Volunteer funds - what we've learned so far

Volunteers reported improvements across a range of wellbeing measures, including their satisfaction with life and happiness. They also experienced benefits to their individual development, particularly a positive impact on their confidence, resilience and sense of community trust. Not only did volunteers report improvement in these areas, many agreed it was the project that had positively impacted on them.

Overall, volunteers reported they were satisfied with their volunteering experience, with a mean score of 8.2 out of 10 for the quality of the experience. This highlights how critical a positive experience is to ensuring projects can have a positive impact on volunteers.

This is an important learning for us and our partners, and it emphasises the importance of providing the right support for volunteers and ensuring that once they’re recruited, organisations play an ongoing role in ensuring volunteers continue to want to give their time and that their motivations and expectations, whilst volunteering, are met.

Some projects also had an objective to increase the physical activity levels of volunteers. Among these projects, 43.6% of volunteers reported an increase in the number of days on which they took part in physical activity.

Volunteers gave a mean score of 8.4 out of 10 for ‘a positive impact on other people’ and 8.1 out of 10 for ‘it has brought different community members together’.

Each project is tailored to the local area it’s being delivered in and so the specific ways volunteers had impacted on communities varied greatly across the projects. One common impact was encouraging individuals in their community to become more active. This was often reported for young people or groups who typically have higher levels of inactivity.

Other impacts reported included improved community cohesion, providing a service to community members and renovating community buildings or assets.

This shows early signs of success in reaching the objectives we set out to achieve and are reaching those who are new to volunteering. One third (34.2%) of volunteers taking part had never volunteered before.

Potentials Fund projects had particular success in recruiting young volunteers (aged 10-20) from school, college or sixth form, which is also reflected in other national data that shows that education is an important route into volunteering and social action for young people.

Opportunity Fund projects, focused on those aged 20+, have recruited many volunteers living in areas of high deprivation. What we’ve learned about how to reach volunteers in these communities is important, as people from lower socio-economic groups are currently the most under-represented as volunteers and are also less likely to be active. Our latest Active Lives data showed that lower socio-economic groups make up only 11% of current volunteers in sport and physical activity, which is striking when this group represents 31% of the adult population.

Across both the Opportunity and Potentials Fund projects, a high proportion of volunteers recruited are from Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) groups and are disabled.

Each project is engaging with different groups of volunteers that have different motivations and face different barriers, however, the evaluation found that there are a number of common factors which can influence a low uptake of volunteering among projects’ target audiences.

This included a lack of interest and identification with more traditional or stereotypical volunteering opportunities among the audiences projects were trying to reach. Some also didn’t see volunteering as something people like them did.

Other barriers to engaging in volunteering included a lack of confidence or self-esteem, language barriers, poor IT skills, a lack of flexibility in existing opportunities, a lack of time or money to undertake volunteering activities, or cultural sensitivities.

These all needed to be considered when developing volunteering opportunities and activities.

To overcome these barriers, projects highlighted the importance of finding avenues to build trust with their target audiences.

This included identifying and building relationships with local organisations and partners who have existing relationships with communities they were working in. They also reported that building organic recruitment networks helped to support recruitment through word of mouth and recommendations through friends and family.

Almost half of all volunteers (45.9%) reported that they had encouraged others to volunteer since joining their project, and so volunteers themselves could become advocates for volunteering in their communities.

Projects who understood their target audience well were successful in designing opportunities that overcame the varied barriers they faced and were able to develop volunteering roles that were of genuine interest to them and aligned with what was going to motivate them to volunteer.

Consulting with the target audiences and the wider community at the start of the project was key to doing this effectively. Ongoing consultation was also important to ensure that projects continually improve.

Once volunteers were in place, projects found they needed to continue to consider how they could support volunteers to continue to take part, and this required them to be flexible and adapt the opportunities they offered.

Ensuring opportunities are local and easily accessible could also help to overcome issues related to travel time and cost. Projects also explored offering solutions to overcome specific barriers, e.g. running a crèche for mothers or running female-only sessions for female volunteers with low self-confidence, or those from BAME communities where cultural sensitivities might exist around mixed-gender activities.

This is all part of taking a volunteer-centric approach to supporting the engagement of volunteers over time.