations, and most importantly, the communities being served.
